I am happy to announce that my Ventriloquist Academy membership website launched this past Monday, July 23rd. It’s been doing really well, considering how small of a niche ventriloquism is. While the art itself is HUGE right now with all of the interest generated by Jeff Dunham, Darci Lynne Farmer, Terry Fator and others, that does not necessarily translate into a lot of people wanting to actually learn how to do it.
The good news, in my case, was that I had a pretty large list of folks I knew were interested – a list that was generated by me being online for so many years and having an opt-in form on my websites for all of these years. So, I had about 3,000 people to mail to.
I have two levels of memberships. The initial front end membership, and then an upsell to a “Legends” level which has more content. For this site, I decided to nix the free Optimize Member plugin and go with Wishlist Member. It costs $99 for a single site, or $199 for multiple sites. It was well worth it to me. Optimize Member caused all sorts of issues with purchasers not getting their automated registration emails, emails going to spam, multiple unnecessary emails sent and more. I think I ended up having to add 80% of the customers into the members area manually. Not fun.
I still have four days to go in my Ventriloquist Academy launch. Sales have slowed down a bit, but I’ll turn up the heat in mailing these next few days. Once piece of information I learned from John Thornhill, which is proving to be absolutely true, is to mail often during the launch. I always thought if I sent emails out to my list more than once a week or so, they’d all get mad and unsubscribe.
In reality, what happens is that people who are interested in your product, information, etc., have no problems receiving frequent emails from you – if they provide good info. The people who will unsubscribe are ones who were never going to purchase anything from you anyway. Think of it as a spring cleaning of your subscribers. JUST BE SURE to take care of your loyal customers.
Right now I’m mailing once a day during this launch until I get down to the final 48 hours. Then I’ll promote the product even more heavily, as a large percentage of buyers will wait until the last minute to order.
It’s been a fun launch!
You can see my sales page here:
https://ventriloquistacademy.com
Lee
1 Response to "The Ventriloquist Academy Launches!"
Hey Lee,
That’s awesome. To be able to build a product and like this and generated sales is super cool. The insight that you gave on mailing your list will be invaluable. In listening to John Thornhill, I have heard him and Randy say this numerous times in P2S, but have been afraid of sending too many emails.
It makes sense that if you provide quality info and really interact with your subscribers, that they will not mind if you hit them with emails every day. The ones that unsubscribe is just part of it.
Thanks for giving an update. I look forward to seeing your final results.
Inspiring and useful.
David