Resources Hub » Blog » How to Use Email to Build Hype Around Your New Product Launch

This is a guest post from Mitt Ray at Social Marketing.

If you want to generate more sales for your product, email marketing is undoubtedly the best method to implement. Studies have repeatedly shown that email generates more sales than other media.

Here’s one that found that email generates nearly 40 times more customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.

Chart comparing organic to email to social media

This is because people prefer receiving promotional messages via email.

But this doesn’t mean that you build up a list using lead magnets, popups, and landing pages and then blast it randomly as soon as you launch a product.

You need to create a strategy first and follow it step by step to get maximum sales.

Therefore, today, we’re going to show you how to use email around your new product launch to build buzz and get more sales.

1. Share helpful content before a launch.

Before you launch your product, you should create some buzz around the solution it provides with free helpful content. Creating and sharing this helpful content via email mainly provides three benefits:

It increases email engagement.

If you look at your past emails, you’ll find that emails in which you share free content tend to get more opens and clicks. This is because people prefer engaging with free content on email over promotional emails. Also, free content will get sent straight to the main inbox or the updates tab, while promotional content gets sent to the promotions tab.

So, before you send that promotional email, if you send three to four emails consisting of free useful content, it’ll boost your open and click rate. And, when you finally send that promotional email informing people about the launch of your product, more people will open it—especially if you inform people to look forward to this email in previous educational emails.

By using this method of sharing content before selling, Matthew Woodward was able to generate $134,171 in just six days after his launch. He followed Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula Method, where you create four videos and promote them via email. In the first three, you don’t promote your product. Here, you only share useful content for free. In the final email, you not only share free content, but you also pitch your product as the best readymade solution to your readers’ problems.

You can learn more about Jeff’s method by reading his book called Launch.

Helps segment your list

Not everyone on your list will be interested in your new product or the content you’ve created around it. If you keep bombarding them with emails, you may see a rise in unsubscribes. Therefore, when you send out the series of educational emails, you can tag and segment your subscribers based on their behavior. And, when you finally launch the product, you only send the email to those who are interested.

Segmenting your list this way will also improve open rates, reduce unsubscribe rates, and provide a host of other benefits.

Can prevent people from unsubscribing from your entire list

You can also ask people to separately subscribe to the free content by signing up again. This way, if they unsubscribe later, they’ll only do so from the list dedicated to the launch for this product and not from your entire list. They can continue receiving the helpful content you share in your newsletter and for future launches.

2. Inform people to join a special list.

Another way to pre-launch and segment your list before a launch is by being more direct. You don’t have to email content and track their behavior or use a lead magnet to get them to opt in again.

Instead, you just directly inform them that you’re launching a new product. You can include brief details about the solution it provides and let people know that, if they’re interested in learning about it, they can just sign up for a new list by submitting their details on a landing page or by clicking a special trigger link that adds their details automatically to another list.

Someone who does this well is Andre Chaperon. Here’s an example from an email where he asks people to let him know that they’re interested by clicking on a link.

Snippet from an Andre Chaperon email outlining his new product launch

Clicking on this link will segment subscribers and add them to a special list, which is different from the main list they’re already subscribed to.

Following this technique helps Andre keep open and sales rates high and unsubscribe rates low. This level of transparency will also get his subscribers to trust him more.

After they click the link, you should send a new introductory email or redirect the subscriber to a landing page where they can learn about what to expect. Even if you follow this technique, you should still share useful content during the pre-launch instead of directly pitching the product. This will increase email engagement and sales.

3. Send follow up emails all the way to the launch.

If you follow the above tactics, you’ll probably send four to five emails every time you launch. That might seem like a lot if you just do one email launches, but it still isn’t enough.

Entrepreneur Graham Cochrane, for example, was able to generate $178,000 in sales last fall because he’d set up an automation funnel that sent out three reminder emails on the last day of the launch. As you can see below, October 15 was his biggest sales day of the campaign. But why would so many people wait until the last moment to opt in?

Cochrane was able to get more sales by instilling a sense of scarcity by having a limited-time offer and promoting this offer in the reminder emails. He also used several other tactics along with the multiple reminders, building trust by sharing case studies and enticing them with bonus materials.

This works for driving more sales because your subscribers’ inboxes are filled with a lot of emails. So there’s a strong likelihood that they’ll miss out on yours. But, if you keep sending several reminders on the day your cart closes or the offer ends, more people will know about it.

Cochrane uses the Kajabi platform to sell his digital products. One of the advantages here is that Kajabi comes with pre-built “pipelines” for automation funnels involving landing pages, videos, and email drips, but you can set up similar funnels using the marketing stack of your choice. The principle remains the same. Just set up a series of empowering video messages to nurture your leads, like Jeff Walker teaches.

This also allows you to amplify the sense of scarcity in your last email, because your audience is already warmed up and interested.

This is an example of a product launch digital platform

To get scarcity to work better, Cochrane also set up a countdown timer on his landing page using Kajabi. Another countdown timer tool you can try is Deadline Funnel. This not only lets you install timers on the landing page, but in the email too. These two timers will work in a synchronised manner.

Cochrane used case studies in his emails because they]ll help clear some of the questions his subscribers have about the product or its effectiveness. Here’s an example of an email sharing a case study (I received it from Jason Hornung).

Here is a snippet from a Jason Hornun email outlining his case study.

Jason shares a testimonial from Barney. Here, Barney writes about a big sale he made by using a strategy he learned from Jason’s course. When people read case study emails like these, they realize that the product really works, and they’ll want to buy it.

If you don’t have any case studies yet, you can send a Q & A email that answers some of your subscribers’ questions.

Once the launch ends, you can send a survey email to the people who didn’t buy the products to find out why they didn’t buy. This will inform you about the content they want to see and the products they want to buy. It’ll help you create a better product and a better launch strategy to accompany it next time.

4. Share the funnel with influencers.

You can also team up with influencers with a lot of email subscribers in your niche and launch your product to their list. You can create an affiliate program (where they get 30 to 50% of sales) for this so that they’ll be more enthusiastic about taking part.

You can provide them access to the same content, emails, and landing pages you created for your launch funnel to get more sales. Of course, you’ll need to modify the copy to suit their subscribers.

Once you get top results with an influencer, you can do the calculations to figure the amount of revenue they generated per subscriber. This will make it easy to pitch to other influencers. They’ll be able to easily decide whether launching your product to their list will be worth it.

This method will also help you build a bigger list to whom you can launch future campaigns.

Wrap up

These are the four techniques you should be using to get more people to buy your products via email marketing. Start off by creating a series of emails where you share content related to your product.

This should be done a week or two before you officially launch your product, as it’ll boost email engagement. As soon as email engagement hits its highest point, you should release your product. This will usually be around the third or fourth email.

But don’t stop promoting your product via email after you send this one. After you send it, you should follow it with a Q & A email, a case study email, and several reminders—especially on the day the cart or the special offer closes.

After the end of the launch, you should repeat the process by teaming up with influencers for an affiliate campaign.

How do you use emails for a product launch? Which techniques have worked best for you? Please leave your comments below.


Mitt Ray is the founder of Social Marketing Writing. You can follow him on Twitter @MittRay.

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