Ep. 120- 50% INCREASE in Conversions!! How WAITLIST Marketing Can Change Your Business!! l Jay’s Scoop

Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that. Welcome back to do this, not that.

And I cannot believe it. I've recorded 117 episodes of this thing and I have not talked about what is perhaps the most effective and impactful form of marketing.

And that is wait list and pre registration marketing. And I don't care if you're a business marketer or a consumer marketer, if you're not leveraging wait lists, okay, you are missing the boat.

Why do I say that? And first of all, what is it, right?

So when you have a wait list or you have a pre registration marketing program, what you are doing is allowing a segment of your audience to show interest in your offer before it actually becomes available. And they're usually giving their email address or something like that to get on this wait list or to pre register for that thing.

Now I got all sorts of data and tips about what you got to do, but you may not even realize it, but this idea of weightless marketing drives so many business and consumer brands and how they're driving interest for their products and updates to their products. I mean, Cybertruck from Tesla, that whole thing is a wait list, right? That's the entire model.

But how about Robinhood, you know the popular, popular stock trading app? They had a waitlist of over a million people. Where they got going. Or how about Airtable, right, That's that no code database platform.

They had a wait list before they got going with over 50,000 people and helped them to raise millions of dollars in funding. But then they doubled down on it all the time.

Now every time they have a new feature or some sort of integration, they get people to sign up for a wait list to get early access to it. And their wait list, on average of over a quarter of a million people notion, right? The popular productivity app.

That is how they launch their business. That is how they launch every new feature is leveraging wait lists. All birds. How about the shoe that I don't know how it got so popular.

Well, guess what, it got so popular because they leverage weight wait list for their original product and every product thereafter. Or have a third love, third love's entire business. And the way that they go to market is with weightless glossier. I don't think I'm even saying that.

Right. Which is the popular beauty brand. Their wait list approach to marketing is how they launch new product lines. So it is everywhere.

Business and consumer marketers are leveraging wait lists and this is how they are winning. So let's first break into some of the numbers before we get into to the simple ways that you can get this into play.

So a recent study by Harvard Business Review found that when you when customers join a wait list or pre register for a product or service, there is an 85% higher lifetime value compared to those that don't. Come on, that's bananas. Now another stat from winter research.

Wait lists can increase conversion rates for for business offers by over 50% and conversion and consumer offers by over 80% compared to traditional sales methods.

And on email promotions, when you're sending out your emails, when you mention a wait list in the subject line, it can increase your open rates by over 40%. Now of course wait lists build anticipation, they build excitement and people just want to get on the inside.

But the other thing that wait lists do, right, is it allows you to get an idea of is this a good idea? Is what I'm about to go to market with a really good idea?

You want to do a wait list before you're ready, okay, let's say you have a software product, it's not even fully done yet, you think it's the greatest product in the world, you think it's a can't miss, but you put it out there, say sign up for the wait list to get early access to our blah blah, blah product and guess what? Let's say you get crickets. Nobody signed up, nobody's interested. You're like, oh, back to the drawing board, right?

It allows you to take that deep breath, say oh, there's not as much interest there as I thought.

On the flip side of that, right, let's say you're going out there with some sort of, you know, get on the wait list for this new consumer product and all of a sudden you have a surge. You're like, oh my goodness, I wasn't expecting this. We need to make sure our inventory is ready for this.

Maybe you are doing some sort of online one to one coaching or masterclass and you do a wait list, a pre registration and you see a huge number of signups. Are you prepared for that?

It allows you to measure the interest and not only generate that excitement, but measure the interest, good or bad, for whatever it is that you're about to go to market with. The other really valuable thing is you get to see who is interested, right? You develop this product, who or this service.

Or let's say you're going to put on a new conference or a new event and then you put it out there and you say, hey, sign up for the wait list to get early access, beta access, first access or pre registration, right? Same idea.

And then you get all of these people signing up and then you look at the data, you look at the job titles, the job functions, the employee sizes of the people signing up. Maybe it's the income on the consumer side, maybe it's location, geographic location, it could be anything, right?

And now you're looking at, say, wait a minute, this is a very different population of people than we anticipated signing up for this thing. And then you can adjust your marketing following that. So a wait list and a pre registration strategy can be a massive, massive home run.

