With the advance of modern technologies, buying digital products online has become a convenient option to going out of houses to purchase cassettes or books from nearby land-based stores. In their turn, digital product creators benefit significantly from selling their products online. This is conditioned by the fact that going by this route, they avoid third-party payments and publishing costs.
So, as a result of the online revolution, competitive business ideas emerged and were enforced due to which working on different projects from home became quite real. Also, marketing ensured its presence in the net integrating businesses to such an extent that nowadays a business will be knocked out of the competition if it isn’t on the web. And in order to support all of those online activities, many software solutions were created by programmers having both free and paid options.
And whenever buyers need to unlock the additional functions or the supplementary information, they will have to make a payment. Accordingly, if you wish to sell a digital product, say, a book, a podcast, a software or whatever, you will have to impress your audience with the free features, which means that the first impression that you make should be inspiring.
“You never get a second chance to make a first impression”, Will Rogers (a stage and motion picture actor)
Thus, what you need to do is to be sure that when people read the free part of your book or use the free features of your software, they are impressed so much as to be willing to pay to unlock the rest.
Consequently, being a newbie in the industry, you will surely need to use all of the major platforms to promote your product, especially on the ones where you have gathered the most followers. Vital as it is, online promotion is not something we would like to discuss within the scope of this article. And the reason lies in the fact that articles on this topic are widespread over the web and the same techniques may be applicable to both physical and digital products. So instead, let’s discuss several features recommended to integrate into your website to get the most value out of the upcoming promotion.
Using pop-up functionalities to call website visitors to some action
Suppose you have a website where you offer your digital products, and you keep thinking of some ideas for promoting it. Most probably, you would like to get answers to the following questions: where to start the promotion from and how to better customize a website for promotion! In order to spread the word about your site, SMM and email marketing campaigns will be a good starting point, even if you are on low budget.
To kickstart rewarding email marketing operations, you will need to convey a message to your site visitants offering a good reason to subscribe to your mailing list.
The latter can be in the form of offering to get their first book for free or to make their first purchase of your digital services at discounted prices. Most frequently, this is done by conveying the message using a subscription pop-up window which is adjustable to your needs and will appear in front of your site visitors just at the moment you specified in the pop-up settings or after they perform certain actions.
Gathering the submissions will become the starting point for you to send valuable resources for free so as to impress your audience to pay for additional information. In case your product is a digital software, always ensure that some of the basic functions are free of charge, as your plausibly future customers must see if your service works for them so as to unlock the paid functionalities.
In addition to customizing your website for running successful email marketing campaigns, customizing it for social sharing is also vitally important and it’s here when social pop-ups come to assistance. In addition to sharing your website to different groups by yourself, by using a social pop-up, you make it possible for your site visitants to share your website on their social pages. To sum up pop-up recommendations, we would also like to advise not to stuff your website with pop-ups: placing one relevant pop-up on each post or page (not necessarily on all of the posts and pages) and at an appropriate time will be just to the point.
Offering sales to your potential customers
Can you imagine the volume of competition you face every day when you are selling online? As Bob Hooey once said, “If you don’t take care of your customer, your competitor will”. So, the same also works in relation to selling digital products. If you don’t make sales from time to time, your competitors will outperform you by offering sales coupons occasionally.
Besides making sales, you will need to optimize your website to trigger some emotional feelings in your plausible customers. More specifically, you can create a feeling of urgency with a countdown pop-up so that your web page visitors consider that your offer for sales is not eternal so trying to avail of it within the period of time specified.
Using your website to Include information on your mobile app
If you wish to sell your product to more people, you should certainly create a mobile app for your product. This way, you take care of convenience for people using mainly mobile devices to access the Internet. To customize your website to sell more digital products, it is recommended to mention your app on your website and let visitors know where your app can be downloaded from.
Also, make your app capable of working offline. For instance, if you sell books, you can write captivating and thought-provoking articles that will be free and available offline. This way, you will manage to keep your audience involved even if their Internet connection is missing.
Including a forum page
Depending on the type of your digital product, it can be useful to have a forum page on your website. This will be a convenient platform for your users to come up together to discuss some topics of interest, to share valuable works and ideas or helping one another with the technical issues they might be facing. In addition, this will also benefit you in a sense that you will come to know your users’ preferences and what you can be refined in relation to your product.
Make tests and suggestions for improving knowledge
As a rule, people love taking tests as they are curious about their knowledge level. That’s why by making tests, you will increase the number of visitors registering to your site. After your users have taken your tests, offer them valuable materials to strengthen their weak points.
For example, if your product is an online dictionary, you can make linguistic tests checking how well your users master the grammatical rules and accordingly, offer to buy a book to develop their knowledge. Or else, if you sell movies, you can make tests to find out how your users know the celebrities – famous actors and actresses. Later on, you may suggest films starred by the authors your users failed to recognize.
Wrapping it up
Selling digital products is profitable both for sellers and buyers. On buyers’ part, it is a good opportunity to stay at home and get valuable materials at incomparably affordable prices from every corner of the world. Sellers of digital products, in their turn, benefit from selling online significantly. This is conditioned by the fact that selling on the online platform it is possible to avoid the hassle and the costs of printing and publishing and also paying third parties for selling. In addition, being online, sellers can reach out to an interested audience of like-minded people who will be happy to get their products.
Also, they can run their own website and promote it on various platforms to increase product reputation and make more sales. This way, instead of paying third parties like publishers, sellers, etc., you will only need to provide some financial means to launch your own website. Afterwards, do your best to customize it for successful promotion in order to sell more digital products. Finally, as the author, speaker, and consultant Jamie Notter once said, “Innovation is a change that unlocks new value”. Thus, let’s follow the changes and add new value to our undertakings in order to get tangible results.