Live launch vs. evergreen funnel: The best way to sell your digital product

If you want to launch and sell a digital product, you’re likely wondering if you should do a live launch with a defined open and close cart period, or just make it available all the time. 

There are two ways to sell a digital product effectively – launching live or using an evergreen sales funnel (which basically means automated with people continuously signing up to your funnel). 

Live launching is self-explanatory – you’re running the launch in real time, you’re showing up at the same time as your audience, and there is a definitive open cart date and close cart date. These dates are set, so they are the same for everyone who is taking part in your launch. 

An evergreen sales funnel still has most of the moving pieces you have in a live launch, but the key difference is that its automated. So people enter your sales funnel at unique times based on when they first start clicking. They will all get shown your offer at different times, and the shopping cart will close at different times. For example, people will have 72 hours to purchase the special offer. While you don’t need to be showing up live, you do need some extra automation to make this possible.

The evergreen option is very attractive to a lot of people because it sounds amazing to have people buying your digital product every day while you’re off doing other things! And it is…

…but, there’s a few things you should know first. 

Before I get onto that, there is one other option that I do not recommend, yet I see a lot of people doing. This is when you create your digital product such as an online course first, then you pop it up on your website and cross your fingers that people buy it. I do not recommend doing this, and I don’t consider this a launch or an evergreen funnel. Technically you could call it evergreen, but it’s not going to make much of an impact on your business.

You can find 3 reasons your digital product isn't selling as well as you'd like here. 

So now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s look at what option is best for you. 

What is the best way to sell your digital product?

One is not better than the other, both live launching and an evergreen funnel have their place. 

It just depends on where you’re at. 

My recommendation is to live launch first, and launch 2-4 times first, before you look at setting up an evergreen funnel to sell your digital product. 

Here’s why:

• A live digital product launch will validate your offer and give you the data you need before you move to an evergreen model. It tests the market and lets you know if people will pay for it. Like any marketing, a launch is a data gathering exercise.Data is simply information to give us feedback on a number of things. And a live launch will give us this data first. By doing a live launch first, you will be able to see if your digital product sells successfully. You’ll know the stats – like what your digital product conversion rate is.
• If you go straight into selling your digital product with an evergreen sales funnel, you’ve got to create the product first without knowing if it sells. This is risky!
• There’s a perception that an evergreen funnel is set and forget which is not true. You need to be constantly attracting people into the top of your evergreen sales funnel which will require ads. Ads don’t run themselves! You also need to have a testing mindset and be tweaking your funnel over time.
• For an evergreen launch to work, you’ve got to collect the data before you can improve it. That means you need to get a lot of eyeballs on your offer. To do this, you’re going to need to run ads. You may or may not have this skill set inside the business. I wouldn’t recommend outsourcing ads until you know your product sells (ad managers are not magicians, they can’t make a bad product sell). So you’re better off getting this data from a live launch first.
• If you’re not a whiz at launching yet, it’s highly likely that you don’t have the skills yet to create an evergreen sales funnel that works. It's a definite skill! So learning to launch by running live launches IS your perfect training ground. Before you know it, you’ll have the skills you need to set up an evergreen funnel.

Should you launch live or do an evergreen launch – the final say! 

You should launch live at least once, but preferably two – four times. This is to make sure that your digital product is appealing and people are willing to pay for it. 

Once you know that you have a digital product offer that sells, you can move onto the evergreen sales funnel. 

The big bonus of this is that you can pre-sell your course to make sure people actually want it. This can save you weeks or months of your time creating something that doesn't sell. 

So what are you waiting for, go-better? Check out my favourite ways to live launch here.