Behind the Scenes of our High-Ticket Service Launch
I’m pulling back the curtain and taking you behind the scenes of our high-ticket service launch. I’ve never shared this much about our launch process before, and I’m excited to give you an inside look at what went into creating and launching the Find Your First Class Ideal Client challenge. We’ll share our initial goals, what we did, and what went well (and not so well) along the way. We’ll also dive into some areas where we see the potential for growth, as well as our ideas for improving and expanding in the future. Whether you’re interested in the world of marketing, launching your own high-ticket service, or just love a good behind-the-scenes story, this episode is not to be missed.
I decided in October of 2022 to do a challenge to open up the Signature Experience and book new clients. And so I got on a call with my launch mentor. We mapped things out. I already had these photos that I had taken for our rebrand. And I decided earlier in the year that I wanted to do a launch using these photos.
Pre-launch period
The challenge was called Find Your First Class Ideal Client, a travel-themed challenge. People loved to travel. I know my audience loves to travel. And so that’ll be really cute to do, and you can do so many different travel motifs with it. I had so much fun creating the copy and graphics for the challenge.
We ran the challenge in the latter half of January into February on a Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. With the help of my launch mentor, we came up with some rough numbers of what I needed to hit. She told me that I needed to hit a goal of getting 1,000 people into the challenge. I was already sweating because that’s a lot of people.
I set launch goals by setting good, better, and best targets. Good meaning if I hit that, that’s, that’s great. Better meaning that’s above my expectations, and Best is like wildest dreams. You would be over the moon. My best was a thousand. My better was 600, and my good was 400 for getting people signed up and registered for the challenge.
During the lead-up to the challenge, I was really loud. I was posting about it. I was talking about it. I sent 22 emails throughout the entire pre-launch, launch, and post-launch. The whole challenge period was about 24 days. And so it was roughly an email a day. For the launch of the challenge, we got 281 people signed up for the challenge. We had 339 page views, a conversion rate of 82%, which is spectacular conversion rates (average signup for a freebie should be 50-70%.)
I grew my list by a hundred people, so out of those 281 signups, 181 were already on my list. Only a hundred of them were new people who were not on my email list.
For Facebook ads, we spent $2,874.22 and got 67 signups. And that is a cost of roughly $36 per signup. And so the Facebook ads, it was really hard to know what to expect since we’ve never run anything like this to the audience; this is a first for everything. I wasn’t expecting anything good or anything bad.
If I opened my prayer book, I was praying that whole week that I don’t care if we get to a thousand people. I would instead have such great conversion rates that I have to be like, there’s no other way besides God. God is the one that was leading this. And that’s exactly what happened. A conversion rate for just page views to signups being 82% is bananas.
Our audience is mostly wedding pros. Friday is like their Monday. It’s the start of the wedding week for them. And so I wanted to ensure we are hitting people on their downtime. I also have gone through challenges myself, and a five-day challenge is tough to keep people energized throughout that entire time, so three days worked out really well. I would keep it at three days again.
The Signature Experience Launch
One of the things I was doing was priming that the Signature Experience was launching. And that it would have $2,850 worth of free upgrades if you enrolled within this period. I wasn’t silent that this opened the cart to the Signature Experience. People knew about that from the moment they signed up for the challenge. I was very clear on the last day of the challenge I would open the cart, so to speak, for the Signature Experience.
There was a one-week window where if you signed up and you booked a decision call within this one week. Then you would get all of the free upgrades that came with it, so like Strategy Sessions, investment guides, and Email Marketing Starter Kits. There were a lot of really fun upgrades that came along with it.
And so, from the Signature Experience application page, we got 245 page views on that application page. And out of those 245 views, we had 10 consultations. That was about a 4.08% conversion rate. Once again, usually, you’re looking at, you know, 3-5%, and so we are on the higher end of a great conversion rate.
So with that, we had 84,000 contracts booked (that’s not money in hand. We do payment plans, but it was $84,000 in contracts secured). I did a downsell at the end, and the cart closed for the Signature Experience. I did a very light downsell. It was only for 48 hours, and I only sent out two emails, and I don’t even think I posted about it on social media.
The downsell was for a Strategy Session where you could get 50% off your session. It was really like, “Hey, if you’re not ready to move forward with this Signature Experience and for a whole new rebrand, let’s hop on a strategy session and talk more in-depth about what it is that you learned during the challenge and help you create a plan and like actually implement what you learned.”
We did $810 worth of down sales. So, all in all, this seven-day challenge resulted in $84,810 worth of either money in hand or contracts booked with the down sell of $810.
I wanted to show high-end ticket salespeople who sell high-end tickets that you can launch, even if you’re not doing a course where I don’t technically have a cart open and a cart closed. For example, you can sign up for the Signature Experience whenever you want. Still, it doesn’t come with all of the perks that it came with during that one timeframe with all the complimentary upgrades that we did.
I wanted marketing to be fun again. I wanted to do stuff that was out of the box that people weren’t doing. And the travel-themed challenge was a home run. But I also wanted to show people that you don’t have to have a course to launch an offer.
I think live launches get a bad rap. They’re time-consuming. They’re not fun to do. You’ll get burnt out. You’ll get tired of doing it. This was my first one, so that may be true in the long run, but this was so much fun.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is what drove the whole launch. Before this challenge, I had this approach to Instagram of converting people, and that’s not really what Instagram is for in my business. The way that I approach Instagram now is a community building, a relationship-building tool to dive deeper with people to have those one-on-one conversations. Being in the DMS is my favorite part of Instagram, and having those one-on-one conversations with people. I learned from this challenge that my main objective is to get as many people as possible to know about our brand and get them onto the email list.
I’m going to be really hitting it hard with podcast interviewing to get in front of new audiences, being a part of summits, being a part of anything that will get the Carrylove Designs brand in front of a new audience.
Email is where it is at. That’s where 99% of our conversions came from. Even out of the 281 signups we had for the initial Find Your Ideal Client Challenge that had an 82% conversion, only a hundred of those were not already people on our email list; 181 were already on email, and they were signing up for the challenge.
Email marketing is my focus. That’s where I want to put my time and attention. And honestly, it’s what I like doing best. I love sitting down to write our weekly scoop newsletter. That’s one of my favorite things to do. And so that’s where I will put more time and attention for the remainder of this year. I also noticed there was a correlation between the people who were showing up and doing the work, who were committed to the challenge they were signing up for the signature experience. So next time, how can we get more people involved? How can we get them to turn in their homework? What would make that better?
We’re thinking about next time having a paid upgrade option where they can actually be on Zoom, have one-on-one Q+A time, and access other bonuses and upgrades for just paying to be a part of the challenge. That may affect how many people sign up for the challenge. Still, if we saw the people committed to doing the homework convert into more Signature Experience clients. I assume that people who pay to be a part of the upgraded challenge would be the ones who convert into signature experiences at the very end.
Next time I want to be more intentional about the six weeks out from the launch. I had a short list of affiliates of people I wanted to bring on and have them promote the challenge. But it was a very noisy time of year for people big within the industry. There was a lot of stuff going on that people could sign up for. Not many people had the time and energy to commit to promoting our challenge.
Top Goals for Next Launch
Getting more people introduced to the Carrylove Designs brand is my top priority. I will be going on more podcasts, doing more interviews, and speaking at engagements – anything that will introduce us to a new audience.
I want to focus on getting people signed up for the email list. I knew that email always converted best for us in the past. But this solidified in my mind that if you have a high ticket offer, then email is best.
If you have any questions about the launch, hit me up on Instagram. DM’s are my favorite place to be inside Instagram, so I’d love to start any conversations with you.
