What is the best way to sell digital products? Since digital products can be accessed from anywhere online, it’s definitely a good idea to have a global reach. So your marketing campaign should definitely be scalable. A local campaign is limited to your locality.
One of the best ways to sell any affiliate product globally is through using paid marketing campaigns. Send paid traffic directly to a product online through your affiliate link. This is often the tactic used by affiliates. However, there’s a problem with this strategy. Most people clicking on your link will check out the product and then leave, perhaps even coming back another time to make the purchase.
This means you’ve paid for them to check out the product but you haven’t made a commission on the sale! You’ve even helped the product owner get more attention but without collecting a sale yourself! So you’ve spent money on marketing, but not made anything. This is a huge problem for affiliates and one of the best ways around it it to collect subscribers and send them to a product from your email messages.
Best Way To Sell Digital Products – Why Use Email Marketing?
Email marketing is definitely one of the best ways to sell digital products online. With email marketing you can send your paid traffic to a landing page where you offer something of value to your visitor. In exchange, they give you their email address. An automated email marketing campaign is triggered. This delivers valuable email messages containing something they are interested in. You can then showcase your products as part of your marketing campaign and send your visitors repeatedly to the product through your email messages.
This has a number of advantages to making sales online. First you can build a relationship with your subscribers. If you’re sending visitors directly to the product, they only have one opportunity to buy from you. After that, should they return to the sales page at a later date you miss out on the sale (if you’re an affiliate).
Another huge advantage of building a relationship with your subscribers through an email list is trust. Most website visitors won’t buy on their first visit, particularly to a new website which they don’t know or trust. They need multiple touch points with a website before they will buy.
The third major benefit is also that you can explain through your messages the value of a digital product to your subscribers. With physical products the value is often obvious. But with digital products there is often some obscurity inherent in the item you’re promoting.
Best Way To Sell Digital Products – Collecting Emails
To set up a good marketing campaign where you can build an email list of subscribers you will need a landing page. A landing page is much better than a website for collecting emails because that’s its specific purpose. On a website there’s many distractions. A visitor can browse around and look through your content at their ease! But on a landing page there’s online two options: sign up or leave. This means you can optimise a landing page for performance much more easily than you can a website. Here’s an example of a landing page:
If you’re paying for advertising, you’ll get much more out of it if you build a list of subscribers and sell digital products through your list. That’s because you can continue to connect with your subscribers over a much longer time frame than you could from a simple website.
Some of your visitors won’t sign up of course, but you can tweak your landing pages by cross testing to get the most out of your marketing budget. Access a landing page software here.
Best Way To Sell Digital Products – Paid Advertising
Why use paid advertising to send visitors to a landing page? Why not build a blog or a YouTube channel? There’s a few reasons why paid marketing is the best way to sell digital products. One of them is speed. Getting traffic organically is tough and it takes a long time and huge amount of effort to get traffic from the search engines organically, especially in a competitive niche. With paid traffic you can turn it on almost instantly and begin to collect subscribers from a landing page.
The other reasons is scalability. Since digital products can be bought from anywhere globally, you ideally want to use a globally scalable marketing strategy. It’s very difficult to scale up an organic marketing campaign which uses SEO (search engine optimisation) as one of its main sources of traffic. But with paid marketing it’s as simple as turning up your marketing budget.
There’s several marketing platforms which can be used to specifically target the audience who is most suitable for whatever you’re selling. YouTube, Adwords, Facebook, Bing etc. all offer platforms which allow marketers to target people by a number of different criteria. These are things such as search terms (things they are specifically looking for online), age, location, interests and other important demographics.
Summary
Of course there’s many ways to sell digital products and I’m writing this article on a blog! So it would be remiss of me to not include other methods of marketing which can work well when it comes to selling online. Blogging can of course be used very effectively to sell digital products online.
From a blog you can sell directly from a banner, or build an email list. But blogging is much slower than through using paid advertising of course. But if you’re tight on budget, blogging or YouTube can be used to gain organic traffic over time.
The “best” way to sell digital products is of course one which works for you. So even though I’ve mentioned paid advertising, that might not be the best way (for you) if you don’t have a marketing budget to do it with! But whatever method of marketing you choose, you should definitely use an email list.
An email list is an affordable “must have” if you’re selling digital products online. It lets you connect with your audience, build trust and showcase your products, giving your subscribers multiple touch points with the product through your affiliate link (assuming you’re an affiliate, not the product owner).