Autopilot sales is no pipe dream. It happens every day for online businesses. When those sales are created with automated systems, and products are available globally, you have a globally scalable business.

Cumulative data anticipates a 16.8% increase in worldwide e-commerce sales over the most recently tracked period. That’s not so hard to believe especially during recent times – post 2020.

But how are automated sales made? Can anyone take advantage of online sales to earn an income online?

Autopilot Sales: Selling On Autopilot

An autopilot sale can be any transaction which is automated. However, many products need to be manufactured, packed and shipped. This adds another level of complexity to the process. But with digital products the whole of the transaction can be automated. So from an online purchase, the customer pays through a payment platform. They automatically gain access to the product they bought which is a digital product of some kind.

Digital product sales can be referred by third party affiliates. They earn commissions based on sales they generate. Using this model of online sales, anyone can generate an income by promoting and selling other people’s products and services online.

From a website, a customer signs up to some kind of freebie offer. They then receive email marketing messages where they are offered a product. When they purchase, the affiliate earns a commission. All of this can happen completely automatically.

Autopilot Sales: Email Marketing & PPC

The process starts with an advert or website sending someone into a sales funnel. A sales funnel is what online business owners use to build trust with potential customers. It involves a landing page, where the first transaction takes place. The visitor’s email is exchanged for a free offer of some kind. Once this happens the visitor enters the sales funnel and receive automated messages.

When a purchase is made, a “tripwire” offer is automatically given to the new customer. This is another offer usually of higher worth than the first. It lets the customer choose whether to upgrade their purchase. If you’ve ever been to McDonald’s or Burger King you’ll know this offer works!

“Do you want fries with that” is what thousands of McDonald’s workers ask their customers – because many of them will say yes. Burger King asks whether you want to “go large”.

The up-sell technique works because for only a little extra, you get a lot more as a customer. Globally, the offer makes a huge difference for the company doing the selling.

Targeting Your Audience

With email marketing, online businesses can reach thousands of people at once with automated messages which sell products through email marketing. It can also be scaled up globally to reach an ever growing number of potential customers.

This is done first by testing and measuring a marketing strategy which is scalable. Paid marketing platforms like Facebook, Adwords or YouTube let you define your target audience very specifically. When you get it right, you can run ads, send people to landing pages and collect their email. Follow up with email marketing messages which sell products.

The whole process is automated and scalable but does require some testing and measuring initially. To get better at targeting you first need to understand the needs and pains of your customer avatar.

Once you better understand your customer, you can target them more specifically in your advertising and create a congruent message which meets their needs. See also affiliate marketing journey.

See also autopilot business.

From Blogging

Autopilot sales can be achieve by blogging too. Although with blogging, it’s much less scalable and much slower. With a blog, traffic is generated through the search engines via SEO – search engine optimisation. Because there’s so many blogs online, it can be difficult to compete for the top placement on Google for any given subject.

To get around this problem, bloggers often target long tail keywords which have lower competition. With a longer tail keyword, there’s often fewer competing websites being ranked on the search engines. As such you have more chance of getting a top listing.

Bloggers also spend a huge amount of time building content and promoting their blogs. The long term goal is free traffic. If that goal is accomplished, that traffic can be turned into email subscribers through a giveaway on the website. So blogging is simple a longer term strategy to generate leads for an automated business.