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Are you looking to improve your 5 day challenge launch strategy?
On today's episode of Rebel Boss Ladies we're talking about five strategies that you can implement in your next challenge to get engagement and ultimately more sales from your members.
This episode is a bit different, because I don’t have a guest this week. Instead, I’m going to be sharing some of my top tips, tricks and strategies that I learned to create my own successful 5 day challenge.
The 5 day challenge I recently hosted was an incredible experience – it wasn’t my first time hosting a challenge but it was my first time hosting a *successful* challenge.
I guarantee that if you use these 5 tips for your next 5 day challenge, you’ll have a more healthy, engaged and ultimately successful launch!
1. When planning your 5 day challenge launch, use what your audience thinks they need
There is a really big difference between what your audience is thinking versus what they actually need.
It's really important that you, as the product creator and marketer, understand what your audience thinks they need so that you can have an opportunity to show them what they actually need later on.
Take social media as an example – everyone constantly thinks that they need more followers on social media, but any Instagram strategist will tell you that engagement and relationship building is way more important than having 10k, 20k followers.
Instead of advertising your content as focusing on relationship building (what YOU know your audience needs!) you can draw people in by targeting your audience with content about how to get more followers (what your audience THINKS they need). Then during training, you can share that valuable content and actually teach how to build an engaged following with the followers you already have.
If you don't create that content targeting the initial desire to get more followers, you might never have had the opportunity to talk to those people who are your potential target customers.
This applies to your 5 day challenge too. When you're thinking about the topic, it should really reflect what your audience wants to learn, instead of what you know your audience needs. This will help you recruit more participants in the long run.
2. Ensure that your 5 day challenge makes a promise of some sort.
Any participant in an online challenge wants to feel like its worth their time to participate.
First, make sure that you’re clear about your challenge in the title. You can use any formula, but a popular one is “my five day challenge will help you achieve X in X amount of time.”
Next, make sure that you can actually deliver on that promise. The worst thing you could do is make your audience feel like they wasted their time. You never want your challenge members to feel disappointed at the end of your 5 day challenge.
When your 5 day challenge members achieve great results, they know you're legitimate. If your members had a negative experience with your challenge, it’ll be tough to sell your product or build relationships at the end of the challenge.
You should also make sure your members know exactly how much time they’ll need to commit to the challenge. People are busy, so be clear with this in your title. Be specific, for example: “5 day challenge to declutter all of your closets in less than 10 minutes per day.”
Most importantly, be careful with how much time you’re asking your participants to give to the challenge.
Think about who your target customers are. If you're targeting busy moms, for example, they might not have any more than 15 minutes per day or they at least might not think they have more than 20 minutes per day. You wouldn't want to create a challenge that has them working for 30 minutes a day because they're never going to sign up.
3. Host your 5 day challenge in a Facebook group, but don’t rely on Facebook to deliver your content.
Facebook can be a great way to curate a group and bring people together. But the Facebook algorithm has been so wonky that you cannot rely on it to deliver your content.
Even if someone has opted into your 5 day challenge and signed up to join your Facebook group, you cannot expect that everything you post in your group is going to be shown to them by Facebook.
A great way to balance that is to use Facebook to compliment your 5 day challenge, instead of using it to deliver your pivotal challenge content material.
A personal example – when I released my 5 day challenge, I created videos separately, edited them, and uploaded them to Vimeo (YouTube is also a great choice!). Make the videos private, and make sure that only people with the link can see it.
You can also create a workbook to complement your videos, that way people can easily follow along and engage with the content while watching. For each day’s workbook, I took a screenshot of the video and included it in the workbook, with a hyperlink to the actual online content to make it super easy for my members to access the video.
Every day during my challenge at the same time, I delivered the workbook to my members via email. Every day at 7 AM they had an email in their inbox with the day’s materials waiting for them, and they had the whole day to complete it.
I used email to deliver my content so I could guarantee that the people who signed up for my challenge were getting the content that they needed in order to execute the challenge itself. This way I didn’t have to worry about the Facebook algorithm not delivering my content.
Using Facebook to supplement your content could also be helpful, and you could upload your videos to Facebook or use it to promote your challenge. But you definitely don’t want to rely on it to deliver all of your content.
4. Create an incentive for your members to participate in your 5 day challenge.
Five day challenges are great, right? You get people who are hyper-motivated to achieve the amazing results you’re promising.
That’s not to say that even the most excited people will actually show up every single day, however. It’s pretty common for people to start losing momentum and dropping off around day 3.
A great way to engage these people who may start dropping out is create an incentive that will encourage them to continue working through the challenge.
What did I do?
