10 reasons why your digital product isn't selling (and how to fix them!)

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Did you create a brilliant digital product, but it’s just not selling? Wondering where you’ve gone wrong? Here are 10 reasons why your digital product isn’t selling – and how to fix them!

Have you created a brilliant digital product – maybe an ebook or a course – but it’s just not selling?

This is a common scenario… but the good news is that it’s totally fixable!

Here are the are the 10 most common main reasons why your digital product isn’t selling… and how to fix them!

Mini shopping trolley with folded up dollar bills inside.

1. Failure to Do Adequate Market Research

Hands down the biggest reason why digital product based businesses fail is because they failed to do adequate market research.

You see the thing is, you can do the best marketing in the world… You can have the biggest audience in the world… But if you create a product that no one wants, you will fail!

Market research, at its core, is simply about listening to your audience and finding out what they most need… and then creating that.

The problem is that many online business owners just create what they want to create… and then wonder why it doesn’t sell.

Or else they assume they know what their audience wants… but they fail to actually ask, so they get it wrong… and so they create something their audience does not want… and so their product fails to sell.

The Solution

Do thorough market research to determine what your audience truly needs. There are many ways you can do this. For example you can:

Look at your blog analytics – what are your most popular blog posts? Is there a common thread?
Look at the questions your readers ask you most frequently in your blog comments, social media comments and via email.
Ask your audience directly about via social media and/or your email newsletters.
Use surveys to gather more detailed information about their challenges and needs.

2. Not Understanding the Importance of Email

If you want to build a successful digital product based business, good email marketing is vital. Email marketing will help you do market research, validate your ideas, nurture cold traffic into warm leads and make the sale.

It will also help you onboard your new customers, give your customers a 5* experience and get glowing testimonials.

If you have ever tried to sell a digital product on your website or via social media alone and been unsuccessful, lack of email marketing, or perhaps I should say lack of GOOD email marketing, is almost certainly why you were unsuccessful.

The Solution

Spend time growing an email list of potential customers and nurturing those leads.

To do this, you need to

Create a valuable lead magnet related to your digital product, such as a checklist, a cheat sheet, or a mini-guide.
Promote your lead magnet on social media, on your blog, and anywhere else you can think of
Nurture your list via strategic nurture sequences and email newsletters designed to warm up your leads and get them to a place where they are ready to buy your product.

3. Not Building a Product Ladder

It is incredibly hard to earn a decent full time income from a digital product business if you only sell one product.

If that product is a low ticket product, like an ebook, you need A LOT of sales every single month to make a decent income.

But if that product is a high ticket product, like a signature program, though you need far fewer sales to make a decent income, it’s really hard to sell ANY AT ALL because people just don’t trust you enough to part with that much money.

So how do you square this circle? You need a product ladder!

The Solution

Build a strong product ladder that guides customers from free products (AKA Lead Magnets) to Low Ticket Offers to Mid Price Offers to High Ticket Offers.

4. Not Knowing How to Launch a Product

Another problem I see is a lack of understanding about how to do a launch.

All too often, I see people try to launch digital products by maybe sending one email to their list, maybe doing a little bit of social media and sticking their new product on their website somewhere. And that’s it.

That is not a launch!

And that approach is doomed to failure.

The Solution

A successful launch involves a lot more razmataz.

You need:

To build up your KNOW-LIKE-TRUST factor with your audience via value packed emails and blog posts, before you even think about launching.
To ‘tease’ your ebook BEFORE the launch, so your audience is eagerly anticipating it.
To create a high-converting sales page and attractive sales graphics.
To send an email to your audience EVERY DAY during your launch.
For your launch emails to be well written – persuasive but not overly ‘pushy’ or ‘salesy’.
To support your emails with an effective social media strategy.
A discount and a deadline – give people a strong reason to buy during your launch.

5. Poor pricing strategy

One of the most important decisions you will make when it comes to selling your digital products is THE PRICE.

You can’t just pluck a number out of the air! You need to be strategic about pricing your digital product and do some proper research.

The Solution

You need to conduct thorough market research to understand what your competitors are charging.

You should also consider how much your audience are able to pay and how much they already spend on other products in your niche, as well as how much it would cost to get the result your digital product delivers in some other way.

You also need to factor in your own level of expertise and knowledge, and the size of your audience.

Finally you need to think about your PRICING STRATEGY – because price is not just one number.

For example, will you have a special launch price? Will you have an evergreen pricing strategy? Or will you follow a cart open/closed model? Will you do flash sales? Will you have a tripwire? Will you have upsells and/or downsells? Will you build an evergreen sales funnel? And how does this fit in with the rest of your product ladder?

6. Not Understanding the Importance of Deadlines and Urgency

If you want to succeed in the digital product world. You need to understand the power of deadlines.

You see the thing is, we as humans… we’re pretty hopeless when it comes to making decisions.

So when we see that someone has created some new digital product that is EXACTLY what we need, we tend to do this…

We tend to go ‘oh that’s nice, I’m definitely going to get that… tomorrow’.

And then tomorrow rolls round and we think ‘oh that’s nice, I’m definitely going to get that… tomorrow’.

And then the next tomorrow rolls round and we think ‘oh that’s nice, I’m definitely going to get that… tomorrow’.

And so on, and so on!

