✨ This One Thing Totally Transformed My Sales — Learning How to Pre-Launch with Nicole Cloutier [BEST OF]

Speaker 0Let's go off the grid. Okay. Let's go off the grid. Okay. I know that you really wanna put your phone away.

Speaker 0Yeah. Let's go off the grid, please.

Amelia HrubyHello. Hello. And welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast about live, laugh, loving online without social media or a big dick. I'm your host, Amelia Frooby. And on this show, I share stories, strategies, and experiments for sharing your work and making money on the internet with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty.

Amelia HrubyThose two core values have been a guiding light as I have taken this show through so many upheavals in the social media world, in the online business world. We've seen the rise of AI together. We've seen the fall of Meta's engagement rates together. We've seen a lot together, and through all of that, we have centered liberation and care in our practices. Those are two personal values of mine that I hope to bring into everything we do here at Off the Grid, And in that vein, I also want to wish you, those of you tuning in the day this episode goes live, a very happy Juneteenth.

Amelia HrubyIf you're not familiar, in The US, Juneteenth is a federal holiday where we commemorate and celebrate the end of slavery in The United States. 06/19/1865 was the date that freedom for enslaved people in Texas was officially announced, which was the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation at the end of the Civil War. And now we celebrate on June 19 every year or Juneteenth as the holiday is called. Of course, slavery should never have happened. Its violence continues to pervade American society and beyond, and there is so much freedom and liberation to continue to fight for.

Amelia HrubyBut I think that celebrating Juneteenth and uplifting the liberation of black communities and people across the country and the world is really important. So I just wanted to bring that into the conversation, wish all of you a happy Juneteenth. And I hope that if you are a white person like me, maybe you take today to do a bit of reflection, a bit of redistribution, a bit of making reparations. Maybe you find some organizations, some mutual aid funds. Maybe you donate some cash.

Amelia HrubyMaybe you uplift black creators. There are so many ways to be in solidarity on Juneteenth, and I encourage everyone to do their own research on what this holiday might mean and ways that you can celebrate it, particularly rooted in your identity and background. That shared, I am bringing you a very special episode today that is not particularly on the topic of liberation unless we are thinking of liberation by making some more money, cultivating some financial sovereignty to support your energetic sovereignty, which is definitely a liberatory act of sorts. Today on the podcast, I am resharing a really wonderful tightened up excerpt of a conversation that I had with Nicole Cloutier last fall all about how pre launching can transform your launches and help you make more money every time you put a new offering into the world. Nicole is a brilliant copywriter and she is preparing to teach the next round of her class open loop.

Amelia HrubyAnd let me tell you, if I had to name just one thing that impacted my sales more than anything else over the past year or so, it would be this class. I took it last spring, I think. Time is a flat circle, but I took it sometime in 2025. And it really taught me a whole new way to think about prelaunching, to think about the emails I send, to think about selling and being sold to as a hero's journey. And as a result of that work, of being in this class with Nicole, of doing the work of the free writing and the email writing, I have honestly seen a lot more financial success in my business.

Amelia HrubyMy interweb launches to the wait list have doubled in average signups per launch. I saw my come to class launch make so much more money than I expected, over $10,000 in revenue, which was beyond even my stretch goal. And, overall, I just feel so much more confident and clear about what I'm doing every time I put something on sale this year. All of that is thanks to Nicole and OpenLoop. And because I'm such a fan, I volunteered to be an affiliate for this round.

Amelia HrubySo if you like what you hear in this free episode today, please do head to the show notes, click one of those links to learn more about open loop, put yourself on the wait list, and if you end up purchasing the class, I will receive a small referral payment as thanks for sending you Nicole's way. But before we get ahead of ourselves, I'm just thrilled to be bringing you this best of episode. I went and listened back to my conversation with Nicole from the fall, and the podcast editor in me was like, okay, Amelia, you can tighten this up. You can just make it the most poignant, most important information that everybody needs to know when they're thinking about launching something new. So that's what you're gonna hear if you keep listening to this episode.

Amelia HrubyAnd I think even if you heard me talk to Nicole last fall, you're gonna get new things out of hearing it again. Thank you so much again for tuning into off the grid. Thank you for being in business. Thank you for wanting to learn to launch better so you can hopefully make more money and stay in business and be a part of our community long term. I'm so grateful for Nicole.