I told my members that I would be hosting a giveaway at the end of the challenge, and in order to be considered they’d need to have six points. They could receive points for different activities, including introducing themselves in the group, doing homework assignments, posting in the group, etc.
To prove they were doing the homework I asked them to share something in the Facebook group and I got a TON of responses. You could ask your members to write a response, share a picture, or anything to get them to participate.
This definitely helped me keep my challenge members engaged – I found that out of the people who signed up for the challenge, 50% of them engaged in almost all of the posts and 30% of them did all of the homework.
The one difficulty? This can definitely be a lot of work for you. You’ll need to make sure to keep track of who is doing their homework and who is earning what points. I definitely made some mistakes here and forgot to award points sometimes, but my challenge members were always great and really helpful when I forgot.
It can get out of hand when you have a lot of people participating. It’s a bit tricky when you’re working with a group of a hundred people but could be almost impossible if you tried to do it with a lot more. Make sure you’re able to get this done, or you can outsource this work to help keep yourself sane through the challenge.
Even though this may seem like a lot of work, encouraging participation in the challenge can really pay off in the long run when it comes to your actual product launch.
5. Make your 5 day challenge an experience worth participating in.
Maybe this is a bit obvious, but you don’t want your 5 day challenge to be dull or boring.
You want to make sure your challenge is a memorable experience so in the future your members will want to join the next one. Even if they don’t buy your product during this launch, if they enjoyed your challenge enough to participate again in the future you’ll have an opportunity to convert them somewhere down the line.
You want your challenge members to become ambassadors for you. You want them to really love and enjoy their experience so that when you host another challenge or you launch another product, these people will take you seriously, speak highly of you and share your stuff. That's how your business is going to grow organically.
So how can you do this? It's important, but it’s not easy. You have to show up to your five day challenge every single day with all of your energy and enthusiasm.
For my challenge, I did this in a couple different ways.
First, I hosted a kickoff event with my challengers. The day before my 5 day challenge started, I sent an email to my challenge members to invite them to a live Facebook event later that night. I told them I was going to share some important information about the event and some really exciting announcements.
I absolutely loved this. It was a great way to engage my challengers and get them excited for the challenge ahead. A really high percentage of people who signed up for the challenge showed up live for that kickoff event.
Content-wise, I didn’t need to share too much. I just said how excited and grateful I am and gave them the rules and expectations for the challenge. This is also when I shared some exciting announcements about the homework assignments and the giveaway I'd be running.
This kickoff helped to create an excited and engaged vibe that transferred into day one. They showed up for the first day of the challenge with that same energy and enthusiasm and this really impacted the results of my 5 day challenge.
I also showed up live every single day for the challenge. Even though I delivered the content through email, I still made an appearance in the Facebook group to answer questions, to recap the event, to shout out any people who were doing incredible work and to help people who were struggling.
It took a ton of energy to show up like that every day. But it was important because it really helped me get my participants engaged, excited, and moving forward in a really great direction.
This can even be as simple as little stuff, like sharing some funny memes. Even something as small as that can really help people join together as a community and laugh about it.
The last thing I did was I commented on every single person’s post for every single homework assignment that they did. This can be tough – let's say even if you have a hundred members in your group and they're posting once a day, that's one hundred posts every single day.
I was up late working every night of my challenge, but it was something that I wanted to do to help every challenge member feel like I personally connected with them. And that personal connection is what's going to help you translate into sales.
A lot of people said that at the end of the challenge that was the best part because the fact that they knew I was watching and that I was actually involved with what they were doing in the challenge made the difference for them. It was a unique and personal experience, which definitely helped with my conversion rate at the end of the challenge.
Is a 5 Day Challenge Right for You to Launch Your Digital Product?
When it comes to deciding the event that you're going to host to launch your digital product, it depends on what your personality is, what your bandwidth is, and what you feel compelled to do. Ultimately, it also comes down to what your audience actually wants from you.
Even if you have an approach that works for you, consider trying out a 5 day challenge. Ask yourself, are you excluding people just by nature of the event that you've chosen?
For me, my 5 day challenge was a great way to engage with my audience and a great way to diversify my approach. I do a lot of webinar launches and decided to use a 5 day challenge to reach a new audience. This 5 day challenge helped me attract other different types of people who still need my product but wouldn't be interested in a webinar.
Conclusion
There's a lot of work that goes into a 5-day challenge. But think about it this way:
You need an event to launch your product. 5-day challenges have a high perceived value and they're free. There's nothing better than that to lure in your ideal customer and convert them into a buyer!
Have you ever hosted a 5 day challenge? Any tips or tricks of the trade you'd be willing to share with us? Comment below!