Empowering women to create 6-figure digital product businesses.
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Want to grow your digital product shop to 6-figures?
This is the third episode in our series where I share all about the big pivot I made in my business this year. In the first episode, I shared what led us to make a change. In the second episode of the series, I shared mistakes to avoid when launching your digital product shop.
In this episode of the Empowered Business podcast, I’m sharing 5 tips and tricks for exploding your digital produce shop to 6-figures in 6 months. These will be a mix of marketing (which I consider strategic) and operational (which I consider tactical tips) to help make your shop a huge success.
I learned a lot on this journey, so I’m pulling all of these tips from my own experience in creating and running a digital product shop. The tips I share in this episode are exactly what’s working for my digital product shop right now because I want you to be able to skip all of my mistakes and grow and scale your shop quickly.
While these tips and tricks are awesome, as you can imagine, there’s a lot more that I want to share with you about what we’ve learned when launching our digital product shop.
Now that you know these tips, you may be wondering- what’s next? We are going to be hosting a live event from January 16th through the 20th of 2023 called the Digital Shop Experience. In this event, I’ll take you alongside me as I implement the strategies that led to a 6 figure digital product shop. We’re covering so many golden nuggets in this event, so make sure to check it out here!
Head over to http://monicafroese.com/listen to listen to this episode and previous episodes on your favorite podcast platform!
Monica Froese
You are listening to the Empowered Business podcast. I’m your host, Monica Froese, 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. Hey, hey, hey. Welcome back to the Empowered Business Podcast. And the third episode in our series all about the big pivot I made in my business this year. In episode 57, I recapped exactly what led us to make a big pivot and launch our digital product e Commerce Store, The Empowered Shop, in March of 2022. And in our last episode, which was episode 58, I broke down the five mistakes to avoid when launching your own digital product shop. And trust me, I pulled those mistakes straight from my own experience. I shared them with you last week to help you avoid making the same mistakes and despite making a few mistakes along the way, our shop did reach the 20,000 a month mark in under three months and became a six figure shop within six months. So needless to say, I’ve learned a few things along the way in terms of what works and doesn’t work. So today I’m going to share with you the exact strategies that are working right now with our digital product shop.
These will be a mix of marketing, which I consider strategic and operational, which I consider tactical tips to help make your shop a huge success too. So without further ado, here are five tips and tricks for exploding your digital product shop to six figures in six months or less. Number one, my favorite thing to say pretty much no matter what I’m teaching, the truth is in the data. Oh, how many times I have repeated this over and over again to my students. And I think sometimes people get a little sick of me. I get it. A lot of people hate data and numbers. I am lucky in the sense that I do love numbers and I could honestly live in a spreadsheet. But here’s the thing numbers do not have to be complicated. Let me break down for you the data that matters the most, in my opinion, when it comes to running a digital product shop, there are three things I religiously track for our shop. The first is what are our top three best selling products each month? I keep track of this in a spreadsheet so I can see trends. The second is average order value. This is exactly what it sounds like on average. How much is an order worth? Logically, you can increase how much an average order is worth to the bottom line.
Then you will make more money and you can track that in your Shopify Analytics. And the third thing I keep track of is our on site conversion rate. This is the number of people who land on our site and then convert into a sale. And that is also a number that Shopify does give you in your analytics. These are the three core things I’ve been tracking for the last nine months that have informed most of the next tips I’m about to share with you. So tip number two is run consistent marketing campaigns to your email list. So it’s hard to be consistent in a small business because there is so much that needs to be done and limited resources to make everything happen. And I get that. That is why businesses that are consistent are also able to stand out from the crowd because many just are not. In terms of what this means for our shop is we keep an ongoing marketing calendar, a flash sales and what we call Fridays, and we leverage the data from what people are already buying to inform what those campaigns should be. So to keep this simple, let me break down what a Friday sale looks like for us. We’ve consistently been sending a Friday email to our email list every Friday at 3 p.m., and we’ve done this consistently, consistently. Notice the trend here since March. We have not missed a single Friday, nine months in, and we basically trained our audience to expect an email from us at this time announcing that week’s deal.
Now, we did not tell people that this was going to happen. We let them naturally catch on to it. Every month I leverage the data from our previous best selling products to inform what that special Friday should be. If something did really well in May, maybe it’s time to do a flash sale in October. This data also helps you decide what other products to create. So, for example, one of our top sellers is a spreadsheet. So in August we launched a brand new spreadsheet for $17 that made $5,000 in the first week. We also saw that people love our Quick Win workshops. So after the initial four that we ran earlier in the year, we kept launching more based on the topics that our audience was telling us they wanted to see. So now we have a total of eight, and two of them make up our top sellers of all time in the shop. So benefits of running consistent marketing campaigns each week to your email list include one Training your customers to expect a deal every week, which builds anticipation and excitement. And two, it gets them inside of your shop where you have other marketing triggers that will take over and help increase your average order value. And because we are always looking at our numbers, we learn that the cheaper the Friday deal is in terms of price, the more clicks we get into our shop.