Amelia HrubyI'm so grateful for you. And now, let's dive in to this conversation about pre launching and open loop with Nicole Cloutier. Hi, Nicole. Welcome back to Off the Grid.

Nicole CloutierHi, Amelia. Oh my goodness. So excited to be back here again.

Amelia HrubyI thought that a very back to basics way in would just be to ask you, like, what is a launch and what is a prelaunch? Like, could you just maybe define some terms for us?

Nicole CloutierA launch, I would put super, super simply as a period of time when you are selling something. And I say it that simply because, like, we use the word launch when I was working in tech and it meant they were launching a new computer mouse. Right? And we use that word in the online business space when we are launching a course or a membership or a digital product. Right?

Nicole CloutierBut there is something that you want to put out in front of the world and say, hey, do you want this? Come buy it. If a launch is just

Amelia Hrubya period when something's on sale, what is a pre launch?

Nicole CloutierWhat I like to say is that if you're not launching, you're pre launching. I mean, and obviously, you can get more detailed about it, but knowing when you plan on launching something, like if I know that I am going to launch a product in November, and then I say, okay, it's September. So I want all of my emails, all of my social media, if I use social media, which I don't. Right? I want all of my messaging leading up to that launch to be about the topic or the thing that I know that I'm going to be selling.

Nicole CloutierAnd the reason is it establishes you as an expert in the thing that you're going to be selling. So people start to be like, oh, like Nicole's talking a lot about this. She knows a lot about it. Right. So it establishes you as a trusted person in the space because you're talking about it and prepare them to be ready to buy the thing that you're going to be selling.

Amelia HrubyMhmm. Okay. So pre launching is the period before a launch, but also maybe like that means it's any time we're not launching, we're leading up to a launch. And maybe we're leading up to a launch years from now, or maybe we're leading up to a launch months or weeks from now. Do you have, like, a maybe more focused period of time where you're like, this is when I'm really in like the strategic content creation and sharing part of the pre launch?

Nicole CloutierFor me, it's usually about three weeks ahead of a launch, but I think it, it depends a lot on the type of your business you're running as far as like how many products you have. Right? Like I am working with someone now who sells art prints. Right? So it's it's different because she's always going to be selling something different.

Nicole CloutierShe'll often have, like, new collections. So it looks different for her than it would look for someone who sells the same course every quarter. Right. Because then they are really always pre launching and always pre launching for the same thing. Whereas someone whose business has more varied types of products, their prelaunches will change depending on whatever they're going to be selling in the future.

Nicole CloutierSo that also changes the duration just depending on how often you're launching.

Amelia HrubyThat makes a lot of sense. And I think that part of what is fun and challenging to talk about when we talk about launching and pre launching is it can be very simple, and it

Nicole Cloutiercan also be, like, very galaxy brain complex. It really can be so simple. Like, it can be very linear, like you're pre launching, you're launching. You you sell the thing. Right?

Nicole CloutierYou Yeah. The money goes in your bank account. The money goes in your bank account.

Amelia HrubyYeah. So how do you know it's time to go into the pre launch period even?

Nicole CloutierYou have to have an idea of when you wanna launch, and you also have to have an idea of what it is. And when I say that, what I think you really need to know is the problem that you're going to be solving and who you're going to be solving it for and what you want that outcome to be for that person that you're solving the problem for. So if you know those three things, you could actually use a prelaunch to figure out the rest, figure out the details. So a prelaunch can be really valuable for starting conversations with your ideal audience, like with your list. Right?

Nicole CloutierSo if you are sending emails to your list and you're like, I kinda wanna build something for them. Maybe you don't even know what the problem is, but you know, you wanna build something for them and you just start asking them questions about like, hey, can you tell me in detail, like, what this is looking like for you right now? Like, what are you struggling with? And like using your prelaunch to answer those questions, that'll actually help you narrow in on what you're even building in the first place. So in a way that's almost like a pre prelaunch, but, but I do think it's really, really important to start those conversations.

Amelia HrubyYeah. I'm glad you're bringing this up because I would agree. I think the sign of that we've really moved into the prelaunch is that you have clarity on who are your people and what are their problems. And then once you feel clear about their problems, you can move into this prelaunch mode where you do something. What do you do in prelaunch mode, Nicole?

