Waitlists That Convert: How to Build Hype, Warm Leads, and Sell Before Doors Open

So what is a waitlist and where does it actually fit into a launch plan? Your waitlist is exactly what it sounds like.

It's a place, a list of emails usually, of people who are wanting to join your offer or just interested in finding out more about your offer, a place to gather them and target them with things like content and emails, correspondences, conversations, so that they can warm up into your offer and decide if they're the right fit or not.

You obviously have people in your audience somewhere, whether it's Instagram or your email list or TikTok or just a word of mouth network, and a waitlist is a way to take the people that are just in your general population audience and put them onto a list of the hottest potential leads into your offer.

They fit into your overall launch in the very early stages.

The way that we plan launches in Launch Your Own Way is first we just set our launch goals.

How much do we wanna make? How many people do we want to enroll? How much do we want to grow our socials? All those kinds of things.

And then you move into the pre-launch stage, which is what I call the warm up.

This is where you really build trust with your audience and get as visible as possible to bring potential new customers into your orbit.

The next is the launch phase, so that's when you're actively selling your offer.

And then there's the post-launch phase.

Equally important.

That's what happens after.

You collect data, feedback, and potentially down-sell into something else.

Now, if we're looking at the four different stages, setting your launch goals, the warm up, the actual launch, and the post-launch, waitlist building sits firmly in the warm up period.

This is when you are gathering everyone into one place, the waitlist, and letting them know about the offer, building trust with them, and letting them make a decision about whether or not it's the right fit for them.

This happens before you go on sale, so the best thing about it is that you're creating demand before you even open the cart.