Do you feel overwhelmed by the number of self-proclaimed sales gurus and quick marketing schemes claiming the power to help you get rich quickly by selling digital products? You're not alone, but you may be surprised to find out that there are really only three ways to increase sales in any business: increasing views, boosting conversions, and encouraging repeat buyers. In the next few weeks, we'll be exploring how you can take charge of your views, conversion rates and sales to build a more lucrative business so you can:
Increase Views of Your Offering
You can't sell a product to people who don't know it's available to them, so the first step to increasing sales is to focus on increasing views. Whether you're running your own website as a sales hub, relying on marketplace listing through your ecommerce provider or building a grassroots social media movement, you have to get the word out there about your product. Not all views will translate to a sale, but every sale will start with someone who views your product.
Increase Conversions from Those Views
Conversion rates can seem complicated, especially for first-time merchants. Essentially, "conversion rate" is just a phrase to describe the percentage of viewers who take the action you want them to take on your site or in relation to your product. If 100 people view your product in an hour, thirty of them make a purchase and ten sign up for your mailing list, you have two reliable metrics to form a conversion rate. In this case, you'd have a thirty percent conversion rate for sales, and a ten percent conversion rate for marketing outreach.
Views are essential, but they're not the only piece of the puzzle. You have to boost conversion rates, especially your conversion rate for sales.
Get Conversions to Buy More, or Repeat Buying
Some digital goods are purchased once, and customers have no real reason to make a repeat buy. This is where you'll need to offer supplementary content to keep repeat customers coming back for more. By building a bigger catalog, you'll also have products you can offer to conversions who are making a primary product purchase. Look for ways to upsell add-ons for your product, encourage past customers to buy more in the future and court new buyers with regular content updates.
Assignment:
This week, focus on learning more about how to encourage product views. Think about what you can do to encourage people to click on your links, look over your product description and consider purchasing your digital good. Next week, we'll get more in-depth with boosting views to start increasing your sales reach.