Episode 58: 5 Mistakes to Avoid When You Have a Digital Product Shop

Monica Froese 

You are listening to the Empowered Business podcast. I’m your host, Monica Fros, and if you’re like me, you want to grow a business you love that gives you financial freedom and fits your lifestyle. Every week you’ll get strategy and unfiltered opinions from me and other successful business owners that will inspire you to make big moves in your business. When we work together, we not only grow faster, we also amplify each other’s voices. Are you ready to build your business on your terms? Let’s jump in. Welcome back to another episode of The Empowered Business Podcast. I hope you had a chance to catch up on last week’s episode where I told you all about why we took a nine month hiatus from recording this podcast. At the end, I let you in on a little secret. We made a pretty big pivot into focusing on our digital product shop called The Empowered Shop. The Empowered Chap is where you can get all of the digital products I currently offer in my business. Something had been lacking in my business over the last six years. As I mentioned in last week’s episode, for years we were operating on a live launch model. This essentially meant that we launched four times a year and had four big cash injections during those months. While all of our focus and resources went into executing these large events, we found ourselves working harder and not smarter. Over the last six years that I’ve been doing this full time, I’ve created and launched well over 100 digital products, things like spreadsheets, website templates, principles, courses, memberships, group coaching, etc.

you name it. And we’ve pretty much done it. But there was one major issue. Everything we have ever launched reside it in a sales funnel or on a sales page. So as people got to know me and wanted to buy more for me, literally the only option to do so was to check out 45 different times. I would have to send them to individual sales pages with their own checkout cards. How ridiculous and unrealistic is that? Essentially what would end up happening is we would launch something new, whether that be a big program during those live launch months or smaller products like spreadsheets on the off months. And we tell our audience about it once and then that was pretty much it because our email bandwidth was always being taken up by the next thing we were going to be doing to get the next cash injection. What were we missing? Well, a single call to action where we could send our customers, our audience, where they could see everything we had to offer for sale and add things to their shopping cart and buy whatever it is they need it from us. Honestly, mind blown. This seems so obvious, doesn’t it? So the number one thing that hit me over the head this year was Domenica. You make it hard for people to spend money with you. People who have come into your world and already decided to hand over their money.

You made it extremely difficult for them to do that. That was the number one problem I really had to solve for secondary to that. Not only did I have an enormous catalog of products I had launched over the years that never saw the light of day again, I also had been producing a large amount of content behind our paid programs. Now I want you to tune in right now and hear me on this, because if this is you, you are missing out on a huge potential opportunity, just like I was. All of the templates, workshops, videos, audio recordings, all the things that we produce for higher priced programs, how much of that could stand on its own? How many things have you created that only the people who paid to be in that specific program will ever see? But those resources could be really awesome as standalone products. So here’s an example In our membership The Empowered Business Society, we have a monthly theme and every month we do a training called the Digital Debrief. Only members of the society can ever see these trainings, but they are so good and they can be standalone trainings. How would we ever get these in front of our wider audience without a shop? Remember, there are only so many calls to action that you can put in a single email. So it’s like, Oh, hey Cindy, I have a lot of new things I did this month that I want to tell you about.

Here are five different links going to five different products with separate checkouts. I hope you buy them all peace. You know, like that doesn’t even make sense. Seriously, how much content do you create that is not being leveraged properly to make you money? A shop can fix both of these issues. It can allow you to cohesively get all of your products in front of your best customers, while also letting you repurpose a lot of the content you’ve already created into smaller products for your wider audience. All in one place with one checkout cart with one call to action. Again, my mind is blown. So now that I have you all bought into the fact that a shop for your digital products is a fabulous idea, let me quickly define the difference between a sales funnel and a shop for your business. It’s very important to know the difference and also to understand why you need both a sales funnel for your digital product, which is what I teach inside of our signature program. The Empowered Business Lab is a hyper specific buying journey meant to help someone who doesn’t know you yet make a decision which is to spend money with you. In other words, a sales funnel takes a cold lead on a specific buying journey. Buying journey being the sales funnel. In this buying journey, we are not offering them choices. Why? Because someone who doesn’t know you yet will get overwhelmed by choices.

You need to get an easy. Yes, from them. Not just say, here are 100 products of mine and you can have at it. Just pick whatever one you want when they don’t even know anything about you or your business. Yet once they are in your world, that’s when the shop kicks in. That is when you want to have a single call to action to make it super easy for your current customers or people in your audience to spend money with you. In terms of how I teach how to sell digital products, this is how I break it down. A sales funnel equals attracting new people to your business, and a shop equals creating an easy shopping experience for your current audience. Sounds so easy, doesn’t it? Let’s be real. We’ve made our fair share of mistakes. So before I tell you about all the fancy numbers, which I’ll be doing that in the next episode, let’s talk about the reality I want to share with you the five mistakes we made when we started The Empowered Shop. My hope is that by sharing this with you, I can help fast track your own success with a digital product shop. So mistake number one, people don’t buy without a reason. Duh. Right? So I see this a lot because I’ve worked with a lot, a lot, a lot of digital product creators. And there’s this idea that just because they created it, people are going to come.

