Email Marketing for Selling Digital Products
Email marketing can be a highly effective way to sell digital products online. With email, you have a direct line of communication to your subscribers that allows you to promote new product launches, share discounts, and generate sales.
In this blog post, we’ll look at some tips and strategies for successfully selling digital products through email marketing.
1. Choose the Right Email Platform
Your email marketing platform is the foundation of your campaigns. Make sure to choose one that allows you to easily create professional-looking emails, segment your lists, track opens/clicks, and integrate with your website or shopping cart.
Popular platforms like MailChimp, Constant Contact, AWeber, and ConvertKit offer a range of pricing tiers suitable for small businesses selling digital downloads. Focus on choosing a platform that will scale with your needs over time.
2. Build Your Subscriber List
The success of your email campaigns depends entirely on the size and quality of your subscriber list. There are several effective tactics you can use:
1- Offer a lead magnet like a free ebook, checklist, or toolkit in exchange for an email address. Promote this on your website, blog, and social media.
2- Run giveaways and contests, asking entrants to subscribe to your list to enter and receive notifications.
3- Allow visitors to sign up on your website via pop-ups or embedded forms. Offer an incentive for subscribing.
4- Grow your list through partnerships, guest posts, social media cross-promotion, and more.
Focus on continuing to build and nurture your list over time. The larger your list, the higher your sales potential.
3. Create Valuable Content
Resist the urge to make every email a sales pitch. Instead, focus on providing subscribers with truly valuable content and recommendations tailored to their interests. For selling digital products, this can include:
1- Product tutorials and tips for getting the most value from your offerings
2- Curated or creative assets like desktop wallpapers, printable templates, guides, and more
3- Q&As and interviews with experts related to your niche
4- Case studies showing how real customers have used your products
5- Polls and surveys to engage your audience while gathering helpful data
By establishing yourself as a trusted source of useful content, subscribers will be more responsive when you do promote new product releases.
4. Writing Persuasive Emails
The key to selling digital products via email is writing compelling copy that persuades subscribers to buy. Here are some tips:
- Catch attention with urgent subject lines that communicate value. For example, “Last Chance for 50% Off!”
- Focus on benefits in your copy, not just features. Explain how your product will solve a problem or make life easier.
- Use words like “you”, “free”, “new”, “introducing”, and “guaranteed” that resonate with readers.
- Create a sense of scarcity or exclusivity when appropriate. Limited-time offers encourage prompt action.
- Use testimonials and social proof to make your claims more believable.
- Minimize the risk in buying by offering satisfaction guarantees, free trials, or demos.
- Make it easy to buy with clear calls to action and links to your checkout page.
Mastering persuasive email copy takes testing and refinement, but these tactics can help sell more digital goods.
5. Using Email Automation
Email automation tools streamline campaigns by sending pre-written emails based on certain triggers and schedules. This is ideal for digital product marketing. You can set up automation like:
- Welcome series to onboard new subscribers.
- Educational content dripped over time to nurture leads.
- Abandoned cart emails if someone doesn’t complete a purchase.
- New product announcements send automatically upon launch.
- Discount reminders before an offer expires.
Automation frees you up to work on other aspects of your business knowing that your marketing campaigns will run on autopilot. Just be sure your automations provide value and aren’t completely sales-focused.
6. Creating a Sales Funnel
A sales funnel moves leads through stages from awareness to purchase. When selling through email, your funnel might include:
- Offering a free lead magnet like a guide, checklist, or template in exchange for an email address.
- Providing a series of educational or helpful emails to nurture leads, establishing know-like-trust.
- Promoting your product offer via broadcast or sequence, often with a special incentive like a discount or trial.
- Following up post-purchase with tips for getting results from the product.
- Cross-selling complementary products or upselling to higher tier options.
- Seeking referrals or testimonials from satisfied customers.
The goal is progressively moving subscribers down the funnel until they convert from prospects into buyers. Automation and segmentation make funnel marketing much easier.
7. Specific Email Strategies for Selling Digital Products
Here are proven email approaches for promoting digital products:
Product launch announcements: Reveal new products/services with a broadcast highlighting features, pricing, and value. Build excitement. Offer launch discounts.
Limited-time offers: Limited-time sales with countdown timers or expiring codes create urgency to buy now. Discounts should be big enough to compel action.
Case studies/testimonials: Show how real customers have used your product to get tangible results. Social proof is persuasive. Ask happy buyers for powerful testimonials.
Upsells/cross-sells: Email customers post-purchase with offers for complementary or higher-tier products. This maximizes customer lifetime value.
Abandoned carts: If someone doesn’t complete a purchase, remind them with an automated abandoned cart email encouraging them to finish checking out. Offer an additional discount as an incentive.
Email is a versatile channel that lets you reach buyers directly with campaigns tailored to moving leads down the sales funnel – from awareness to conversion and beyond. Keep testing to see which strategies work best for selling your digital goods.
Promote Through Product Launches and Sequences
Product launches and automated email sequences are two of the best ways to directly promote and sell your digital products via email:
1- Use product launch emails to reveal new offerings, share details on pricing and features, include testimonials, and provide calls-to-action to visit your sales page. Follow up post-launch with tips for getting started.
2- Create sequences like educational series, onboarding drip campaigns, or abandoned cart flows to automatically deliver a series of emails designed to convert subscribers into buyers.
3- Send broadcast emails when releasing updated versions of existing products, running limited-time sales, or offering special holiday discounts.
4- Divide your list into segments and send targeted emails about products you think specific segments will be most interested in.
Testing and Optimization
Consistently test and optimize your email campaigns to increase deliverability, open rates, clickthroughs, and sales conversions. Try subject line A/B testing, segmenting your list to compare different approaches, adjusting calls-to-action, and reformatting emails for mobile optimization.
Use analytics to identify when and which emails are performing best so you can refine your approach.
Conclusion:
Email marketing can be one of the most affordable and effective channels for selling digital products directly to your target audience. Just focus on growing your list, providing value through content, and purposefully promoting through launches, sequences, and broadcasts.
With consistent testing and optimization, you can continually improve your email campaigns and use them as a primary sales driver. Learn here more about digital products business tips and guides.