How to Use a Waitlist Strategy to Sell Before Your Launch Even Opens
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If I had a nickel for every time someone posted, "waitlists are dead"... I’d have at least 50 cents. But if I had one for every time someone decided something in marketing is dead, I’d be rich, I swear.
Sales psychology hasn't changed just because trends have. And no, waitlists aren’t dead.
If you're launching anything this year and you don't have a waitlist strategy in place, you're leaving money on the table.
The data says that a warm waitlist converts at about 5 to 15%. A cold list, or the regular schmegular list you plan to send launch emails to, converts at 0.5 to 2%.
The math on this means that if you send an email to 100 people who are on your cold list, 2 will buy. Yet if you send launch emails to 100 people who joined your waitlist because they raised their hand and said "yes, tell me when this opens," and you could sell to 15.
And that number is why you should be considering a waitlist for your launch.
What is a Waitlist
A waitlist is a list of people who've self-identified as interested in the transformation you offer.
It's a soft commitment to buy, not a hard yes yet. Typically this shows up as an opt-in page, though your sales page can pull double duty as a waitlist between launches too.
If you want to see an example of the sales page as a waitlist page, you can look at the Copy On Demand waitlist page. I only open it once a year. The rest of the time, my sales page collects waitlist signups from people who hear me talk about it and think "yep, that's for me."
The 4 Types of Waitlists You Can Run
Not every waitlist needs to look the same. Here are the four main types:
Validation waitlist
You're testing demand before you build. "Sign up here if you'd want this" tells you whether it's worth creating in the first place.
Capacity waitlist
You have a limited number of spots and a full roster. Accountants do this well, often reaching out early in the year to confirm current clients are staying so they can offer open spots to the waitlist.
Cohort or rolling waitlist
Your sales page stays live, but purchasing is only open during specific windows. This is what I run with Copy On Demand.
Early access or VIP waitlist
People on this list get first dibs, a bonus, or early bird pricing before the general public sees the offer.
You can combine waitlist types, too. A rolling waitlist with an early access bonus layered on top is a strong combination if you're building anticipation for a recurring launch.
What This Looked Like in a Recent Launch
A recent client of mine, a PR coach who helps authors publicize their own books on LinkedIn, came to me with a list of several thousand people and 175 waitlist signups collected over just three weeks. She'd already done two things right before we even started working together: she talked about her offer before it was available, and she nurtured her waitlist with a welcome email and one heads-up email ahead of cart open.
Here's where I came in. She thought she wanted to make a big push to her full list (and she did!). But I wanted her to focus more on those 175 waitlisters.
Her coaching program had a one-on-one VIP upgrade, but she only had capacity for 20 people at that level – this was her early-action bonus. So we built the waitlist messaging around that scarcity: "This is worth thousands of dollars, and only the first 20 people to sign up get the one-on-one spots. Waitlist members get access first."
We sent three emails to her waitlist before the cart opened to the public. Result: 24 spots sold before the public even saw the offer, plus another 10 within the first three hours of open cart. That's 34 spots sold against a capacity of 75, and all 20 VIP spots gone before she opened her cart to the public. This was a first for her, and it happened because she leveraged the heck out of her waitlist.
How to Build Your Own Waitlist Strategy
If you're heading into a launch, here's the approach I'd take:
Start publicizing your waitlist 2 to 3 weeks out. The problems your audience has three weeks before cart open aren't much different from the problems they have on launch day. That window gives them time to warm up to the investment.
Nurture the entire time they're on the list. Ask for feedback. Give sneak peeks. Let them help shape the bonus they'll get for being early.
Give the waitlist something the public doesn't get. Early access, a bonus, early bird pricing, or a short flash sale window just for them.
NOTE: if you're not sure what bonus makes sense for your offer, that's exactly the kind of strategy question I help clients work through inside Copy On Demand, alongside the actual email copy.Tell them when cart opens and what to expect. No surprises. Waitlist members should feel like insiders.
Keep the room warm between launches. A waitlist you build once and ignore for 10 months isn't a waitlist. It's a dead list wearing a waitlist costume. I've made that mistake in my own business, and it never performs the way an actively nurtured list does.
Key Takeaways
A waitlist strategy isn't about collecting emails and hoping for the best. It's about building a warm room of people who've already said yes to being interested, then treating that room like they’re going to buy from you. Do that well, and your launch starts one step ahead!
If you want to see this exact strategy applied to a launch, get on the waitlist for Copy On Demand. It opens once a year in December.
Listen to the full episode of Copy And wherever you get your podcasts, and drop a comment letting me know which type of waitlist you're running (or which one you're about to start).
Helpful Resources:
Forgotten Launch Emails checklist (use code PODCAST to get it for $1!)
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