So I put a sales page up on the internet. Why is nobody buying my thing? That’s the first thing you’re going to have to get out of your head. You cannot just passively throw it link to your shop in your website header or in the footer of your email and expect to get traction. You need to proactively be sending people to your shop. In other words, you need to make it the central or singular call to action in your business. Now, once they are at your shop, guess what? They’re not going to just add a bunch of things to their cart because they feel like it. Nope, that’s not how it works. Your shop needs to have a buying journey, just like your sales funnels do. Now there are several different marketing techniques that I will share with you in next week’s episode about how to lead your customer to buy more every single time there they come to your shop. Average order value and average customer value are two numbers you will become obsessed with if you are going to be successful at this. Now, when we initially launched our shop in 2020, we had no consistent marketing strategy or schedule to bring people into the shop every single day. Not only do you need a consistent schedule, but you also need to develop consistent and interesting marketing campaigns to get people excited to keep shopping. Things like theme discounts, special product offers and new releases give people a reason to buy from you.

Okay, Mistake numbe r two getting hung up on pricing. Oh, I could go on and on and on about this topic. But here’s the deal. Almost every digital product creator I’ve met gets very hung up on the pricing of each of their products. And I get it. It might be that you feel the product is truly worth a certain amount and you don’t want it to go below that amount or you are worried someone won’t want to pay you what you’re charging. There are a million different reasons digital product creators get hung up on their pricing. But guess what? Almost all of that goes out the door when you have a shop because it’s not about the price of each individual product. It’s about your average order value and average customer value. At the end of the day, it’s actually just math. And when you focus on the end result of what you want your shop to generate in revenue, it changes everything. And while I was just saying that I’m going to go off cuff here and tell you that one of the reasons a digital product shop is so different than a physical product shop, we associate ecommerce to be more physical products that ship. And that is a whole different pricing model because there are fixed costs associated with creating an item, warehousing an item, and shipping an item in a digital product shop. For the most part, the work and effort that’s put into creating the product is the overhead.

So the way we need to look at the numbers in our shop, in pricing products, in our shop is different than how a traditional Ecom store would do it. And the reality is there is not any training out there on this. Nobody talks about the differences between these two, which is why I approached originally my shop from the e-comm mentality of a physical product and it just didn’t work. Okay, back on schedule here. Mistake number three, not collecting email. All right, So here’s the deal. This one is so fascinating. I kind of wonder how I even got hung up on this. So the idea here is, is that I spend a lot of time getting my current customer’s current audience back to my shop to make more purchases with all of these different marketing triggers. But the reality is we’re all so indexed on Google, you’re going to submit your shop to Google, you’re going to get organic traffic, you can get paid traffic if you want as well to your shop. You can get people who do not know you coming to your shop. You can get people coming to your shop through word of mouth. We have an affiliate program in our shop. So these are people that might not know me yet, but they might still be buying from me when they get to my shop. Well, I need their email address. This goes back to what I’ve been saying all along, which is if I can’t get that initial sale, I absolutely, absolutely want their email address so I can continue to communicate with them.

And that is something that informed my entire strategy behind the triple dip funnel, which we trademarked. And I’m not going to go into that in this episode. I will link to it though, in the show notes if you want to know more about it. But the idea here was from an e-commerce standpoint, if you go to something like Old Navy, what is the pop up that comes up? It’s usually, Hey, sign up for our email and save 20%, something like that. So not only is it important to collect emails from people who are coming to your shop, whether they are on your email list or not, because what you can do is offer them a really good incentive to hand over their email and then spend money with you. This idea that discounts are bad, you may feel that way, you may not, but it blows my mind because at the end of the day, discounts get people to buy and what we care about are average order value and average customer value, which I will define next week’s episode and why we care about those. But what I am telling you is this You should absolutely have a new customer offer on your site, on your shop. It does not matter if you are focusing on just sending people from your email list there, because the fact of the matter is other people will find you.

