No. 265: The Case of the 80% Launch Profit Margin

The Client:

Run Like Clockwork (RLC) is the training company based on Mike Michaelowtiz’s book, Clockwork. Mike partnered with Adrienne Dorison, a world-class efficiency consultant for small businesses to research and write much of the book and create the training program. Adrienne’s signature program is the Run Like Clockwork Accelerator: a 12-week training program that helps small business owners achieve a business that runs “like clockwork” without them — so that they can take a four-week vacation completely unplugged from the business.

The Problem:

In the third quarter of 2019, Adrienne began planning to launch the Run Like Clockwork Accelerator for the first time in its current iteration. The timing of the launch was important, because Adrienne was planning to go on maternity leave as soon as the 12-week program was complete.

Because she walks her talk in terms of delegation in her business, she knew she wanted help running the launch and creating a portfolio of content that could be used for a subsequent evergreen launch funnel when she went on maternity leave — her own four-week “vacation.”

“When we were planning for the Accelerator launch, I knew how much content comes with a launch in terms of sales pages, landing pages, emails,” Adrienne said, “and I can write some of that, but I definitely wanted it to be better than what I could do on my own.

“I was also pregnant last year during this launch. And I was traveling. And it was too much to try to do it all myself. I was trying to nap every day because I was so exhausted and having someone else be able to help me was so nice.”

The Result:

We started with a strategy session to talk about all the pieces of the launch, specifically a cornerstone piece of content they would drive traffic to before the launch. 

“One of the big pieces that we had Lacy do was this four-part blog, and it was built to speak to all the objections in our industry and in our market. And it was big and lofty and we wanted that to be a statement piece for our launch. So she took a lot of my ideas and turned them into a beautifully written piece. And that was the lead off that we had for the launch.”

The RLC team drove ad traffic to the cornerstone blog post, and then invited people to a challenge. Lacy and Adrienne brainstormed the content for the challenge, including the “hook,” that participants would be able to collect all the information they needed on a single post-it note.

The challenge went well, and the warm traffic it generated culminated in a 26.5% conversion rate on the first webinar.

Lacy also worked with Adrienne on the sales page and then crafted most of the emails and other copy for the entire launch, from inviting people to the challenge, through the webinars, all the way to the cart close and downsell.   You can click here to read a full breakdown of all the content created for this launch.

The result was the biggest and most profitable launch in the company’s history. Because this was a new version of the program, with more resources and support, they had increased the price point by 30% — and they still enrolled more students than ever before.

“A lot of the content that Lacy wrote, we also take those emails and then we pull that into social media copy as well as Facebook ad copy. So we get a lot of bang for our buck as we use that content across the board. Even though she’s writing organic stuff, her touch is still on the Facebook ads and things like that.”

Plus, the launch was very profitable — to the tune of an 80% launch profit margin.

“Most of that happened organically because I know […] our expenses were pretty low on Facebook ads, copy, design for the sales page and then my team’s time during launch — which I think is important, because I think a lot of people don’t count how much their own team is costing them during those months. That’s not counting delivery of that program though, in terms of team time. So we were super profitable.” 

The Analysis:

It’s always gratifying to be part of a successful launch for a business that’s helping so many other people, and it’s a huge win to see numbers like a 26.5% conversion rate on a webinar, and an 80% profit margin on the launch as a whole.

Yet there is even a bigger ROI here because Adrienne and her team were able to use and repurpose so much of the copy into an evergreen funnel that helped the business to continue to grow while Adrienne was on maternity leave.

“We repurposed almost everything within that launch because we did transition it to evergreen. So we do have the webinar that is on evergreen, as well as all the webinar emails, as well as the launch emails, that we just had to take and tweak a little bit to make them sound more evergreen. So all of that content gets repurposed and utilized. 

“And then we have the blog post, which is absolutely evergreen, that still drives traffic. And we run ads to that blog post, just trying to get more eyeballs on the content that was actually working to move people into the funnel. And then she had some ideas for us to do some client testimonial podcast episodes, which we’ve just started doing this year.”

Even the sales page is still in use both for evergreen and live launches. “Actually, I hired someone this year to help me do a review on the sales page and they ended up trying to rewrite the whole sales page,” Adrienne said. “And then I hired someone else to come in and give me an actual feedback review on the sales page. They were like, ‘your old sales page is way better.’ So we’re back to the sales page that Lacy originally wrote because it’s so good. We just made minor tweaks to that again this year. So it’s an asset that I knew wasn’t just going to be for that launch, but that was going to support us via evergreen, as well as throughout this launch and the next one after that.”

Curious about how we could support your next launch? Click here for more information.