Evergreen and launches need about the same number of leads a year. The difference is when they arrive. At a 6% lead-to-call rate, 65% show rate and 25% close rate, four sales a month needs roughly 410 new leads every month, continuously. Below that floor, launches outperform evergreen.
- The question underneath the question: not “which model converts better”, but “which model can my lead flow actually feed”.
- The evergreen floor: monthly sales needed ÷ (lead-to-call rate × show rate × close rate). Worked below.
- Same annual leads, different variance: evergreen needs them every week; a launch tolerates lumpy, borrowed and one-off flow.
- Most sustainable programs run a hybrid: an always-open door plus two real events a year. Launch sales lower the evergreen floor.
- The tooling is not the constraint. Thinkific’s own site says it supports live cohorts, self-paced and blended formats in one product.
What is the difference between an evergreen model and a launch model?
A launch model sells in windows: you open and close cart on published dates, usually two to four times a year, and enrolment outside those dates is either impossible or handled by a waitlist. An evergreen model keeps the door open permanently — someone can find you on a Tuesday in February and buy that afternoon. The boundary is not the funnel, the webinar or the software. It is whether a person who wants to buy today can. A launch model coaching business that quietly takes enrolments between cart closes is already running a hybrid; it just has not priced or staffed it as one.
The two models fail in opposite directions. Launches fail on cash-flow timing: twelve months of costs paid out of two months of revenue. Evergreen fails on starvation: the door is open and nobody walks through it.
How it works
How to size your evergreen floor
Set monthly sales needed
Work out how many enrolments a month cover delivery, team and acquisition. That is the number evergreen has to hit every month, not on average.
Pull your three rates
From the last 90 days: lead-to-call rate, show rate, and close rate on calls actually held. Use measured rates, not the ones from your best quarter.
Divide to get the floor
Monthly sales divided by the three rates multiplied together gives the new leads a month an always-open offer needs to survive.
Compare, then choose
Test the floor against your worst recent month, not your best. Below it, launches out-earn evergreen on the same annual lead volume.
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The three tests to run before you look at revenue
Criteria first, because the comparison is meaningless until you know which constraint binds you.
- The variance test. Take your last twelve months of new qualified leads by month. If your worst month is less than half your best month, your flow is lumpy, and evergreen will produce lumpy revenue with none of a launch’s concentrated attention to compensate.
- The delivery test. Can a person joining in week 9 of a 12-week curriculum get a coherent experience? If the answer needs a workaround — a second timeline, a catch-up call, a “pre-program” holding pattern — your delivery is cohort-shaped and evergreen enrolment will cost you fulfilment hours you have not budgeted.
- The floor test. Is your reliable monthly lead flow above the evergreen floor, calculated below? Not your best month. The floor is a monthly commitment, so you measure it against the month you can count on.
Two failures out of three and the decision is made for you: keep launching until you have fixed the failing test.
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How do I calculate my evergreen floor?
The evergreen floor is the number of new qualified leads per month below which an always-open offer starves. It is one line:
Floor = monthly sales needed ÷ (lead-to-call rate × show rate × close rate)
Worked end to end; replace the rates with your own from the last 90 days. A $9,000 program needs $36,000 a month to cover delivery, team and acquisition — four sales. Lead-to-call 6%, show 65%, close on held calls 25%.
- Sale probability per lead = 0.06 × 0.65 × 0.25 = 0.00975, or 0.975%.
- Floor = 4 ÷ 0.00975 = 410 new qualified leads a month — about 95 a week, every week.
- Sense-check the middle: 410 leads → 24.6 booked calls → 16 held → 4 sales.
Two things fall out of the arithmetic. First, the floor is most sensitive to the lead-to-call rate: if yours is 3% rather than 6%, the floor doubles to 820 and no amount of sales training recovers it. Second, the annual requirement is identical either way — 48 sales a year needs about 4,900 leads whether you sell them continuously or in windows. Evergreen and launches need the same leads; evergreen needs them on a schedule. That is the whole decision, and it is why an audience that arrives in bursts — a podcast appearance, an affiliate’s list, one post that travelled — suits launches even when the annual total looks healthy.
Evergreen vs launch model: what each one needs and what breaks it
All rows use the same worked funnel (0.975% of leads become sales), so the lead columns are comparable.
| Model | New leads required | Cash-flow shape | What breaks it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pure evergreen, 4 sales/month | ~410 a month, every month | Flat: month 2 and month 11 look alike | One month below the floor shows up in the same month’s revenue — there is no window to make it up in |
| Two launches a year, 24 sales each | ~4,900 a year, gathered in two 8–10 week pre-launch windows | Two spikes; 8–9 thin months carrying 12 months of fixed costs | One under-performing launch removes about half the year’s enrolments |
| Four launches a year, 12 sales each | ~4,900 a year across four windows | Four smaller spikes, 4–6 weeks of build before each | Team capacity: four builds is roughly 24–32 weeks of the year spent in launch mode |
| Rolling cohort, monthly intake | ~410 a month, tolerates roughly ±30% month to month | Near-flat with a monthly step | A cohort that fills below its minimum seat count still costs the full delivery hours |
| Hybrid: evergreen base + 2 launches supplying 40% of sales | ~246 a month base, plus two launch windows | Flat base with two spikes | The launches stop working as events if the offer, price and bonuses never differ from the always-open door |
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Who each model is wrong for
Evergreen is wrong for you if: your delivery is genuinely cohort-locked and week-9 entry degrades the room; your offer is sold by a live event rather than by a page, so the persuasion only exists during a challenge or a live workshop; your acquisition depends on one founder’s output rather than a repeatable channel; or your reliable monthly flow sits below the floor. An evergreen funnel below its floor does not fail loudly — it produces one or two sales a month indefinitely, which is slow enough to look like a messaging problem for a year.