This is how I started Guru Conference. So I put on a virtual conference.

I put on a lot of virtual conferences now, but the first time I put on Guru Conference, which is a very large free virtual email marketing event and I had no idea if this was going to work or not. I said, I want to put on a really big virtual email marketing event. And I had no plan whatsoever.

I didn't have a single speaker, I didn't have a platform to put it on, I had nothing.

I was like, oh, now I actually have to do this thing. But it allows you to measure that interest.

Now there are some key steps that you want to do to make sure that when you are setting up your wait list or your pre registration plan, number one is come up with a wait list incentive, right? Something. Why should they sign up to get on the waitlist or to pre register? If it's for a conference, maybe it's a discount, right?

Or maybe if it's a software product, they get beta access to something to try it out first, some kind of incentive. The second thing is you create your waitlist page, you make it super simple to sign up.

Usually it's one or two fields that give their email address and that's it. Then you promote your wait list.

You get people excited, you create that energy around exclusivity and scarcity and all the other behavioral things that get us excited about getting on the inside. Right. We all want to be behind the curtain and then ongoing who's ever signing up. Keep your wait list hyped with updates.

Send them email, say this is going on. You're going to love it when you get access to this. You're going to be the first one to get access to because you signed up. Get them hyped.

If you're not leveraging wait lists and pre registration, I think you are missing the boat.

All right, before we get into since you didn't ask which is the ridiculous portion of this podcast, I want to let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. What's a Marigold? Listen, I know everybody out there has an email sending platform or platform.

They do all of their relationship marketing or whatever. I use Marigold. It is incredible. Okay? I send out billions of emails with them. It is just an easy tool.

So if you haven't checked them out, you should check out Meet Marigold. It is my email sending platform of choice.

But also they have a great piece of content that you can get access to@jschweddelson.com Marigold that's my name.

So if you want the free report, you go to jschweddelson.com Marigold all right, let's get into since you didn't ask the ridiculous portion of this podcast. So what is going on? So I try so hard to find good things to watch on television and I'm a loser. I can't find the right thing.

So this weekend I, I was like, okay, I saw there was the movie, the new movie, Mother of the Bride was on Netflix. All right? And I was like, I was like, this is gonna be good because I saw who was in it. Brook Shields is in it. Okay.

Miranda Cosgrove, who's the girl from icarly, was in it. Chad Michael Murray from One Tree Hill and Benjamin Brat from Law and Order. I'm like, all these are great stars. Okay? This is gonna be a great movie.

This movie was horrible. I mean, and I like horrible movies, but it was next level horrible.

I don't know what happens to these actors and actresses, but they, they forgot how to act. How is it that Brooke Shields, Miranda Cosgrove Chad Michael Murray and Benjamin Bratton know how to act. And I'm not a guy. It was terrible.

I can't act, but neither can they. Anyway, I don't know. I get so worked up about that.

But on a positive note, I was very, very excited to hear, which I know you're all going to care about immensely, that the Bachelor has been renewed for another season. This just came out. I'm very happy. I know you don't care, but this is important. Season 29, it's going to be awesome.

They also just renewed American Idol, which I don't understand how that's still in the air. Who is the last famous person that came out of American Idol?

I mean, I know there was like Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood, but has anybody done anything coming out of American idol in like 10 years? I don't even know who the judges are. Is Lionel Richie a judge? I don't know.

And then the other thing was that again, nobody's going to care about is that Bravo has renewed every version of the Real Housewives. This just came out. Atlanta, Beverly Hills, Miami, New York, Potomac, Orange County, Salt Lake City. I'm hyped. Yes, I'm hyped.

Listen, you might watch really smart TV and you might be really intellectual. Like maybe you're watching Franklin with Michael Douglas. Please, I put that on. It was so boring. I mean, it was so epically boring.

Who are you kidding? Watch the Real Housewives. Move on. Anyway, thanks for checking this out. If this wasn't horrible, leave it a review.

If it was horrible, you could also leave a review that wouldn't be as cool. And hit me up on JSON.com drop me a note, let me know what's going on.

And make sure you register for Guru Conference, the world's largest free virtual email marketing event. We will run out of spots. Sarah Jessica Parker's gonna be there. Come on. See you there. Thanks. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice.

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