What an exciting time—after all the anticipation, collaboration, and investment you’ve put into this thing, you are finally ready to hit that publish button to open your virtual front door.
Throwing a virtual launch party can be a little intimidating—it’s not like you can send out RSVPs. BUT… Don’t let that scare you. There are some simple things you can do to hype up your launch that will lead to plenty of foot traffic (aka: click traffic).
Let us serve as your virtual “party planners.” Find all the best practices in this website launch guide.
Your website is only valuable to you when there are plenty of visitors coming through it. To start out with a bang and the basics, you can simply share a launch announcement with all your contacts to let them know that your new website is now available and they are invited to come take a look. Encouraging them to share your link with their contacts doesn’t hurt either. ?
NEW WEBSITE LAUNCH GUIDE: Best Practices
Whether you do all the best practices on this guide or just one, the most important thing is to make it high-quality. If you can’t get to everything on this list before your launch date, don’t try to stuff it in.
1. Announce to your contacts
As we said above, the most obvious thing you should do when your site goes live is to share it with all your contacts. When we say everyone, we mean everyone—even your grandma. Why? Because high traffic volume will alert Google that your site matters and it will naturally work your brand-new URL in the searches.
2. Announce your site on social media channels
Social media is a great way to leverage your contacts, but also bring in new faces! We suggest creating a series of social media posts based around your new website to further hype it up and get people curious about the final product. Depending on your timeline, you can start teasing your launch an entire month out or a couple of weeks out.
Regardless of how much time you have—you need to share something prior to going live. (You wouldn’t throw a party then invite people, would you? Your website launch should be no different!)
PRO TIP: Make sure you are posting fun, attractive graphics. With mirco-videos (TikTok and IG Reels), 24-hour stories, and go-live features on basically all the major platforms, you can create a variety of promotions without sounding redundant!
Oh… and there may or may not be three social media caption samples at the bottom of this guide… (wink, wink—there is).
3. Send an email to current and past customers, prospects, and staff
Whoever told you email marketing is dead is dead wrong. When a customer or prospect grants you the permission to send a message into their direct inbox, you should do nothing less than take them up on that offer.
We’ve had so many success stories through email campaigns that we couldn’t let you get away with any excuses for not doing one…
Download our FREE Website Launch Email Campaign Template for guidance and inspiration on what to share with your audience! (See Below)
4. Ask all your staff/key volunteers to change their email signature
If you don’t have branded email signatures for your company, you need to hop on that ASAP. Here are the steps to customizing an email signature for Gmail and Outlook users. If your company uses another email provider, a simple Google search can teach you how.
To promote your launch, add an additional bolded message to your sign off that says “NEW WEBSITE COMING SOON!” or “CHECK OUT OUR NEW WEBSITE!” Simply hyperlink the text and you’re discreetly promoting your launch. If you have a staff or key volunteers, you can provide a sample text for them to use and send them the how-to link for editing.
5. Publish a blog post
If you haven’t gotten the hint, anywhere and everywhere you can share the exciting news, do it. If your website doesn’t have a blog portal, consider posting an article through Linkedin’s publishing platform or another one of your social media platforms that offers a feature for expressive content. The blog post can contain a video going over new features, screenshots of special pages, the rationale behind your redesign or launch, and testimonials from excited customers or members that have already benefited from the new site or your services.
You Now Know All the Best Practices for Marketing Your Website Launch
Now, it’s time to get organized! Try to plan out your posts in advance by utilizing social media publishing tools and always keep your ideal clients in mind when crafting your content.
We hope this free template helps you get a kickstart on marketing for your launch!
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