So if we put something on a Friday deal that is over $47 for our audience, our clicks go way down and that matters to us because of tip number three. You need to become obsessed with increasing your average order value in your shop. The more people you get to your shop, the more people that can place an order with you. The more orders you get, the more data you have to work on increasing your average order value. See how this all works together. There are so many ways to do this, but I’m going to share our absolute favorite one with you, which is order bumps and upsells. We use a Shopify app called Honeycomb to help us do this. Any time someone add something to their cart, they are presented with what I call an order bump. This is a product that will enhance what they are already buying. The order bump is another product in our shop that we offer at an amazing price before they reach the checkout page and they have 5 minutes to decide to move on to the checkout or add it to their cart as well. Now an upsell happens after the checkout occurs and is usually the next step in their buying journey with us. So this is also offered for 5 minutes at a discounted price.
Order bumps and upsells currently make up 12% of our total revenue in the shop. That is money we would never have seen if we didn’t use this app honeycomb. The key here now is to leverage those order bumps and upsells to increase the average order value of our entire shop. So the next layer here is to evaluate the data for each order, bump and upsell and make changes to constantly be increasing the conversion rate for each. The higher our conversion rate on our order bumps and upsells, the more money we’re adding to the bottom line and the higher our average order value will be. Which brings me to point number four. The buying journey in your shop matters. So remember, if you want to increase your average order value, you need more people to place orders. That’s logical, right? This is where your site conversion rate comes in. That is the number of people who come to your site and end up checking out, meaning they end up paying you money. This means that the journey they take while inside your shop matters. So if you confuse, you lose. And when you are offering dozens, if not hundreds of digital products, it can quickly become easy to confuse. So there are two general ways that someone is going to come into your shop. The first is they’re going to come to your main storefront. So just like the main landing page of your shop, maybe that’s from Google or a pin you have on Pinterest, or you’re talking about your shop on Instagram, whatever it may be, or maybe you link to it on your main website header like we do on ours.
Or I even have my shop listed in the footers of all of our emails that go out. But the key point here is they would arrive on your main page. The second way someone’s going to come into your shop is specifically to a product listing. Now, this is likely from your marketing campaign efforts like a Friday sale, When we are leading with something on a Friday sale, we’re not going to link you to the overall shop main page. We’re going to link you direct to that product listing. So what happens in each case in terms of guiding your buyer is going to be a little bit different. So if they came to your main page, it’s not a guarantee that we own any sort of relationship with them yet, meaning they may or may not be on our email list. So the first thing we focus is on offering them something in exchange for their email. So for this we use a Shopify app called Twilio. It’s a gamification app and it shows to first time visitors in our shop. And if you spin the wheel, you’ll get a discount code that you can use within 30 minutes. Now, the second big thing we learned was if someone is new to us, they are not going to know where to start.
So we did one main thing to improve the buying journey here, which is we added a start here to our site navigation. So the first thing on our menu is the start here dropdown and it gives you the main topics of things that we offer in our shop in a logical order. And then you can decide based on where you are in your journey. You can click on the topic at hand and we don’t put everything in those topics together. We put the things that are going to help people new to us get started where they are in their buying journey. So we are essentially meeting people in our shop where they’re at in their own journey. Now if someone lands on a specific product listing, we want to make sure it’s super easy for them to understand what else we have that might benefit them. So for this, we use an app called Frequently Bought Together. And what I do is I manually create what is called a bundle for each product, my shop using this app and it displays at the bottom of a product listing so people can easily add the related products to their shopping cart at the same time as the product that they’re already interested in buying. Or they can choose to click over to the new product listing and learn more.
Either way, I am making a. Easy for them to know the next step in their buying journey. And tip number five that I have for you today is don’t make your life harder. Template ties everything. We can get a shop listing up in our shop in 5 minutes, whereas creating an entire sales page in unique shopping cart like you do for a sales funnel can take hours like hours. And this is why you cannot scale. Little little side rant here. You cannot scale a digital product business by building individual sales pages for every single product that you launch. We can do this in under 5 minutes. Now it is like mind blowing how fast we can do it. This alone has been game changing for what we can offer to our customers because the faster we can get up a listing, the more products we can create. And when we create digital products, what are we doing? We’re solving problems that our customers are having. So it’s a win win for everyone. But what does this actually mean to template ties? Everything. The first thing is we keep a spreadsheet that tracks everything about our product listing from price to the product link and steps that need to happen to complete the listing. So, for example, one step on our spreadsheet prompts us to create a tag in ConvertKit, which is our email service provider, and then also a rule so that every time someone buys something in Shopify, our email service provider has a record of it because if you’re going to be emailing people, you obviously want to know what they’ve already bought from you, right? Right.