Launches are wrong for you if: you carry fixed monthly costs — salaried coaches, a support team, retained ad spend — without a cash buffer covering the thin months; you are a team of one and cannot absorb 6–8 weeks of build without stopping delivery; or your scarcity is not real, which is a compliance problem before it is a marketing one.
We are wrong for you if continuous lead flow is not the thing you are short of. If you run two launches a year off a partner network, your cohort is delivery-locked and your problem is conversion inside the window rather than volume outside it, an appointment-setting engine is solving a problem you do not have — fix the offer and the launch mechanics first.
“Should I go evergreen?” does not mean I stop launching
This is the objection that stalls most decisions, and it rests on a false choice. The sustainable version for most programs is a permanently open door plus two real events a year: a live cohort intake, an annual price change, a genuine bonus that expires. The launches concentrate attention and give your audience a reason to act now; the open door catches the 11 months of people who were never going to be ready on your date.
Every sale a launch supplies lowers your evergreen floor. Take the same 48 sales a year. If two launches supply 40% of them, evergreen only has to carry 29 sales a year — 2.4 a month — and the floor drops from about 410 new leads a month to about 246. That is the number to test your real flow against before you decide you cannot sustain evergreen.
Can I run a cart-close deadline that resets for every visitor?
Technically yes; the timer software exists. Whether the claim around it is lawful is a different question. The ACCC states that a business must be able to prove any claim they advertise, and that “it makes no difference whether a business intends to mislead or not”. A deadline is a claim. If the page says enrolment closes Friday and enrolment does not close Friday, the fact that the funnel is automated does not change what was represented. The workable version is a deadline that is true per person — a bonus, price or intake date that genuinely expires for that buyer. General information only, not legal advice.
What continuous lead flow actually costs to run
If the floor test is the one you fail, the honest options are: lift the lead-to-call rate, lower the sales you need per month by raising price, or add flow. Adding flow is the one people underestimate. Sustaining ~410 new qualified leads a month means an acquisition channel that runs whether or not you are in launch mode: paid traffic watched weekly, an outbound motion against a real list, partner flow, and search and AI-assistant visibility that compounds. Budget the channel, the tooling and 5–10 hours a week of someone competent — an evergreen funnel with nobody watching the numbers is a launch that never opens.
The other half is response speed. Continuous flow means leads arrive at 9pm on a Sunday, and an enquiry that waits until Tuesday is a different enquiry by then. In our own client work we typically see speed-to-lead alone worth roughly a 3x improvement in the rate at which enquiries turn into conversations — that is an operator observation from campaigns we run, not a published study, and it overlaps heavily with contact-rate and set-rate gains rather than multiplying with them. For the underlying numbers: our cost per booked call benchmarks for high-ticket coaches sets out what a qualified call costs by channel, the launch and evergreen funnel campaign types for course and program owners compares campaign shapes side by side, and lead generation for high-ticket service businesses explains why sales capacity, not lead volume, binds above a $5,000 deal. If the floor maths says your price is doing the work, start with how to price a high-ticket coaching offer.
Frequently asked questions
Should I go evergreen or keep launching?
Run the floor test. Divide the sales you need each month by (lead-to-call rate × show rate × close rate). If your reliable monthly lead flow — not your best month — is above that number, evergreen will hold. If it is below, launches will out-earn evergreen on the same annual lead volume, because a launch concentrates lumpy flow into a window where the offer has your full attention.
How big does my email list need to be before evergreen works?
A list is stock, not flow, so it sizes a launch rather than an evergreen funnel. Mailchimp’s published email marketing benchmarks report an average click rate of 3.02% for the Education and Training industry, on data the page says was last updated in December 2023. At that rate a 5,000-name list produces around 150 clicks per campaign — enough to fill a launch, and not repeatable weekly. Evergreen is fed by new leads arriving, not by re-mailing the same names.
Do I need a different platform for evergreen versus launches?
No, and platform choice is rarely the constraint. Thinkific’s own site describes support for live cohorts, self-paced and blended formats with subscription and payment-plan pricing in the same product, and Kajabi’s own site describes building courses, coaching programs and memberships alongside email, landing pages and automated customer journeys. Both models are already supported by the software most program owners are on. The constraint is lead flow and delivery shape.
How long should I give an evergreen funnel before deciding it has failed?
Long enough for three full sales cycles at your actual cycle length, and no less than 90 days of consistent flow above the floor. Below the floor you are not testing the model, you are testing whether 120 leads a month can produce four sales, and the answer at 0.975% per lead is that it cannot. Fix flow first, then judge the funnel.
Can I run evergreen and still open and close cart twice a year?
Yes, and that hybrid is what most sustainable programs settle on. The rule that keeps it honest is that the launch must differ from the open door in something real — a live intake date, a bonus that expires, a price that changes on a published date and stays changed. If the only difference is urgency copy, you have an evergreen funnel with a countdown on it, and both the audience and the regulator treat that as the same thing.
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