Best Way To Sell Digital Downloads

What is the best way to sell digital downloads? How you sell products online will be a big determining factor in your level of success. To sell in big numbers, you need to reach big numbers. There’s many ways to sell online, but they can be divided into a  couple of categories:

• Using paid marketing
• Using organic search marketing

Both paid and organic marketing can be very effective, and your decision which to use will depend on your marketing budget and available time. Paid marketing is fast, and you can sell products quite quickly using paid marketing. Organic marketing is much slower, and you’ll need to build a lot of content in order to see the volumes of customers you can see quickly with a large marketing budget using paid ads.

Paid ads shouldn’t be used to send people directly to affiliate products though. Doing so might be a waste of money. No, you should instead send paid marketing to a landing page, where you collect email addresses of your subscribers. Whether you use paid marketing or organic, using an email list is definitely the best way to sell digital downloads. Here’s why:

Best Way To Sell Digital Downloads

Physical products are very different to digital downloads. With a physical product, you know what you’re buying. With digital downloadable products, you don’t necessarily know what you’re getting. So customers will be more likely to need some re-assurances with a digital product. Most customers don’t buy on their first visit to a website.

Studies have shown that a customer will need several touch points before they make an online purchase of some kind. This means that you shouldn’t be paying advertising to send someone directly to a sale page. Most will leave, never to return. Instead, send paid traffic to a landing page and collect their email details. Follow up with email messages which help your subscribers in some way and inform them about your product.

An email list is the best thing you can invest in as an affiliate marketer/product referrer. It lets you collect email addresses and interact with your subscribers over a longer period of time. On a website, most visitors are gone within a few minutes. But once you capture their email address, you can follow up with them over weeks, months and even years and decades!

Using Email Marketing

But your subscribers aren’t guaranteed to open your email messages of course. In fact many of them won’t! Only 40% of emails will even get opened by your subscribers. If you bombard your subscribers with too many sales pitches, they will soon lose interest. However, if you deliver messages which help them, inform them and entertain them, they are much more likely to look to your messages as a means of information. When they are ready to buy, you’ll be first in their mind if you’ve already provided a useful service through your emails.

If you want to get good at email marketing read Robert Caldini’s book on Influence. In it he mentions a number of principles and strategies for influencing behaviour. One of them is called the law of reciprocity. The tactic is used in shops and the sales person will go out of their way helping the customer try on clothes and answer their questions etc.

Once they have helped the customer above the necessary polite measures expected, the law of reciprocity will kick in with many customers who will feel duty bound to make a purchase! The same principle can be used in email marketing, and not necessarily in an underhand way. Help people with your emails and they will get to know, like and trust you. When this happens they are more likely to act on your recommendations and purchase your product.

Email marketing also gives the customer a number of touch points. If you’re able to reply to questions and help them come to a decision which is right for them, they’re more likely to buy.

Best Way To Sell Digital Downloads: Which Marketing “Engine”

To get people to a landing page in the first place takes a marketing “engine”. Your marketing engine in the first place could be either paid marketing, organic marketing, or a combination of the two. Here’s a few popular marketing strategies used by those who sell digital downloads online:

• Blogging – a slow strategy but it can give you free traffic and passive sales
• Google Adwords – search, display, re-targeting adverts which can be targeted towards your target market.
• YouTube – particularly useful with digital products because you can convey more information in a short time, to explain the usefulness/value of your product.
• Social media marketing – both free and paid options
• SEO – search engine optimisation – used for organic marketing via blogging, website building or video blogging
• Bing – Similar to Google Adwords

While there’s many choices for your marketing “engine”, your decision which one to choose from will come down to your own personal choice and personality. If you don’t see yourself blogging for several months on end, that’s perhaps not the best strategy for you. If you’re on a very tight budget, paid marketing might not be suitable. However, I would suggest that paid marketing is far superior for making online sales than organic marketing is. This is for a couple of main reasons. In a popular niche, organic marketing can be very competitive. This can mean you’ll need to create a huge amount of content even for very little traffic. Plus with all your work, your traffic isn’t scalable, and it might fail!

