A product launch can look absolutely brilliant from the outside.
Beautiful photos. Clever advertising. A countdown that has everybody waiting.
Then launch day arrives, and customers cannot find the size guide, the delivery information makes no sense, or the checkout completely refuses to cooperate.
Not quite the grand entrance you had in mind, is it?
The good news is that many of these problems are avoidable. You just need to pay attention to the less glamorous details before everybody starts clicking.
Here are five details that can make or break an online product launch:
1. Check What Your Product Page Is Missing
You know your new product inside out. Your customers don’t.
They don’t know how big it is, what comes in the box, or whether the colour looks different in person.
Go through the product page as though you’re seeing it for the first time.
Better yet, ask someone who wasn’t involved in the launch to look at it.
You’ll be surprised what they ask.
2. Give The Checkout A Proper Test
Before you announce the launch, pretend you’re a customer and place an order.
Not just a quick click on the “Buy Now” button. Go through the whole process from start to finish.
There’s a good reason website functionality matters for online marketing success, especially when you’re about to send a whole lot of new customers to your store.
Choose a product variation, enter an address, check the delivery fee, and make a test payment. Now do it all over again but from your phone this time.
You want to find the broken bits before someone who’s ready to spend money finds them for you.
3. Don’t Leave The Packing Until Last
You’ve got 500 launch bundles to sell.
Great. Are those bundles actually assembled, or are the individual products still sitting in separate boxes?
Someone needs to put everything together, check the contents, and get it ready for shipping. Contract packaging can help with that sort of work, especially when your own team is already super busy.
It’s worth sorting out before those 500 customers start asking where their orders are.
4. Make Sure Customer Service Knows What’s Coming
Marketing has spent three weeks talking about the launch.
Has anyone told customer service?
Make sure they know what’s being released, when orders will ship, and what questions customers are likely to ask.
Give them the answers before launch day.
It’s a little unfair when the first time your support team hears about a new product is from an irritated customer asking where it is.
5. Check What Your Competitors Are Doing That Week
You’ve picked Friday for your big launch.
Unfortunately, your biggest competitor has picked Friday for a massive sale.
Before finalizing your date, have a look at what’s happening in your market.
You can’t plan around every competitor, but you might avoid launching directly into an event that’s going to steal most of your customers’ attention.
Sometimes moving the date a few days is totally worth it.
In Conclusion
The best product launches tend to look effortless from the customer’s side.
That’s usually because somebody behind the scenes has checked a hundred little details. You don’t need everything to be perfect, but the important bits do need to work.
After all, we all know that getting people interested is only half the job.