Amelia HrubyWhat do I do if I'm like, okay, I'm ready to prelaunch. Where do I go next?

Nicole CloutierYeah. Well, first I wanna say that when I actually started getting, like, conversations going from my email list, it made a huge difference in the launch. Right? Like the people who reply to my emails, the people who ask me questions, like those are the people that bought like the first people that bought for anything. And I've launched this way with services.

Nicole CloutierI've launched this way with digital products and courses. Like the people who reply are the ones who buy. And I'm not using those conversations to sell. I think I wanna make that clear. Like, if someone replies to a prelaunch email, usually it's because they're saying like, wow, the way you just described that is exactly my lived reality, you know, which is not an accident like that.

Nicole CloutierThat's why I love voice of customer research, which a prelaunch also is. You're getting that, like, voice of customer. Right? You're getting the exact way that your person talks about the thing they're struggling with and the thing they want. And you can take that language and, like, keep using it so that you can prove you understand the problem.

Nicole CloutierSo those conversations are the most important part of a prelaunch, like asking and asking specific questions. Like, don't just say like, hey, what are you struggling with right now in regards to your marketing? Right. Well, because I think a lot of people do do that. Right.

Nicole CloutierThe questions are very general. And I feel like that almost comes from early social media when I used to work on the social media for Logitech, for example. And in every post we would put at the end, like, do you agree? Like, because the rule was ask a question. Right?

Nicole CloutierLike that was the rule.

Amelia HrubyWhat do you think?

Nicole CloutierYeah. What do you think? But if it feels like you're asking your audience to write you an essay, they're not going to do it. Right. So my most successful questions are honestly, usually multiple choice.

Nicole CloutierIt's like, hey. Which one of these do you identify with? And then sometimes people respond with just a letter and I will say, hey. Can you tell me more about that? Like, I'm like, just get super curious.

Nicole CloutierYeah. I think that

Amelia Hrubythere's, like, so much gold in what you just said though, because I hear from people all the time, like, no one replies to my emails. I am sending my emails and no one is replying. And if you get stuck there, then the advice that we're giving around, like, do the prelaunch have the conversations, get the information, or during the pre prelaunch, be doing that even. Like, it's kind of a dead end if you can't get anyone to reply to you. So I'm curious, Nicole.

Amelia HrubyLike, you just gave us some great ideas, which are ask more specific questions, use multiple choice. But when you're working with a client and you're seeing this, like, low engagement, lack of replies, I guess my first question is, like, how many replies might we expect or want? Because sometimes I think people are like, oh, only two people replied to my email. And I'm like, two out of a 100? That's beautiful.

Amelia HrubyAmazing. Could you do a little bit of maybe, like, expectation setting for us? And then also, like, if we want more, what's your advice for getting more replies or engagement on our emails?

Nicole CloutierWell, I think replies are probably the most important metric in your email marketing. If I'm being honest, like we focus a lot on open rate and click through rate and that's because that's what our ESPs give us, but replies are more important in how successful an email is and how well it's landing. But to set expectations, let's see. I have a client who has a pretty small list. It's like three twenty people.

Nicole CloutierAnd if we get like, two replies from an email, that's great. Right? That's good. We're happy. But if we get which we do sometimes, if we get, like, 10 or more, it's like, oh, this one landed.

Nicole CloutierThis one's really good. So I'm not a math person. I don't know what percentage that that is off the top of my head, but that feels good to me. Like 10 out of 320 feels nice.

Amelia HrubyIt also really depends on the quality of your list and how you built your list. So if you have built your list by getting to know people and joining communities and, like, when somebody joins their list, they already know who you are. You're a known entity. They want to be there. Then probably your engagement, your responses will be higher.

Amelia HrubyThere will be more of them because those people know you. They're invested in you. As opposed to, if you've done what I've done, which is build my list through a free lead magnet, you know, that invites in, I think,

Speaker 3higher unsubscribe rates. A lot of people come grab my lead

Amelia Hrubymagnet and bounce. Like, they're, come grab my lead magnet and bounce. Like, they're not actually around to be on my list. They just want the free thing. My off the grid emails I send every week when the podcast comes out don't typically get replies.

