E-Commerce is HUGE!  It’s convenient for consumers to buy online and it’s less overhead for a shop owner.  Win-win, right?  But let’s kick it up a notch...digital products!  This is the ultimate way to generate passive income and requires even less overhead and time spent physically fulfilling orders.  The bulk of time is spent on creating the digital product.  I previously posted about 3 things that you are overlooking when processing orders, but since that was geared more towards people that sell physical products with inventory, I decided to create a part two!  If you sell digital products online, there are four things that you may be overlooking that I will be discussing today.

1 / Sending an automated follow-up email with rating scale or survey

Feedback is an awesome thing, but you will never know how your customers feel about your products if you don't ask them.  Positive and negative feedback are great things for a few reasons-

Positive Feedback- This is obviously the best thing because it reassures you that you aren’t selling your products in vain and that you are actually selling a product that people enjoy.  It’s also great because you can use it as receipts (aka testimonials).  Receipts give you more credibility and encourage potential customers to purchase from you.

Negative Feedback- This kind of feedback, though sometimes a blow to your ego, is actually helpful because it tells you areas where you can make adjustments/improvements to your products. If your e-book was too scattered and confusing, this kind of feedback can encourage you to revise it and make it better.  Try to turn negative feedback into a positive thing.

Because of these reasons, you should send an automated follow-up email to all of your customers to get their feedback.  It doesn’t have to be long and elaborate, it can even be just one question (how satisfied were you with the product on a scale of 1-5?).  You can create automated emails to send to customers if you tag them appropriately in your email marketing service provider account.  I use ConvertKit for this and it works great.

2 / Incorporating links to your products in related blog posts

Digital products are the ultimate source of passive income because you create the product then pretty much set it and forget it.  You can make sales in your sleep with digital item, but in order to get more eyes on your products, you will have to promote them.  There are various ways to do this, but one smart way is to incorporate links to them in relevant blog posts.  For example, I sell a digital guide on how to create a password protected free resource library in Squarespace.  There are posts that are related to that topic on my blog, so I include the product link in those posts.  The blog post is there to educate the reader and the product is linked to teach them how to create one of their own.

3 / Creating a small email sales funnel

Email funnels are something that I’m starting to get into a little more.  When you sell digital products and passive income is your goal, you should be setting up email funnels for your products.  This is basically when you send a series of emails to people that signed up for one of your freebies, and you pitch a paid product to them in the emails.  By doing so, you are able to promote your products on autopilot and generate sales 24/7.  If you are using an email marketing platform that supports tagging or grouping and email automation, you can create an email funnel.  The flow would be something like this:

• Offer a free blog organization worksheet as a lead magnet on your website
• Someone signs up to get the sheet.
• Your email marketing platform automatically sends them the email with the freebie in it.
• Automation will add them to a “welcome email” series (i.e. the email funnel) in which they will receive a certain amount of emails over a span of time (aka drip content) of your choosing.
• The initial emails are meant to educate them on something related to the subject of the freebie that they received.
• The later emails will include pitching your product (the product that you are selling should be directly related to the freebie that you offered, otherwise the funnel may not work out).
• Ideal result: The subscriber buys the product that you pitched in the email funnel.

4 / Sending targeted emails to subscribers tagged with a specific interest

This strategy is similar to the email funnel, but it only involves one email.  If you are utilizing tagging/grouping in your email marketing platform, you should be able to find groups of people that are interested in the same thing.  For example, I have a tag in my ConvertKit account that is called “Interest: Time Hacking”.  This means that whenever I create a new product that is specifically for saving time, I can send a promo email to just that group of people that showed an interest in the topic in the past.

Do you currently incorporate any of these strategies in your digital product sales process flow?  I would love to know.  Leave a comment below!