The fifth eBook in the Paid Growth and Campaigns category. It pulls together everything from the channel-specific eBooks into a single way of running a campaign - from setting the objective on a Monday morning to reviewing the results six weeks later and deciding what to repeat.
Members ebook·7 chapters· 35 minute read
Chapter 6
Launch and Follow-Up
How to run the launch week without burning out, and the follow-up sequence that earns back the cost of the spend by converting the warm leads the launch already generated.
The launch week is the loudest part of the campaign and the least dangerous. Most things that go badly in a small business campaign go badly in the build phase, when there's no audience watching, or in the follow-up phase, when the team has switched off and the warm leads quietly cool. The launch week itself, if the brief is good and the assets are honest, mostly runs the rhythm you set in the last chapter.
The follow-up is where most campaigns leave money on the table. The launch generates a stack of warm leads - people who clicked, started a form, abandoned a basket, replied to an email or asked a question in a comment - and most small businesses respond to a third of them quickly, half of them eventually and the rest never. The conversion rate from a warm lead in the launch week to a customer in the follow-up phase, with a tidy follow-up routine, is usually two to four times the conversion rate at the click itself. Without the follow-up routine, the campaign delivers a fraction of what it could.
This chapter is the launch and the follow-up. By the end you'll have a launch-week routine, a follow-up sequence and a clear handover from one phase to the next that doesn't depend on heroic effort to work.
The full chapter walks through the launch-week routine that prevents burnout, the response-time rule that earns back the cost of the spend, the follow-up sequence template and the handover that closes the campaign cleanly.
The launch-week routine
Two short sessions a day during launch week. A morning session of thirty to forty minutes - check that everything that should have gone live did, look at overnight responses, reply to anything that needs replying, note anything for the daily five-minute team check. An afternoon session of twenty minutes - same loop, smaller. Anything that doesn't need an immediate response waits for the next morning. Outside those two sessions, leave the dashboards alone. Owners who refresh ad results every hour during launch week make worse decisions, work longer days and don't actually improve the campaign.
If the campaign needs more than two sessions a day to keep on top of, it was scoped too big for the team. That's a learning for the next campaign, not a problem to solve in the middle of the launch by adding hours.
The response-time rule
Every enquiry, comment, message or form submission gets a real response inside one working day, every working day of the launch and follow-up phases. If your normal response time is slower, this is the campaign window that earns the cost of speeding it up. The earlier eBook Lead Capture and Follow-Up covers the routines that make this possible without taking over the day - templated first replies, a simple inbox triage, a clear handoff if more than one person is replying. The campaign version is the same routine running tighter.
A single missed response in the launch week can cost more than the day's ad spend. A week of slow responses can quietly halve the campaign's results without showing up in the dashboard, because the lost customers never get logged - they just go elsewhere.
The follow-up sequence
Anyone who took the first step in the launch but didn't complete the second goes into a follow-up sequence. The shape varies by offer but the rhythm is similar.
The follow-up sequence template
Within 1 working day: a personal first reply if the lead came through a form or message
Day 3: a useful follow-up - a relevant case study, an answer to a likely doubt, a brief reminder of the offer
Day 7: a clear next-step nudge with the deadline if there is one
Day 14: a final friendly check-in and an offer to stay in touch even if the timing isn't right now
After day 14: into the regular newsletter or list, no more campaign-specific follow-ups
Handing off into the follow-up phase
When the launch window closes, two things should happen the same day. Active campaign ads should drop to a maintenance level or stop entirely depending on the campaign type, so you're not paying for new clicks while you're still working through the warm leads from launch week. The follow-up sequence should be confirmed running for everyone who came through but didn't convert. A whiteboard or a simple list of warm leads with their current status keeps things visible during the follow-up phase, even if you're using a customer-list system in the background.
Owners who skip the handover and just let the campaign drift into general activity lose track of which leads came from which campaign and can't review honestly later.
What gets logged
Through the launch and follow-up phases, three things get logged in addition to whatever the platforms log automatically. The total number of real enquiries the campaign produced. The total number of those that converted to customers. The total revenue from those customers in their first ninety days. Without those three numbers, the review in the next chapter has nothing to work with. With them, the review takes thirty minutes and produces honest answers.
What to do this week
Set up the launch-week routine - two sessions a day, blocked in the calendar - before the campaign starts. Build the follow-up sequence as templates in your email tool now, not in the middle of the launch. Decide where you'll log the three numbers and make sure whoever replies to enquiries knows where to log them too. The next chapter is the review; the logging this week is what makes the review possible.
Recurring principle: follow up quickly and consistently. The launch is the loud part, the follow-up is the part that pays. The earlier eBook Sales Basics covers the deeper version of the conversation patterns that turn warm leads into customers.
The rest of this chapter walks through the practical steps, the templates and the checklists you need to put it into action. It includes worked examples, copy frameworks and the small decisions that make the difference between a plan that sits in a drive and one that gets used.
Inside you'll find a step-by-step playbook, a downloadable template, a checklist you can run this week and a short list of common mistakes to avoid before you start.
The full action plan, broken into weekly steps.
Ready-to-use scripts, templates and checklists.
Worked examples for different sized businesses.
Common mistakes and how to avoid them.
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