Amelia HrubyMaybe one or two on a, like, really spicy week, maybe five, you know, something like that. But when I pre launch like this, there's also, like, a time boundness of it, And it's like this little moment we're in together. Just like a launch is a little moment we're in together. And so I find that I don't think people are tuning me out the way that they do if I, like, email every Monday. And I do this to other people.

Amelia HrubyIt's like, if I know it's always coming, I mean, even with your beautiful, wonderful emails, Nicole. Right? Like, I know they're coming weekly, so some weeks I'm just, like, not flagging it because I'm tired or whatever. Right? And then other weeks it breaks through.

Amelia HrubyBut when you were prelaunching, I was locked in with you. I opened every email. I read everything. So, like, something about the time boundness of it, I think, really works. And then knowing how, I guess, just, like, carefully curated the list you're emailing is is a really important part of setting expectations or seeking engagement and replies.

Nicole CloutierYeah. I was nodding so much as you were talking. First of all, I can't believe you don't read every weekly newsletter I send. It's terrible.

Amelia HrubyIt's sad for me as well.

Nicole CloutierBut also as you were talking. Okay. So yes, I agree. I think that there is something about the time boundness. It feels more intimate and also an important distinction between a launch and a pre launch is a general rule in marketing that I always try to follow is in every piece of content you have, you really only wanna ask your audience to do one thing.

Nicole CloutierLike one, there's one thing in a launch that is click this link and buy. In a pre launch it's respond. Like that's what you're asking for. That is the main call to action is your question. So, and, and like when you send your podcast emails, right?

Nicole CloutierLike you're the main thing you want them to do is click and listen to the podcast. So replies really aren't the main metric in those emails. And that is why having a dedicated pre launch phase is so valuable.

Amelia HrubyI just wanna like underline that and, like, say again that during a pre launch, your call to action is respond to this email. You ask a question, reply

Speaker 3and

Amelia Hrubylet me know. That's the CTA. But during the launch, it's always click here to buy, which takes them to the sales page to where they purchase. So I think that that's such a good delineation, and it also helps me start to build out the sort of, like, pre prelaunch as well. Because what I'm starting to see and hopefully listeners are following along with is, like, maybe you have an email list where you do send a weekly newsletter or you write whenever the muse strikes you like I used to.

Amelia HrubyYou can have a variety of CTAs and emails like that. Like, some, you may ask people to reply. Some, you may be sending them to an event you're hosting. Some, you may be doing other things. Like, there's a way that you are, again, just, like, communicating to people what you're about, what you know, what you do.

Amelia HrubyBut when you move into that pre launch mode, you're really trying to understand with such clarity. What is this problem you're focusing on? And also some other things like, how have they already tried to solve it? Have they made a purchase around this before? Is there something that's already on their mind?

Amelia HrubyIs there a big blocker or objection to why they've never tried or wanted to solve this problem in the past? You know? All of these sort of related questions and asking those and getting people to respond so that you can then, as you continue writing, start to answer those questions and resolve those objections.

Nicole CloutierLike it all kind of weaves back in. There's something that I wanna say that I want listeners to understand too is you can send regular weekly emails. Right? Like you can be generous. You can send free things.

Nicole CloutierYou can ask questions. The prelaunch is that pivot from know, like, and trust to ready to buy from you. Right? Because people can know, like, and trust you and read your emails and think your emails are wonderful. But if you only just send one off weekly emails that aren't, like, connected and aimed at your future launch goal, then people aren't going to be actually ready to buy the thing that you're selling when you launch.

Nicole CloutierSo I really do think you need that on ramp these

Amelia Hrubydays. That's so helpful as well because I see so many creators just provide value into oblivion. Right? It's just like we're just offering and offering and giving and giving and giving. And I've started saying, like, giving people one more free thing is not what's gonna get them to buy from you.

Amelia HrubyI have seen no evidence that the one more free thing model of sales actually gets someone to make a purchase. It is this sort of different skill set, which again is what I've always loved about your work, of taking people on the emotional journey where they understand what their problem is, how you see it, how you see them, how you can help them resolve it and move toward a purchase for that. So before we talk about your sort of framework that you teach in your amazing course, OpenLoop, I just wanna lay out, like, one more problem that prelaunching solves or, like, I think that we've talked about prelaunching solves the problem of trust. Prelaunching solves the problem of not knowing what people's problems are because you ask them and they tell you. And it also, to some degree, solves the problem of people on your list not knowing what you're doing and selling because you're orienting them toward that.