With paid marketing you can test an advert out very quickly to see how effective it is. If it doesn’t work, drop it and create another. If it does work, and make sales, you can easily scale your business by spending more on advertising. The ability to scale up a campaign makes paid marketing the best method for selling digital downloads. Plus you can get traction very quickly, which isn’t as feasible with organic marketing methods such as blogging.

Best Way To Sell Digital Downloads: Video-Landing Page-Email Marketing

So, if you want a definitive “best” way to sell digital downloads, although this is a subjective issue, I would definitely say to use email marketing and paid advertising. Send paid traffic directly to a landing page and collect email subscribers. Follow up with useful and value driven emails which build trust and deliver value to your email list.

There’s many ways to use paid advertising online, but with digital products video is one of the most most useful. In a text advert, you only have a few lines of text to express the value of your product. It’s much more difficult to convey an idea via text and build trust, which is more necessary for selling digital products online. This can more easily be done though a video advert.

Once you have created a video advert, target your audience through YouTube’s ad creation platform (Google Adwords). The targeting is a pretty vital part of selling digital products too. With the wrong people on your email list, you can still fail to sell. See why target market is important and checkout the customer avatar worksheet pdf for more on this topic.

Send your YouTube traffic directly to a landing page (not a product/website). A landing page is a specific page designed to get your visitors to subscribe. It’s very different to a normal website. With a website, you can browse around and check out what’s there. On a landing page there’s only two options; sign up or leave.

Landing Page Software

A good landing page and video advert can make all the difference. You should spend some time testing different adverts and landing pages to optimise them for the best performance and the lowest cost. One of the best ways to do this is through using a landing page software such as Convertri.com.

This software offers the best and most user friendly software I’ve personally found for building and testing landing pages. It also allows you to easily cross test different landing pages against each other to optimise for performance.

Guarantees

If you’re selling digital products online, it can be more difficult to get customers to trust you. After all, a digital products is far less tangible than a physical product. How will your customers know they are buying something useful that will actually help them with their particular problem?

As mentioned already, increasing the touch points you have with your potential customers (with email marketing) and using value driven content in your email messages is one way to get around this problem.

But another simple way to encourage trust is to offer a money back guarantee with any product you sell. If you’re an affiliate marketer this means choosing products which offer this. Most legitimate digital products will offer this. Make sure your customers know about the guarantee too, which you can do through your marketing messages.

Time Sensitive Offers/Discounts

Time sensitive offers are a useful way to sell anything online too. With a time sensitive offer, you force your customer’s hand a little by offering them a discounted rate which runs out at a certain time. Or use a landing page with a timer on it, which expires if they don’t take action.

You can do this through your marketing messaging via email, or on a website sales page with a counter. The main aim is to get your customer to take some positive action. With a time sensitive discount, they know the discount will expire and it pushes them to make a decision, especially if they were previously on the fence.

Summary

So what’s the best way to sell digital downloads? As you can see there’s a lot involved if you want to master the art of selling digital products online! But ultimately digital products should sell themselves if they are good products and offer huge value. See also most profitable digital products. Choosing the right products to sell is a huge part of successful online selling. Here’s a quick breakdown of the best ways to sell digital downloads:

• Choose your marketing method: Paid marketing is faster and more scalable
• Use email marketing – which allows you to build trust and increase your touch points with the customer over a longer time period. Send useful value driven emails in your campaigns.
• Know who you are targeting with your marketing, buy understanding your customer avatar
• Use YouTube – which helps you build trust (and better explain the value of your product), which is harder to do on a text only advert
• Get a landing page software and split test your landing pages to find the best performing one/s
• Use products which offer guarantees and make sure your customer know you offer them!
• Use discounts and time sensitive offers

Did I miss anything? If you can think of anything else please leave a comment below. If you have enjoyed this article or found it useful please share it! Thanks!