What is a digital products system?

If you want to create more revenue in your business, digital products are the way forward, but if its sky-high profits and complete freedom you want then a digital products system is what you really need! In this blog I’m going to take you through..

• What a digital products system is and why you need one
• The 7 phases of the digital products system
• Your biggest opportunities right now
• Plus where you should start

What is a digital products system?

A digital products system is a suite of varying digital products strategically positioned within your business to…

• Increase your customer lifetime value (How much a customer spends over a lifetime)
• Increase customer purchase frequency (Number of times a customer buys)
• Increase number of customers
• Increase profits!

When you have a products system, you can continually generate new leads, more sales and increase customer loyalty far better than with just one product.

What makes up the products system?

Lead Generation

The start of the products system is about generating leads for your other products. Quite simply, you can splinter off parts of your low / high ticket products to create valuable free content for lead generation. The most successful digital products businesses continually market their free content / lead generation products to build their email list rather than a frantic and expensive list-building sprint just before a launch!

You might have heard the phrase “the money is in the list”, which is true a certain extent but what you should really focus on is building a list of your ideal customers who are pre-qualified as potential buyers.

You do this by creating high quality free content that is directly related to your end product. This is why I recommend chunking your other products into smaller free products to introduce you to your customers. When you show potential customers a huge amount of value in advance of asking for the sale, you’re far more likely to get the sale and build incredible customer loyalty at the same time.

High Ticket

A high ticket digital product is a higher priced digital product usually something like a video course or online masterclass, but it could also be software or a hybrid coaching program for example (hybrid coaching is video plus live coaching). By focusing on the high ticket product first, you can create a larger amount of revenue in a shorter space of time and can then invest your time and resources into marketing other products in the products system.

A high ticket digital product is a product that is priced at the higher end of the scale for your customer. This varies depending on the market you operate in.

For example in the B2B market, a high ticket digital product might be priced in the $1000’s. In the craft and hobby market, a high ticket item might only be priced in the low $100’s.

The price you pitch your high ticket product depends on what your market is prepared to spend on getting their desired result, but regardless of the market this is where I recommend you start when it comes to paid products. A lot of people I speak to about digital products tend to want to start with low ticket first, but this is slow, expensive and less effective.

Your customer will get far more value from a high ticket product, which makes it’s a lot easier to sell and you can launch in quick and easy ways – such as simply getting on the phone to your leads. (You couldn’t do this with an ebook for example).

Low ticket

A low ticket digital product is a lower priced product positioned to be the “intro” into your suite of products. It is usually the first exchange of payment for your customers, and so should be the first natural step that leads into your high ticket product / recurring products.

Selling a low ticket product can be challenging as there are lots of moving parts that need to be in place – such as an advertising strategy, landing page, checkout and delivery mechanism. This is why I recommend you start with the high ticket first, because you can create more profit from high ticket that can then be invested into a stronger marketing campaign for your low ticket product.

It takes a LOT of sales of your low ticket digital products to match the profit of a high ticket product.

Low ticket products could be templates, workbooks, ebooks and mini-courses for example and could be a splinter of your high ticket products for ease.

The more congruency between your lead generation products, low ticket and high ticket products the more sales you’re likely to get and least money you’ll spend on advertising.

Profit Boosters

Although not strictly a product in its own right, profit boosters are still an important aspect of the products system itself.

Profit boosters are great ways of generating more profit throughout the year from your suite of products. A great example of this is Black Friday deals, seasonal sales, timed launches or one time offers to your email list.

Having all of your products available all the time doesn’t create any urgency to buy and so you’ll get less sales. Using profit boosters throughout the year as part of your promotional plan will help you generate more revenue from your products.

The variety of running these kind of promotions also keeps things interesting for your customers and increases sales as well as creating tests for what motivates your customers to buy.

Recurring

Growing a predictable, consistent stream of recurring revenue is the ideal way to scale. It can can also help you forecast revenue, avoid cashflow issues, and anticipate future resource needs like marketing budgets and team members.

Over time when creating your suite of products, you could move them into a membership / subscription to build recurring revenue and increase customer lifetime value. Software is also a great way to build recurring revenue.

JV Partners & Affiliate

You don’t always have to sell your own digital products to generate revenue for your business – and equally you don’t need to be selling your products only to your own audience.

I define Joint Venture and Affiliate products as 2 separate strategies.

Joint venture partnerships are when you partner up with complementary businesses to sell each other’s products into your audiences. These are usually hand-picked partners that you build longer term relationships with. This is the ideal solution if you want to keep a closer eye on the quality of the customers that buy from you as you can screen the audience in advance.

Affiliate marketing is selling products for / from affiliate partners and they may not necessarily be people that you know or have built strong relationships with. Many product creators have affiliate programs with a simple application and often automated process to sign up and sell on their behalf.

You can also register your products for sale on affiliate reseller websites, such as Clickbank and you don’t need to have relationships with the people who sign up. This can mean a lower quality customer as you don’t know who is selling your products for you.

Affiliate marketing should be a complement to the core products you have on offer, rather than your main revenue stream.

Evergreen

The final piece of the Products System is evergreen products, and should be the one you focus on last.

If your products don’t need much support, and have a good sales conversion / low refund rate, they might be a good candidate to turn into an evergreen product funnel.

This is a sales funnel with continuous availability and minimal customer service. This should only be tackled once you have had success with the other stages first because it does rely on good conversion rates and a solid product to ensure success.

If you jump into this straight away, you risk a higher refund rate, lower customer satisfaction and lower sales. A bad evergreen product is worse than having no evergreen product.

Summary

I hope you enjoyed today’s post on the Products System and can now see how all the products fit together to help you build an amazing business.

It certainly takes time to build a products system but by starting off with the high ticket first the other phases happen quicker and easier.