Amelia HrubySo I think those are three problems it solves. I also think prelaunching solves this problem, which is this experience many people have had or fear that when they launch something, there's just gonna be, like, crickets, like, nothing. It's like I send the email launching my new beautiful thing, and nobody replies and nobody buys. And I wanna say that I've had that experience. If you are in business long enough, you will put something on sale that no one buys.

Amelia HrubyIt will happen to you. It is okay. We can hold each other through it. You can come hang out in the interweb Slack and tell us about it, and we will cheer you on anyway. And I think that pre launching solves this problem because if you are pre launching and getting crickets, something is wrong and you maybe should not launch.

Amelia HrubyLike, I I think pre launching is the period where you open those feedback loops. It's why you're part of the reason your course is called open loop because you're asking questions. You're inviting in that engagement. And I'm not saying that doing the prelaunch will guarantee that your launch works or sells or doesn't get crickets, but I have yet to see a prelaunch go well and then sell nothing. May not sell as much as you want, may not hit your wildest dreams in sales goals, but I haven't seen it happen where your prelaunch is, like, everybody's replying and excited and it's working and they're onboard, and then it goes on sale and you sell nothing.

Amelia HrubyHow's that landing with you, Nicole? Like, do you think that's a problem that prelaunching can help solve? Yes. A 100%. I also just wanna say for listeners that I have launched things and sold nothing.

Amelia HrubySo 100%, it's a

Nicole Cloutierpart of business. Like, it's gonna it's gonna happen. But I've never prelaunched and then had that experience. Like, once I made prelaunching actually a part of my launching practice. So yes.

Nicole CloutierAnd we can talk about OpenLoop and how I prelaunched that because I think it's a good example. I didn't fully have the course itself finished during my pre launch. So I knew the problem I was solving, right, was that launching isn't doing as well as it did a few years ago. Right? People are having problems with it.

Nicole CloutierI believed I had the solution, which was having a pre launch as part of your launch, which I knew a lot of people were not doing. And I knew that my audience is solopreneurs. Right. Like people running businesses almost entirely on their own. So I knew those three things.

Nicole CloutierAnd then I had, like, a really I like, I had my frameworks. Like, I when I say I didn't have anything built, like, I knew what I was building, but I hadn't, like, recorded all the videos and made all of the materials. Right? Like, I hadn't put all that work in yet. And then in the prelaunch, the answers that people gave me to some of those emails informed my scripts for the videos I ended up recording.

Nicole CloutierLike, it made sure that what I provided was actually what people needed. So I think that kinda answers what you're saying, right, in that, like, I was able to create a product based on what I was actually hearing from people. And if no one responded to those prelaunch emails, I don't know if I would've actually gone through and, like, built the thing and launched the thing. Like I knew what I was building because of the responses I was getting. And when someone responded and said, oh my goodness, that is exactly my experience, that pain you just described.

Nicole CloutierI was like, oh, yes. Okay. I'm onto something here.

Amelia HrubyThis is where we get back to that point where it's like, as you build your skills with email marketing and launching, you really learn, like, how to ask questions that inform the product you're creating while simultaneously informing the launch emails you're gonna send to actually sell that. Like, you really learn to sort of loop and reloop and circle back again this, like, open loop theme, but you start to build it all in. And I also just wanna, like, throw back to my folks who are like, that's way too much for me. Where do I begin, Nicole and Emilia? And I wanna share an example from my own business because after I took OpenLoop, I implemented a one email prelaunch to my next interweb wait list sale.

Amelia HrubyI have this sort of method for opening the doors to the interweb where, like, every six ish weeks, I would send a couple emails to folks on the wait list and say, like, you can come in this week. Here's something we're doing next week. Here's what's coming up for the fall. Here's some feelings about why you should come in before doors close today. Like, that was sort of a sequence I had been doing and working relatively well for me.

Amelia HrubyBut I noticed in the spring, it was, like, working less and less well. It's like in January, I sent two emails and got, like, 12 new people in. And then I sent three emails and I got eight. And then I sent four emails and I got six. And I was like, wait, I'm sending more emails and getting fewer people.

