You are excited to sell online. You have found the perfect product but you are stuck because you are not sure how to launch. In this article, I am going to show you 10 product launch stages you should consider to help you boost your product launch strategy into the stratosphere.
1) Brainstorming Stage
Before you can even begin to think about product creation, you need to figure out what product is going to be brought on board. Understanding how you want it to fit in with your brand and why customers would purchase it is essential. After all, there are millions of products and services available online everyday and yours needs to stand out amongst the crowd if you want any success whatsoever.
2) Product Creation Stage
This is where some serious planning , product idea and implementation begins. When you imagine a product, what do you see? How is it going to benefit the end user? What problem will it solve? If you can answer these types of questions then you’re headed in the right direction.
3) Product Design Stage
When product design is done properly, all your efforts up until this point were worth every minute. Assembling parts, building prototypes and testing for functionality are all crucial elements that need to exist here. Make sure things are built correctly from the beginning because getting halfway through product development only to realize something doesn’t work as intended will be costly both in time and money!
4) Testing Stage
Once product creation has been finished and product design has been solidified, it’s time to test and make sure everything works as intended. This is very important because if you find out a product isn’t working as intended after the product launch or even worse after product shipping begins, then your product will lose credibility and you just open yourself up to more risk! Make sure that testing occurs frequently enough so that no surprises occur once the product hits the market.
5) Product Launch Stage
Whether this is a product launch done internally at your business or via an email campaign, knowing how you want to engage with customers before going live with a product is paramount. Some companies choose to do small beta tests for product launches so they can learn what does and doesn’t work, while others prefer to just go for it. It will all depend on the product launch stage you’re at and your product itself.
6) Product Marketing Stage
Essentially, product marketing is about communicating your product and getting people interested in it. Whether you use PPC advertising, display advertisements or social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube to share product information with consumers, here you need to ensure that consumers know what the product is and why they should purchase it. If you don’t do a bang-up job of product marketing then no one will purchase your product even if they want to!
7) Middle of the Launch Stage
After product launch has been completed and product marketing has been going on for a while, the product is now in the hands of consumers. Now it’s time to continue product marketing efforts and learn from consumers what they like and hate about your product. If you were doing product testing correctly up until this point, then most things should be working as intended but there will always be bugs that need to be eliminated or improvements that can be made based on consumer feedback.
8) Product Improvement Stage
While some entrepreneurs simply come out with a product, create a product launch strategy around it and forget about it over time, those that are truly successful at ecommerce keep fine-tuning their products by making them better product updates. You can do this by introducing product updates directly from the product page, sending email product launch newsletters to consumers or simply making a product upgrade blog post that gets shared around social media platforms.
9) Product Retirement Stage
Unfortunately, this is something that all product owners must face. At some point in time, you’re going to have to retire a product because sales are going down and it’s not worth the maintenance costs associated with keeping it front and center on your product catalog any longer. If you find out about this after your replatforming efforts have begun (building an entirely new website), then it will cost you more money than if you retired the product early before spending too much time or money on building a replica of your current site that is product launch friendly.
10) Product Reviews Stage
The product review stage can be broken down into two categories:
- product reviews done by your customers and
- product reviews done by your competition.
As far as consumer product reviews, these are usually shown on the product page or after product purchase so consumers know what to expect with the latest version of the product you’re selling. These opinions should be considered very carefully because if a lot of people mention that something isn’t working right with your new product, then it might not be time to retire the old one! If you do find yourself in this situation, then at least make sure consumers know about any guarantees or warranties they have when purchasing from your business.
With competitor product reviews, they are done by your competition on the back end of their product catalogs. Seeing what products they’re selling and how many sales they get can help you decide which product launches you need to increase your own ecommerce product sales with.
Phew! That was a lot of product launch information to take in all at once. Hopefully your product launch strategies will work out better than 95% of the 30,000 new products that come out every year. Just remember to do due diligence and research before launching a product and make sure you stick with it even after product launch and product marketing is complete. If you don’t, then consumers won’t become loyal customers and sales will plummet. Don\’t forget to share this article if you found it informative and to join my Facebook Group where we talk all Information and Physical Products.