And if you can offer even people who exist on your email list a special offer, the first time they’re in your shop, you get the order. So not collecting email, we didn’t do that for a while. That was a huge mess. Now we do. And I will talk about the stats behind how many people we’ve converted from our welcome offers, collecting that initial email in the next episode. All right, Mistake number four Consistency with product listings. You want your buyers to have a consistent experience with each of your products. The same flow to the description, the same sections in the description, the same graphic type layout. We recently just upgraded our theme and we are working on making our listings even better. But the one thing I do know for sure, if you want to up level and be professional, you have to be consistent with your appearance. This makes it even easier for people to add more to their cart. If you make them think too hard, you’re going to lose them. Do not make it hard for people to understand what you are selling and why it benefits them. All right. Mistake number five not offering order bumps, upgrades and upsells. You think I would know this since that’s a core part of the sales funnel experience. But for months we did not do this and we left thousands and thousands of dollars on the table.

So just to define what I’m talking about here, and I will go into more of the marketing methodology of this in the next episode. However, order bumps, order bumps in the way I teach our enhancements to the current product that they’re buying. And we use an app in the Shopify App store called Honeycomb. So what will happen is when you have something in your shopping cart and you go to the checkout page, it’s going to pop up a box and it’s going to say, Hey, here’s this great offer on basically like an adjacent product that goes really nice with what you have in your cart. Upgrades are when, let’s say I have a digital products at scale. That’s our course on how to create digital products. Well, that course happens to also reside inside of our bigger program, the Empowered Business Lab. So if someone’s buying digital products at scale, why not offer them to upgrade into the empowered business lab? And then the third thing I mentioned here were upsells, upsells, because of how there’s a lot of reasons why we do it this way, but just know this is the best way for our business for this to work at this point. Upsell happens after the checkout. An upsell is the logical next step that they would want to take with your products and we give them a super sweet offer. I think it’s like a five minute countdown. And if they add that offer to their cart, it actually starts a new order and actually presents yet another order bump.

This has been phenomenal at increasing our average order value and average customer value. And we’ll go into more of that. Like I said in next week’s episode, however, the fact that I did not do this for months and months left thousands of dollars on the table. So I don’t want you to make that same mistake. Before we wrap, let me recap the mistakes. Mistake number one, people don’t buy without a reason. You have to give them a reason to buy. You can’t just say, Here’s the link to my shop, Have fun. Mistake number two Do not get hung up on pricing of individual products. Mistake number three, please collect their email addresses. Please give them a welcome offer when they get to your shop. Don’t make that mistake. Mistake number four You have to be consistent. With your product listings, give them a cohesive feel, give them the same information in each listing that they need to make an informed and easy decision. And mistake number five, you need to offer order bumps, upgrades and upsells. You are leaving money on the table if you don’t. This is what I want to leave you with. Opening a shop for your digital product business gives you credibility. It provides a single place for your new and potential customers to see everything your business offers for purchase. Imagine Old Navy not having a centralized place for you to shop. What if you had to load different sales pages for t shirts and yoga pants and they didn’t even connect together in an easy to use shopping cart? It would be hard to find them credible, wouldn’t it? Storefronts or shops up level your professional appearance to customers and it provides a cohesive shopping experience.

You are the real deal and your brand should or I would say, must reflect that a digital product shop also lets you showcase content and products that your customers miss if they’re hidden in funnels, which I’ve already talked about in this episode. Think of all the content that you’ve created over the years. That would be amazing to sell, but illogical to create dozens of different sales pages for a shop allows you to have that centralized call to action for all of your digital products. This makes it easier to drive your customers to one place to see offers that might have otherwise been hidden. It also simplifies your marketing efforts and inevitably will lead to more profit in your business. So what does a digital shop do for you? One. It gives you credibility with new and current customers and with people who find your shop through different avenues like affiliates or Google to a professional appearance. It up levels your brand. Three. It provides a cohesive shopping experience for your customers and for it gives you a centralized call to action to send people to one place to buy things from you. Oc So are you sold on creating a shop for your digital products yet? Because I hope so.

I’m very passionate about this topic and if you haven’t guessed yet, we have something super special coming up for you. We’ll be taking next week off for us Thanksgiving. But on December 1st I want you to tune in because I’ll be sharing all the strategies that work right now with our shop and I’ll be telling you about a super awesome live event we will be hosting to help you create your own six figure digital product shop. In the meantime, I’d love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on today’s episode. So come follow me on Instagram and send me a direct message. My handle is Monica Dot froze fr0ese. I absolutely love chatting about all things digital products and shops. If you’ve been on the fence about starting your own shop, I am pretty sure I can give you that push to make it happen. So send me a DM and let’s chat about it until next week. Well, I should say until the week after Thanksgiving. I’ll see you back on December 1st. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of The Empowered Business Podcast. I just launched a brand new subscribers only podcast called Monica Soapbox. It’s a nice supplement to what I share with you each week here. Monica Soapbox is more laid back where you’ll get unscripted behind the scenes updates on my business and the industry. Head on over to empowered Business Deco forward slash soapbox to sign up. See you here again next week.