The psychology behind gated launches

Quotes

• “One thing that I didn’t mention was that I was a paramedic for 12 years too. I think that’s what gives me the calm demeanor in business conversation. Whatever conversation we’re going to have isn’t going to be as scary as what I’ve seen as a paramedic.” -Jordan“Business was always in my blood although it skipped my Dad. I always felt this need to be in business so I actually purchased a Taco Del Mar, it’s a chain restaurant but I also have this drive to be a paramedic so I did that all at the same time. I worked 44 hours as paramedic plus the restaurant which ended up losing me $150,000 over the 5-yearspan so I really needed a way to fund my business endeavors at the time.” -Jordan“When I acquired Taco Del Mar, we were a part of SubWay and they purchased the whole brand. So I was really interested in marketing, it was actually the one thing I was good at, with the restaurant. At operations, I was really terrible but we tripled our sales in the 5 years even as I lost a ton of money.” -Jordan“Throughout that I got on every single possible board that I could be a part of so that I could see what the marketing teams were doing for our brand and what they are doing for SubWay so I learned a lot during that time.” -Jordan“My wife is a fashion designer and we had our first daughter so we were trying out cloth diapers. Worst decision to try, ever. So the problem was, there was no leggings that actually fit diapers for kids. So it was really simple for my wife to make leggings with a little room for kids who are in diaper.” -Jordan“A little bit later that year, we had our wholesaler contact us and they made a $500 order. Fast forward to 6-7 years, we are at mid-7-figure revenue brand, fairly well-known in Canada.” -Jordan“Once we got to the 7-figure, we were running the company together and that didn’t work. It didn’t work us being together day-in and day-out. So I was always the marketing arm for Little & Lively and I’m like, I’m sure I can do this for other people so I became a consultant and it was a good transition. Now Mindful Marketing has really grown into its own beast.” -Jordan“We launched a VIP group on Facebook and what we decided to do was give them early access. It started out as just 1,000 to 2,000 people and we would give them early access to launches and we thought, ‘Oh, this is incredible.’ And the launches were okay, they were like $30,000 at the time before the general public were able to access the products. But once we added SMS into the mix it was acompletely different ballgame.” -Jordan“Gated Launch is where we essentially password-protect the website and then we give out that password to our VIP list. We allow them to enter the website early and everybody else who wants access to that launch has to either join our SMS list or our VIP group to be able to get in.” -Jordan“Psychologically, it creates this fear of missing out. When they know that for those two hours they are one of the lucky ones and strategically we also end up selling those products. We don’t want a massive inventory on hand and it also allows us to figure out what is going to sell really well that season and then that day, make our order to our manufacturer.” -Jordan“We don’t tell our SMS list about our offer until the day that it comes around because I don’t feel like messaging your SMS all the time. Once every two weeks is appropriate. With email, it’s quite different. We’re going to our VIP group and announce the password with specifics about the particular time. Our SMS provides links as well so leading up to any sort of launch, we are generally get about 500 to 1000 new subscribers to both our VIP list and SMS list.” -Jordan“We start with no awareness and then we have subscribers at the Instagram and Facebook level. We’re trying to move this group down to our email list, that’s the next best place. After that we want to move them to our VIP group if they purchased. From the VIP group, we then want them to join the SMS list which I think is the best for notifications.” -Jordan“What’s interesting to me is you’re starting with marketing to get people to be members of your social community before you actually drive them to the website, before you try to collect any information. You are creating a tiered stage to your marketing.” -Ben“We use direct response in all of our marketing but generally we’re really trying to get their contact information so we make sure that we got email capture on our website.” -Jordan“What I am really concerned with and where I go againstpopular wisdom is frequency. I reallt believe in a high, high frequency. Our overall account frequency is 21. That’s what we aim for because people need to see your ads a lot. But this is like 40 potential, differentads across the full funnel.” -Jordan“I believe that’s why we get the kind of return on ad spend that we’re able to get for clients and for Little & Lively. I didn’t even realize that Little & Lively over the last 7 months, we have got a 10.15 full funnel return on ad spend. That is incredible.” -Jordan“Sure some people get annoyed, but it’s very, very rare. When I think about the companies that I buy from? It’s because I see them all the time and it’s actually what I want.” -Jordan