If you’ve heard of or considered waitlists before, you might still be wondering: do they actually work? And can they make a difference for my business?
Well, if adding £144,00 worth of revenue sounds like enough of a difference to you, keep reading.
Of course, how you use a waitlist and what you can expect from it will vary depending on your goals and industry.
But here’s a real-life example of how a content marketing agency used it to validate a new offer idea, inform their promotion, and sell out in only two weeks.
The 3 steps this agency took to add £144,000 to their revenue
Jammy Digital is the content marketing agency founded by Lyndsay and Martin, authors of Content Fortress.
They specialise in helping brave founders create EPIC content that drives sales, especially in the form of blog posts and videos.
Until recently, they only offered video as a face-to-face service, travelling with their videographer and director to meet their clients and record all the videos in person.
The Jammy Digital team is based in the UK, though, and one of their clients was in Los Angeles. As fun as it would have been for them to write it off as a business trip, it wouldn’t have worked well logistically.
So, they tested something new. They scripted the videos and directed the client on Zoom while the latter recorded them themselves. Aaaaaaand it was a success!
That’s when Lyndsay and Martin came up with an offer idea: could their video marketing services work well as an online option for other clients, too?
They didn’t know whether or not their market would have been interested in it, though. So, instead of wasting time and money by basing their launch on guesswork, they started with a waitlist.
Let’s go through the three main steps they followed.
Step 1: Understanding the market with a waitlist
Sure, their online video marketing project worked well with that LA-based entrepreneur.
But a single experience wasn’t enough to justify creating a new offer around it, promoting it, and just… HOPING it would sell. What if other clients would have been put off by its “impersonal” online aspect? What if there just wasn’t enough demand for it?
So, Jammy Digital didn’t immediately put together a fancy sales page and launch. They started with a ScoreApp waitlist to validate their new offer idea.
- They created a landing page that outlined their initial concept and invited business owners to sign up for its waitlist
- They attached a quick ScoreApp quiz to find out what their audience thought of it and to get clear on their needs, wants, likes, and dislikes (for example, they asked questions like “What are you struggling with currently with video marketing?” and “Would you pay for this service?”)
This only took them 20 minutes to set up thanks to our intuitive drag-and-drop builder and pre-made templates for landing pages and quizzes!
Then, through their ScoreApp waitlist landing page and quiz, Jammy Digital found out three main things:
- Their target clients were interested in that service (hurray!)
- Their initial concept didn’t fully match the demand, but now they knew exactly what to tweak (if they had skipped this step, they would have risked launching something that sold less or… not at all!)
- What their audience loved the most about this new offer was that it required less time than its in-person alternative
This gave them the data and confidence they needed to put that offer together, knowing the market wanted it.
Step 2: Working out their maximum number of clients
Our founder, Daniel Priestley, always talks about the importance of creating supply-and-demand tension to become oversubscribed.
When something is widely available for everyone, it loses its perceived value. On the contrary, if it’s limited and harder to access, it comes across as a premium and in-demand option.
That actually worked well with Jammy Digital’s situation. Because they have a small team, there were only so many new clients they could take on in one go (without running the risk of overpromising or overbooking themselves).
So, they didn’t need to manufacture scarcity: they could just be open about their availability.
So, after calculating how many new retainer clients they could sell that new offer to (based on their team’s capacity), their magic number turned out to be four.
Step 3: Creating content that builds trust
Jammy Digital didn’t just use their ScoreApp waitlist to validate their new offer idea. They used their audience’s quiz answers to inform their marketing, messaging, and copy!
- They knew exactly what to lead with when writing their sales page
- They created relevant thought-leadership content that educated their audience and fed into their upcoming offer (such as “Everything You Need to Know About Our Online Short-Form Video Service”, “1 Million Views on YouTube for Our Client – This is EXACTLY How We Did It!”, “The Best Examples of B2B Short-Form Video Marketing” and “How Much Does B2B Short-Form Video Content Cost?”)
- They repurposed those blog posts into videos and social media content
- Their sent them to their ScoreApp waitlist subscribers and the rest of their email list, too
- They nurtured their waitlist to build momentum
Their super successful launch
By the time they were ready to launch that new online video marketing offer, Jammy Digital had already:
- Validated their idea
- Advertised how many new clients they could take on
- Nurtured an engaged waitlist full of people who had actively expressed an interest in that service
No wonder their sales calls ended up being a piece of cake, and those four spots sold out within two weeks, adding £144,000 a year to their revenue!
Now that they’re fully booked, guess what?
They’re still using their ScoreApp waitlist. That way, as soon as they have availability to take on more clients, they’ll be able to fill it asap.
How will you apply a waitlist to your service-based business?
That was Jammy Digital’s strategy (and it clearly worked amazingly for them!), but there isn’t just one way of harnessing waitlists for your service-based business.
For example, you could create yours to:
- Really get to know your audience by asking them the right question, and using their insights to shape your new offer or marketing
- Pre-qualify your leads (for example, “What’s your yearly revenue?” or “Have you worked with a business strategist before?”) so that you ONLY set up calls with those who’d be the right fit
- Gauge demand before creating a new service or digital product
- Validate that new idea by getting honest feedback from your audience, improving it accordingly if needed
- Retain more leads when you’re fully booked (just because you haven’t got the capacity to work with more clients right now, it doesn’t mean you should let them leave your website empty-handed!)
- Personalise your marketing by segmenting your list depending on their quiz answers
- Set up a full waitlist funnel that recommends the right service, package, or next step for each lead
- Build and maintain momentum for an upcoming offer
- Position yourself as an exclusive service provider, unlike those competitors who are willing to work with anyone
- Always be in demand
- Raise your prices confidently, knowing your target clients will happily pay them because they’re already lining up to work with you
Launch your ScoreApp waitlist, build hype, and sell more
The best part? ScoreApp makes all this a breeze:
- Build a waitlist landing page to illustrate your initial concept
- Attach a few quick questions to validate it and gather the insights you need
- Connect it with your email marketing platform, and build (and maintain) momentum with a personalised nurturing sequence
Ready to launch your new offer confidently and sell out like Jammy Digital? Create your waitlist with ScoreApp today and for FREE.