So that’s a step that we track in our spreadsheet. We also track what the order bump, upsell and the frequently bought together Bundle is for each product listing. The second thing we template size is we have Canva templates for product listing photos. So not only does this make it super easy to create the photos for each listing, but it keeps our entire shop cohesively branded and that is important. The third thing we template size is our product descriptions. So we want all of our product listings to be consistent, offering the same information and making it easier for our customers to make a decision. So if all the things we had in our product descriptions varied from product to product in terms of how we structure them, that would make our buyers have to think harder about what we’re offering and we don’t want to do that. So not only does this make it easier for you to get a listing in your shop, but it also creates a cohesive experience for your buyers. When you template ties everything behind the scenes, it makes it easier than ever to get a new product listing up in minutes. So while these tips and tricks I’ve shared with you today are awesome, as you can imagine, there’s a lot more that I do want to share with you about what we’ve learned over the last nine months.
But before I tell you about what’s next, let’s just recap the five tips and tricks to help your digital product shop reach six figures in six months or under one, you are going to track your data period point blank. It’s going to happen. You cannot make informed decisions in your business if you are not tracking your numbers. Right? So we’re going to commit to that too. You’re going to commit to running consistent marketing campaigns to your email list. When I say email us, I’m referring to your warm audience. These are people that already have committed to hearing from you on a regular basis, and now you’re going to be offering a special to them every single week to get people back into your shop. Three, you’re going to become, what, obsessed with increasing average order value. Why? Because the more money each order is worth, the more money you make. And it becomes easier to also predict if you bring new people to you how much money you can make month over month. That’s a much more advanced topic. But trust me, you won’t regret this for was the buying journey matters. It matters. You have to lead people on a journey in your shop. You have to make it easy for them to understand what they need from you based on where they are in their journey.
And then tip number five is we’re going to template ties, everything. Stop making your life harder than it has to be. Make your life easy. Make everything easy to list. Your customers will thank you for it because it will be cohesive and you’ll think yourself for it because you won’t be pulling your hair out every single time you want to put up a new listing. So now that you know how to make your life easier when it comes to running a shop, what’s next? Well, we decided to do something that we’ve never done before. We are going to host a live event that’s running January 16th through the 20th of 2023, and it’s called the Digital Shop Experience. I am so excited for this. During the experience you are going to walk alongside me as I implement the strategies that led to a six figure digital product shop in just six months. There are very few resources out there that talk about digital product storefront. Many of the Shopify focused resources that you’ll find cater to physical products, and it’s simply not the same when talking about. Digital products. So after nearly a year of testing these strategies, I’m ready to show you exactly how we grew from a $250 a month shop to a 20,000 plus a month shop in under six months. I’ll be showing you this by launching a brand new shop of my own.
So you will get to see how this all happens in real time. Yeah, that’s a little important nugget right there. We are launching an entire new shop that we haven’t told really anyone about yet. And you’re going to see behind the scenes of how we’re doing that, leveraging what we already know in the experience. So topics we’re going to be talking about during the experience include how to actually get to that 100,000 goal. It’s not just an elusive goal. We’re actually going to have a spreadsheet and we’re going to back into that goal with actual data. We’re going to talk about how to run effective marketing campaigns that keep your customers coming back for every single sale. So how do we make sure that we’re being, what, consistent with our marketing efforts? We’re also going to take you behind the scenes of how to make your shop run smoothly. So I already told you how we template tires, but there’s a lot more that goes into it. Not to mention we’re also going to be providing the templates that we use, which are pretty robust. Next, branding tips that will add credibility and expertise to your shop. My sidekick Haley, or we call her my right hand lady, my unicorn. What basically she can do everything I do, but the one thing she does that I don’t do branding. She is our creative wiz and she’s going to give you all the tips and tricks to make sure that your shop looks cohesive and has a professional look and feel.
We’ll also be talking how to quickly create a library of digital products. So I want you to tune in here to what I’m saying. We’re going to teach you how to take content that you’ve already created and repurpose it into profitable digital products that you can put into your shop. And this is a very different mentality than what we teach when we teach and how to create a digital product from scratch. So if you have been creating content online and you have tons of different resources that you may be offered for free, maybe live behind bigger paid products, we’re going to show you how to strip them out and get paid for them. And then probably my favorite topic because I already said I love numbers. Of course, we’re going to be analyzing your shop analytics so that you can make informed and profitable decisions. And yes, there will be more spreadsheets, but I promise it’s not overwhelming. And that is single handedly what will make your shop profitable. Like I said, if you don’t know your numbers, you can’t make good decisions. So you can learn all about this over at Empowered Business dot Co forward slash experience. And I’ll also, of course be sure to link to that in the show notes next week. You’re definitely going to want to tune back in because I’m bringing on one of my good friends, Jennifer Ross Camp, who is going to share how she used my strategies to kickstart her shop and in the first month brought in over 8000.
So make sure to tune in because there are a lot of golden nuggets that you will definitely get from her story. I’d really, really love for you to join us in January for this interactive event. So don’t forget to head on over to Empowered Business Dot Co forward slash experience to learn more about the digital shop experience. And there is also a chat button on that page so you can chat with me any time if you have questions. Unless of course, if I’m sleeping then I’ll get back to you in the morning. So I hope I’ll see you inside the experience. But definitely I hope to see you back here next week to hear all about how these strategies work for other shops other than mine. So don’t forget to tune in. I’ll see you then. 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 that co forward slash soapbox to sign up. See you here again next week.