Amelia HrubyWhy? Like, it was attention stuff and other stuff going on. But when I did it this summer, the Friday before I opened the cart, I sent a prelaunch email because OpenLoop told me to. And I said something like, thanks for being on the wait list. On Monday morning, I'm gonna send you an email that invites you in and gives you a discount code that's only good on Monday.

Amelia HrubyIf you don't wanna get it, leave the wait list here. And if you do wanna join, keep an eye on your inbox. And I increased my first day sales. I did, like, 300% more people who joined on day one. And I think that was a difference between, like, nine and three for for more specific numbers.

Amelia HrubyBut like the increase was amazing for one email, a single pre launch email. I didn't ask a single question. I didn't follow any of the instructions, but I sent one email to a wait list that has just been, like, kind of building and growing whenever I talk about it on the podcast. So I share that to say there is an art of pre launching. And for our more, like, advanced marketers, we're here to, like, really try to solve a bunch of your launch problems by inviting you to start pre launching.

Amelia HrubyBut if you're just getting started, if you're like, that's too much, and you're like, I send my weekly newsletter, but I can't do anymore, Maybe just add in one email that's like, this thing's gonna go on sale next week. And I just found it worked such wonders for me.

Nicole CloutierI'm so glad you shared that. That's amazing. And yes, it's in open loop. There are 12 emails as part of the system. Right.

Nicole CloutierBut that email, that last email is the one that I say, this is the only one you can't skip. You can skip all of the others, like in your first pre launch, especially the one you sent is the one that's like, you must send this, you must let people know what's happening tomorrow so that they can be prepared for it. It's similar to people opting into the wait list, which is great. Right? And I love that you gave them an out.

Nicole CloutierRight? That you said like, Hey, if you don't want it, click this button. You gave them a moment of decision. And once people say like, yes, you know, then when it comes, they're like, oh, yeah. Yes.

Nicole CloutierMy feeling towards this is yes. And it'll it'll make your launch way more successful. But, yeah, a prelaunch can be done with one email. It can be done with three emails. I always talk about this 12 email, like three week long, or you could do it three month long, but you can do a pre launch that's like one email or two emails or three emails, and it will help your launch do better.

Nicole CloutierAbsolutely. Minimum viable whenever we can.

Amelia HrubyYeah. I mean, sometimes all we have in us is one email.

Nicole CloutierYeah. Exactly. Which is totally fine. We don't have to do these things perfectly.

Amelia HrubyI think that that is also something I want to just pause on and emphasize here, which is that I think this moment we're in with online business and creative business and arts businesses, you know, it is asking us to uplevel our skills because inboxes are noisy, podcast feeds are noisy, the world is noisy, there are wars happening, there are genocides happening, our physical realities are hard, our internet realities are hard, and many of us are also trying to sell. It's really hard to capture people's attention. It's really challenging to speak to people's problems when they're already feeling bad about a lot of other things. And I'm personally really feeling that crunch of, like, I have less to give, but the world is requiring more of me, and my sales are requiring more of me. I feel like I have less capacity, but I have to build more trust than ever.

Amelia HrubyI feel like I I don't have the energy to send as many emails, and now I need to build in the prelaunch sequence. Like, it feels really tense and tender. And I think in that moment, we can invite ourselves into expansion, but we cannot expect perfection. It will all crumble under the weight of perfectionism, especially right now. And so what I have found helpful is learning frameworks like the ones you teach, Nicole, where I'm like, okay.

Amelia HrubyNow I get it. Pre prelaunch, prelaunch, launch. Three act email framework, which is what you teach in the course. I can sort of map what I can do onto this, focusing on, like, the minimum viable what's happening. So, you know, if we say three part pre launch, great.

Amelia Hruby12 emails, three emails, the literal one email before cart opens, beautiful. The other thing I've had to remind myself about launching and prelaunching is that more effort does not always equal more results. What I learned with the interweb, more emails did not always equal more sales this year. So much of it is out of my control. Like, what's happening in the world the week that I'm trying to launch is totally out of my control and does impact my launch.

Amelia HrubyAnd that is hard to swallow sometimes when we all, like, wanna be making money in our businesses or need to be making money in our businesses. But it felt important to surface some of that here after I feel like I'm kind of saying, having all these problems, send more emails, but also maybe not.

Nicole CloutierYeah. No. I think it's so good you said that. And a prelaunch, like the bare bones of it, it can replace your weekly emails. Like you can take a break.

