What Is One Item That Should Be On A New Product Launch Checklist?
To help you have a successful product launch, we asked CEOs and E-commerce Professionals this question for their best insights. From taking advantage of your internal ambassadors to designing a professional presentation, there are several items that should be on a new product launch checklist.
Here Are 12 Items To Include In A New Product Checklist:
- Information for Employees
- Execute QA Testing
- Set an Actual Launch Date
- Craft Your Customer Journey
- Position the Product
- Use Analytics and Tracking
- Inform Stakeholders Regarding Launch Agendas
- Create a Social Media Strategy
- Invest in Marketing Campaigns to Build Buzz
- Use Smart Goals to Define Your Objectives
- Excess Amount of Stock
- Design a Professional Presentation
Information for Employees
Make sure you give enough info about your product launch to your own employees. They will be the first to test, give feedback and act as an ambassador. They are often overlooked or forgotten. Next to that, it also creates more commitment and engagement of your employees to the company as they are the first to test.
Bjorn Verbrugghe, Unigift
Execute QA Testing
Whenever you’re launching a new product, it’s important to exhaustively QA the product end-to-end. This ensures that new users trying out the product don’t immediately run into issues that result in frustration. It’s easy to get excited about getting new features out the door, but if you haven’t tested them appropriately, they invite distrust in your ability to provide a reliable, working service.
Blake Burch, Shipyard
Set an Actual Launch Date
Choose your perfect launch date. Don’t forget to choose the actual launch date on a new product launch checklist, because timing is everything. You can have a great product, but if you don’t pay attention and release it over a holiday weekend when everyone is already busy with plans or out of town, you will not get off to a great start.
Consider exactly who your target audience is, why they need your product, and when it would be the most useful to them, and choose a date accordingly. Timing is everything, so make sure you include a product launch date on your checklist and set yourself up for success.
Karim Hachem, Sunshine79
Craft Your Customer Journey
It’s exciting launching a new product you’ve been working on, but before you add it to your website, you’ll be well off to make sure you’ve got a thoughtful customer journey mapped out to actually lead people to this amazing new offer. Starting at the end is often the easiest!
Think through how someone will actually be purchasing this product. How easy are your check-out process and the following delivery system? What information would be helpful for your new customer to know BEFORE they got to the checkout? That’s going to be super valuable to add to your sales page!
Now going back a step, make sure you have a compelling sales page that positions your product as the perfect option for your ideal customer. Answer any FAQs and potential objections here too!
And finally, how do you plan to get this person to your sales page? And are they likely to be ready to buy if you send them straight to the page? If not, adding some content to nurture people towards the sale will serve you well!
Michelle Pontvert, Strategic Squarespace website designer
Position the Product
For a new product launch, I can’t state how important positioning is. It will help you define who your product is for, what problems it will solve, and more importantly – what makes it unique from your competitors. Unless it’s a completely new idea, chances are you already have some big competitors in your domain. You need to fight them smartly so you can fit your product in the market – and that’s exactly where positioning can help.
Think about Nike – what do you feel? Now think about Converse – what do you feel? It’s funny that both brands sell shoes, but we have a completely different feelings attached to them. That’s how smart positioning is done. You can nail positioning by researching your top competitors and figuring out loopholes.
The best way to do that is by researching what their audiences’ are saying about them – and from there, you can craft a unique narrative for your product.
Josh Tyler, Tell Me Best
Use Analytics and Tracking
It’s so easy to not prioritize your analytics and tracking when you first launch. However, it’s crucial to get something in place from the get-go, so you can start making data-driven decisions, early.
To begin with, you can implement something simple, like Google Analytics or Mixpanel snippets. This will at least report page visit data as well as device and system metrics. This will take a developer a few hours or less. You can also consider a screen recording tool like FullStory, so you can qualitatively analyze your user’s experience. It’s often extremely enlightening.
Once you have a more established product, you can improve your integrations with tools like Mixpanel to gather more specific insights into your product experience. However, make sure you write a plan of what you want to track and (more importantly) why you want to track it — before you implement anything custom!
James Sear, Avion
Inform Stakeholders Regarding Launch Agendas
It’s crucial to communicate launch details to key stakeholders, including the promotion technique and target day launch and time as it opens more doors for collaborations and revisions. You should engage with them if you want them to do specific activities at this time, like posting material on social media or contacting consumers to incur a positive result when launching a product.
Additionally, this gives the product launchers and stakeholders to brainstorm, copy-edit, and proofread the content of the product launch. Work as a team and keep one another posted with every action done to avoid misinformation and, at the same time, promote a culture of belongingness.
Daniel Maman, My Phenom Fitness
Create a Social Media Strategy
In today’s market, it’s almost essential to have social media platforms, and they can be a huge help when you’re launching a new product. You can use your account to announce it or just to promote it. Depending on the industry you work in, you could also run an influencer campaign surrounding it. Whether you make social media a big or small part of your product launch, having a strategy in place should always be a priority on your checklist.
Rachel Reid, Subtl Beauty
Invest in Marketing Campaigns to Build Buzz
Not only will a solid marketing plan help you sell products, but it will help you get customers interested in your brand. This is especially true when it comes to a new product launch, as you don’t have the same amount of information available to you as you would on a regular basis.
When a company has a successful product launch, it can amass a dedicated following of customers who are excited by its brand. This helps create the kind of engagement that brands need to continue growing. A marketing campaign can help drive this growth and ensure that your product launch is successful.
Saunav Kaushik, VinPit
Use Smart Goals to Define Your Objectives
Always make sure to define your goals before you launch your product. Launching a new product is a lot like launching a rocket into orbit. There is a very specific sequence of steps that need to be followed in the correct order. If your goals are not defined before you begin, you allow confusion and mismanaged expectations to dictate the life cycle of your product. SMART goals are actionable goals, and actionable goals get done.
Patrick Robinson, Paskho
Excess Amount of Stock
Always make sure you have enough stock to meet demand. With a successful launch, you’ll have customers clamoring. But you can’t fulfill orders if you don’t have a product. Plan for more stock than you think you’ll need. Plan for more customers than you think you’ll have. Be ready for an influx and meet new orders quickly and efficiently.
Raina Kumra, Spicewell
Design a Professional Presentation
It is important when launching a new product that you have a good photographer/videographer that can produce great content. When marketing online, you have 3 seconds to capture the audience’s attention so you want to make sure the person creating your content can make it clean, professional, and high quality.
Ashley Garabed, Argon agency
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