A behind the scenes glimpse of what’s been happening the first twelve hours of our book launch.
In this episode Russell gives a quick recap of the first twelve hours of the book launch. He shares how he felt when it looked like the average cart value didn’t look how expected, and what happened next.
Here are the important things you will hear on today’s episode:
So listen below to find out how the big book launch turned out yesterday.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome….oh crap. I almost just, backing out of my driveway I literally just almost backed into a wall. And you guys would have caught it live here on Marketing In Your Car.
I hope you guys are all doing awesome today. Today, well yesterday was book launch day. And today is the day after book launch day and I bet you’re wondering how it’s going. So I wanted to tell you.
As you probably know, actually I can’t remember exactly how much I told you guys. Leading to the book launch, as with any launch, there’s a lot of stress and time and energy and stuff that goes into it. So Monday night we basically were at the office super, super late. And then at 3 o’clock got done, went home and came back Tuesday. Luckily we set up the launch time for 4 eastern, which we had 2 o’clock our time. So we had til 2 o’clock to get everything done, which I highly recommend on launch day.
We used to launch days at 9am in the mornings. It was always a nightmare, so we push them out late in the day, that way you’ve got time in the morning. We had about 5 hours. Everyone got back out here at 9, so we had 9 til 2, so 5 hours to get everything done. And we start moving and scrambling and going and going. It’s crazy, no matter how much stuff you have, that’s why it’s good to pick a launch date, because otherwise you’ll never actually get done. Because we never would have gotten it done ever. Even staying up all night and all morning, everything, it still was I think 9 minutes late before the funnel went live.
It’s funny, because you have wish list stuff you want to do to make it smaller and smaller and smaller, til the point where you’re like, “Alright, this is what we HAVE to do.” And then it’s like, “Oh crap, it’s got to go live, what are the stuff we have to cut out?” and it’s just kind of crazy.
So you launch it and sit back and you wait. And this is honestly for me, the worst time. It’s weird because you feel like it’s going to be this huge climatic boom, but it’s like the opposite, you get this huge climatic thing and then it stops. And then you’re just like, “What’s happening?” and then we start sending emails, but because us and 8 million other affiliates are all emailing the same day from Actionetics, Actionetics gets backed up and our emails aren’t going out and all sorts of other stuff starts happening. But luckily a lot of people were waiting, anxiously waiting to buy. So book sales started coming in, boom, boom, boom.
So we’re watching the sales come in at first and then we’re watching the stats and numbers to see where things are at and obviously it’s hard because the first group of people to come through are your hyperactive buyers, it’s you guys and you guys jack up our stats. I don’t trust our stats that early. But it’s still you’re watching to see and be curious. So we’re watching all the stats and the stats looked good but there’s this new stat dashboard in Clickfunnels, I didn’t even know it was there. I remember we talked about it at Funnel Hacking Live, but I hadn’t seen it. So I clicked on it and it was amazing because you can see the sales from everything. Front end products, upsells, order form bumps. Everything. So you get a glimpse of here’s what everything is.
So I’m looking at it all, based on numbers it looked good. Then there’s this number up here that said, “average cart value.” And the average cart value number was horrible. And I was like, “huh?” I keep watching it and as one hour turned into two, and the average cart value number kept getting worse and worse. I was almost to the point of depression and honestly I was coming back to my team like, “Okay, what do we do? Do we go and add in a whole other upsell?” because the cart value wasn’t as high as we needed it to be and all these millions of things start going through your head, so I’m like, “ I don’t want to add another upsell.” because I wanted…. this funnel is, as we talked about in the last podcast, is a short funnel. There’s offers in there, but it’s a short funnel because I was trying to shorten it. But then there’s longer on the value size.
So over the next 21 days, where it monetizes amazing, but I don’t know if affiliates are short sighted typically. They’re not looking at 21 days, looking at what happed today. So it’s like, I need to be high enough to make sure affiliates were happy and all that kind of stuff. Totally stressing out, freaking out and trying to figure things out. And then I think Steven or someone was like, “I forgot to reset the stat data before it went live.” Which means all our test purchases were in there and everything. So it’s like huh, so I had John go and actually pull all the data. Delete all of the other purchases and he’s drawing a map and everything, looking at everything.
He came back and like, “Here’s our numbers.” Boom, boom, boom. “Based on our numbers our average cart value right now is $39.” And I was like, “What? No, the stats here say it was at $19.” And he’s like, “no, based on the actual numbers we’re at $39.” And I’m like, “Are you kidding me.” $39 is perfectly aligned with what we need to make this whole thing work. And all the sudden, it was funny, I went from wanting to cry and rebuild the whole funnel to, wait a minute this is exactly how we needed it to be. So there’s this huge sigh of relief. Then I’m like, “wait, make sure you’re right. Do the numbers again because I don’t want to be celebrating and then find out in an hour from now that I shouldn’t have been celebrating. So do the numbers again.”
“Yes, this is exactly what it is.” We looked at the numbers and it was like, oh thank heavens. There was one stat in our stat dashboard that wasn’t correct and then also a bunch of other data. But when all was said and done it was awesome. Then I was like, “This is awesome. Let’s put some fuel on the fire.” So I did a Facebook Live and started doing more stuff. Then finally all my emails started going out at like 6 or 7 at night. and now it’s been 12 hours and as of today we have sold, this morning it was 6300 copies of the book. What? My initial goal was 10,000 week one. And now Dave told me this morning our goal is 10,000 for the first 24 hours. So that’s about to happen.
So I’m going to go in there right now. I’m about to virtual book tour, which basically means I’ve got 15 people lined up today. We’re going to be doing Facebook Lives’ onto their audiences, they’re going to interview me about the book and when the interview is done, we’re going to logging onto their account, we’re going to be playing ads to promote that Facebook Live to their audience. Which is I think, the future of JV, but we’re the first to kind of really test it. So I’ll let you guys know how it works. But it’s basically going on a book tour, like real authors.
Real authors? I shouldn’t say that. If you look at traditional people, when the book comes out, what do they do? They go on Jay, I guess it’s not Jay Leno anymore. I haven’t watched TV for so long. They go on Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, The Today Show, they do the media network that way. So we’re doing that, but we’re kind of doing it through Facebook. So we’re doing Facebook Lives’ to people’s audiences.
Then affiliates typically don’t, I don’t know they’re short, I mean they’re amazing people and I’m the same way, but as affiliates, I make fun of myself, we’re kind of short sighted. We want to see cash immediately, and we don’t want to do anything for that cash. Because we don’t have to, we’re affiliates. We’re just good at making money. So we have to do that. So basically it’s like, “Okay you get on, you have ten minutes to interview Russell and it’s done. And then Russell will spend his money to promote that post to your people. And that’s the goal and the game plan.”
So that’s going to be fun, we’re trying that today. In fact, it’s starting in 14 minutes. I got to go. I’ll let you guys know how it goes. But that’s the recap so far of the first 12 hours of the book launch. It’s been amazing. Average Cart Value is sticking at about $38-$39 dollars. If you do the math on that, 63….we’re at about a quarter of a million dollars in cash collected the first 12 hours on the free book offer, which is awesome. So funnels work you guys. Once again, proving it, practicing what I preach. If you haven’t bought the book yet, go to Expertsecrets.com. Buy the book, slowly the funnel is working. It’s exciting. Anyway, appreciate you guys, have an amazing day and we’ll talk to you again soon. Bye everybody.