Nicole CloutierLike if you send weekly emails, for example, you can take a break from those for three weeks and send an email from each of the acts, which I'm happy to walk through if you want me to, Amelia. Should we give people a quick overview?

Amelia HrubyLet's tell them. I'm just here, like, it's a secret, but we're all about sharing secrets here. So please please just tell us

Nicole Cloutierwhat the acts are, the sort of beat of each. Yeah. No secrets. So act one is emotional alignment, which is really helping the people, like, understand that you understand exactly what they're struggling with. And, you know, we started talking earlier about getting responses from your prelaunch emails.

Nicole CloutierAnd I usually find that this act, this first act is where I get the most responses because I'll say something that someone is like, oh, that is me. Like, that is my experience. Like, you just said it exactly as it's happening inside my head. So you don't even need to like, yes, still ask questions, but what gets responses from those emails is not so much the questions as much as the like resonance of it. So again, so if you're doing a three email prelaunch, send an email that speaks directly to their pain points.

Nicole CloutierMy feedback on these emails for clients is always be more specific, like be as specific as you possibly can about what the struggle is.

Amelia HrubyDon't say something like, remember that morning one time when you dropped your coffee on the way out the door? Instead, be like, remember when you ruined your favorite white sweater because you spilled your matcha down the front of it while you were juggling your keys and your phone on your way to trying to lock the door and get into your car before you had to be at work. Yeah.

Nicole CloutierExample. I'm applauding. And then act two is where you start to reframe the beliefs. So sometimes when people don't buy, it's because they actually don't think that they're capable of the transformation that you're going to offer them. Right.

Nicole CloutierSo they don't believe that there's something in them that they don't believe is like able to put in the work, able to like do the thing that you're going to be offering. So if you know what your transformation is going to be for them, you wanna start to make them feel like it's possible that they are capable of the change before they can commit to it, investing in it.

Amelia HrubyI feel like I've started seeing a lot of course creators do this during their prelaunch or launch period because of this common objection of, like, I buy courses and I never finish them. And so I like when people really speak to that or, like, address it head on instead of pretending it's not happening. So I love in a launch sequence, like, here's a list of, like, 10 things that I've done to make sure you can finish this no matter how busy you are. Like, I think that's becoming more and more common with this sort of, like, help the person receiving your email see how they can really do this. And so, like, time and energy is a big thing there, and I now that I've said this, folks can start to watch out for this and the emails they receive for launches too.

Amelia HrubyI swear I really think you'll see it pretty quick. Well, also, we we

Nicole Cloutiercan get pretty mean to ourselves about not finishing things. Right? Like, we can be, like, not the kind of person that finishes things I start. I'm not the kind of person that finishes courses. And so, like, getting down to that identity of, like, yeah, you are.

Nicole CloutierLike, you totally can be. You're capable of this,

Amelia HrubyI think is important too. And, like, an identity level. Also, if somebody holds that shame, you can help speak to and alleviate that feeling and make them feel seen in that because it's real.

Nicole CloutierAnd that's another email. If you start paying attention to other people's launches that you'll see a lot of is, hey, if you only do 10% of this course, here's what you'll achieve. That is an email you will see a lot of now that you're looking for

Speaker 3it. Mhmm.

Amelia HrubyOkay. So what's act three?

Nicole CloutierAct three is desire activation is what I have named it. And so that's really building anticipation. So you've already done a lot of work, but now this is where that email is that you send, like, the day before a launch. That's just like, here's what's coming, setting expectations, and letting them know, like, exactly what to do on the day of launch so that they can be prepared. I think a lot of times people wanna skip this email because it seems silly.

Nicole CloutierIt's like, well, they'll get the email tomorrow and they'll know what to do. But like letting people feel that anticipation is really important.

Amelia HrubyI 100% agree that especially with how busy our inboxes and our lives are, like, just making it super clear how something is going to work before you, like, open it up for people is becoming more and more important. It's a way of being generous and expressing care, telling people what's coming. It's also, as I learned many seasons ago from Jess Jackson, it's trauma informed to tell people what is coming so that they can feel regulated and prepared around it. No jump scares needed. Oh my gosh.

Amelia HrubyThat is the perfect way to describe when somebody launches after not having emailed you for six months. And you're like, I'm afraid.