By “waitlist”, we mean a list of people who are interested in what you’re planning on launching, whether that’s a product, service, event, SaaS, or something else entirely.
When you build a waitlist strategically and nurture those subscribers, it allows you to position yourself as a premium option, gauge demand, and sell more easily (and even at higher prices). But how much does it cost to create a waitlist that does all that for you?
It actually depends on lots of factors.
Let’s look at them one by one so that you can make the right decisions for your budget and goals!
What’s involved in building a waitlist?
First things first: be realistic, and have the right expectations.
You can’t just share a generic landing page (along the lines of “Coming soon” or “Sign up to be the first to know”), drop your offer out of the blue, and expect to sell out.
If you want people lining up to buy from you, you need a full waitlist funnel.
These are its core phases.
1. Research and planning
To prepare a successful waitlist strategy, you must:
- Get clear on your goal – What exactly are you hoping to achieve with this waitlist? For example, this could be promoting an event, filling your pipeline with pre-qualified prospects waiting to work with you, or validating a new offer idea before launching it
- Know what information you need – Based on that goal, what do you have to find out from your audience? (For example, if you want to validate a new offer idea, you’ll need honest feedback on what they like and dislike about it) With ScoreApp, that’s a breeze! Once someone signs up for your waitlist through its landing page, you can show them some quick but strategic questions (more on that soon!)
- Know your timeline – When are you launching this new product or service?
- Plan your promotion – Now that you know your launch date, give yourself enough time to build momentum, and decide how you’re going to promote your waitlist. For the best results, consider relying on a mixture of marketing tactics, like creating social media content around your waitlist, emailing it to your current list, running paid ads, and so on
2. Writing your copy
Your copy will sell your waitlist and help you get the insights you’re after.
- Landing page copy –You’ll need a compelling headline and sub-head, as well as body copy that expands on them. Their focus? How your new offer will benefit your audience and what makes it exclusive (your customers should get on your waitlist out of both excitement and FOMO!)
- Writing your questions – Once you identify what insights you need from your audience, work your way backwards to craft clear questions (for example, “What’s your biggest struggle when it comes to [what you help with]?”). You can also use them to segment your subscribers based on their answers, personalising your waitlist emails to make them even more effective
2. Building your waitlist
Your main waitlist funnel pieces will be:
- Landing page – As well as your written copy, don’t forget to add high-quality visuals (like photos and videos) and elements that increase FOMO (like a countdown timer or reviews from past clients)
- Quiz or survey – To gather those valuable insights, you’ll need a way of asking questions to your subscribers. For the best results, we recommend doing this with ScoreApp after they share their details. That way, even if some of them don’t make it to the end, you’ll still get to contact them. Smart, right?
- Email marketing platform – That’s what you’ll use to manage your waitlist and nurture your subscribers until it’s time for your launch
Depending on your needs and preferences, you could include additional tools (like a CRM). But everything we shared is more than enough to build a successful waitlist funnel without breaking the bank.
3. Nurturing your waitlist
Don’t make the common mistake of skipping a waitlist email sequence! This important bridge between your landing page and your announcement will build and maintain momentum.
- Writing your nurturing sequence – For example, you could welcome your subscribers and make them feel like VIPs, talk about their problem, educate them on your solution, connect with them through relevant stories, build trust with case studies and reviews, and create FOMO by highlighting the scarcity of your upcoming offer
- Personalising it – Set up different sequences, or tailor certain elements in each email to make them super relevant to each subscriber. That’s another benefit of attaching a quick ScoreApp quiz to your landing page: it’ll segment your subscribers automatically!
- Planning your announcement – Once it’s time to launch and your subscribers have been nurtured, send multiple emails to compel them to take action, creating excitement and FOMO
4. Launching and managing your waitlist
Once you’ve set all this up, it’ll keep working in the background for you (hurray!) but don’t forget to:
- Test everything – Do this before launching your waitlist to ensure your entire funnel runs smoothly, including on mobile phones and different browsers
- Monitor your results and analytics – For example, do a lot of people unsubscribe after a specific email? If you ran some A/B testing, which version performed better? Then, optimise your waitlist funnel accordingly to get the MOST out of it!
So, how much does a waitlist cost?
Building a waitlist can cost you anything between £0 and a few thousand pounds (eek!).
Why such a big range? Because it depends on what tools you use and whether you DIY it or hire an expert.
So, let’s look into it for each part of your funnel!
1. Waitlist software
For the best results, your essential tools should include:
- Landing page builder – These can range from free plans to around +£150 per month
- Quiz or survey builder – You could ask your questions on the landing page itself, but to avoid overwhelming your audience, it’d make more sense to do it after they’ve shared their contact details. The best quiz and survey tools are around £15-£75 per month, but you can also find free and more expensive options (+£100)
- Analytics tools – If you choose a good landing page and quiz builders, they’ll come with built-in analytics. If you need external ones, they are both free options (like Google Analytics) and more specialised software ranging between £15 and +£1000 per month
Using ScoreApp as an all-in-one waitlist builder
With ScoreApp, you get those three funnel parts (and more) for the price of one… or even for free!
- Use our intuitive drag-and-drop builder to create your landing page from scratch, or start with a customisable template
- Attach a short quiz that pops up once someone has shared their contact details
- Review your analytics without needing separate tools
You can create your ScoreApp waitlist for FREE and only upgrade to a paid plan (starting from as little as £24 per month) when and if you need more features.
2. Advertising and promotion
Your waitlist costs will also depend on how you’re planning on marketing it:
- Organic marketing – From social media to sharing your waitlist with your existing subscribers and adding it to your website, this is unlikely to incur additional costs
- Paid advertising – The cost of ads on search engines and social media can change quite drastically but you get to set your own budget, whether that’s billed as CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per thousand of impressions)
3. Email automation
If you already have an email marketing platform, your waitlist is unlikely to cost you much more, unless you’re planning on growing a HUGE one (most email tools charge you more depending on your number of subscribers).
To give you an idea, Mailchimp and ConvertKit plans are around +£100 per month for +10,000 contacts.
ScoreApp connects with the most popular email platforms. So, your waitlist landing page and quiz will always work smoothly as part of a bigger funnel.
4. DIY vs hiring a professional waitlist funnel builder
Tools aside, THIS is what will impact the cost of your waitlist funnel the most, both when it comes to writing your content and putting all those pieces together.
- DIYing your entire funnel – Your only “cost” is your time!
- Hiring experts for some parts of your waitlist funnel – For example, you could choose to hire a copywriter to write your landing page copy and emails, to work with an agency that’ll also plan the marketing and promotion around your waitlist, and so on. So, the overall cost will depend on the size of the project and who you hire. To give you a rough idea, freelancers charge £379 per day on average whereas agencies have much higher fees (between £700 and +£15000 per month)
- Outsourcing your entire waitlist – In this case, we’re talking about a full sales funnel, which will cost you between £1000 and +£50,000
Build an affordable waitlist funnel with ScoreApp
As you can see, several factors affect the overall cost of your waitlist. The good news?
With ScoreApp, you can create your entire waitlist funnel for FREE or a very low monthly cost:
- Use ScoreApp as an all-in-one waitlist tool to create your landing page, attach a quiz to it, and monitor your analytics
- Connect it with your existing email marketing platform
- DIY it confidently (even if you’ve never built a wailtist funnel before) thanks to our intuitive builder, our library of templates, and our AI feature to write your copy
Sure, building a waitlist can cost you hundreds or thousands of pounds, but you can also create it for FREE with ScoreApp and only upgrade to a budget-friendly plan when you need more features.