And somehow we never quite get round to buying that product.

And that’s where deadlines come in. Deadlines force us to make a decision. We can no longer sit on the fence.

If you see that someone has created some new digital product that would really be perfect for you… and there’s a discount available until midnight tonight… you are not going to put off buying it until tomorrow. You are going to buy it today… because you do not want to miss out on that deadline!

And that’s why deadlines are so important. When you learn how to harness them properly they will massively increase your product sales.

The Solution

Build deadlines and urgency into your pricing strategy to encourage potential customers to take action and make a purchase.

Offer time-limited discounts, bonuses, or incentives to motivate customers to buy now rather than later.

Run flash sales, offer launch discounts, and build out evergreen sales funnels to automate this.

Miniature trolley sitting on a laptop keyboard. The trolley contains a red sign saying 'sale'.

7. A Poorly Designed Sales Page

There are so many things that can go wrong here, but typically the problems fall into 3 camps:

It looks visually unattractive
It’s hard to understand
The sales page fails to convince the reader that they need the product

The Solution

Invest time and effort into designing a sales page that is clear, persuasive and visually attractive. Use compelling copy, visuals, and social proof to convince visitors to make a purchase.

8. Bad Customer Experience

This could be poor teaching, poor presentation, poor aftersales or it could even be that the product just straight-up doesn’t deliver what the marketing promised.

A bad customer experience will result in disappointment, requests for refunds and negative reviews.

Conversely, a good customer experience will result in a whole bunch of testimonials and success stories… Leading to customers becoming advocates for your products…

Leading to customers who sell your product for you via word of mouth marketing, by becoming affiliates for your products, by sharing their success on social media, by giving you testimonials and case studies to put on your sales page and your website, by writing reviews of your product and generally creating a huge buzz and excitement around you and your product.

The Solution

Prioritize customer satisfaction at every stage of your customer journey.

This starts with your product itself. It should be a product that delivers on its promise, a product that gives your customers an amazing customer experience and crucially a product that solves your customer’s problem – a product that gives your customer the transformation or the result that they were hoping for when they bought your product.

But it goes far beyond the product. You need to ensure you are offering excellent customer service and support every step of the way.

9. Lack of Traffic

You can get all the other parts right: you can do amazing market research, you can do incredible marketing, and you can have the most brilliant product… but if you have no audience… if you have no traffic… well no one will ever know!

The Solution

First, you need to harness the power of digital product specific SEO, keyword research and content marketing to attract the right kind of people to your website.

Because with a digital product business, you don’t want to attract everyone – just potential customers, just people who would be a perfect fit for your product.

But you need to go beyond SEO and tap into alternative sources of traffic such as speaking on podcasts and at summits, participating in bundles, Facebook ads, list swaps, JV webinars… even social media and Pinterest.

And you need to have a way of converting that traffic into subscribers and then customers via a strong Lead Magnet and Product Ladder.

Miniature trolley containing dollar bills, next to a laptop.

10. Not Understanding How People Buy Digital Products

The way people buy digital products is fundamentally different to the way they buy physical products and requires a very a different approach to marketing and sales.

It goes something like this…

Someone who is your ideal customer has a problem… So they google that problem and they land on a blog post on your website, which helps them a little bit with their problem… And they see somewhere in that blog post a lead magnet – a freebie that helps them a bit more with their problem – and all they need to do to get it is give you their email address.

So, they sign up for your freebie and now you can send them nurture emails – these nurture emails will typically do 3 things: they will help your potential customer to understand their problem better, they will help your potential customer see that your digital product is the best solution to their problem and your emails will help your potential customer know, like and trust you enough to consider buying your digital product.

If you’ve done a good job with your email marketing, your potential customer is at some point going to click on a link in one of those emails and go through to your sales page. There your sales page will continue the work that your nurture emails started and will further convince your prospect that they need your digital product – that your digital product is the perfect solution to their problem, that you can be trusted, and that your product actually does work.

To maximize your sales, you will generally also want to include some form of deadline – to get them off the fence and to give them a good reason why they should buy your product now, rather than putting it off until later… This could be a price discount if they buy before the deadline, but it could also be a time-limited bonus or some other incentive to buy before the timer hits zero.

So, thanks to all this pre-work, your lead will hopefully buy your product and be delighted with their purchase. They will have a good onboarding experience, they’ll read the ebook or they’ll do the course, they’ll get the outcome that they were hoping for – in other words you’ll solve their problem.

And finally, if they have a good experience… they’ll write a brilliant testimonial which you can put on your sales page, they’ll tell their friends about it, they’ll maybe join your affiliate program… and that will lead to more sales.

In fact, if you get this right it become a virtuous circle.

The Solution

You need to understand the unique buying behaviour of digital consumers, such as the importance of traffic, email marketing, trust, deadlines, and social proof, and tailor your strategies accordingly.

A ROADMAP TO DIGITAL PRODUCT SUCCESS…

As you can see, building a successful digital product business requires a lot of moving parts: market research, email marketing, product creation, pricing strategy, building a product ladder, writing a high converting sales page, nurture sequences, sales sequences, evergreen sales funnels, tripwires, beta launches, flash sales, gathering testimonials, digital product specific SEO and more!

When you join the DPSA, you let me worry about all of the moving parts, and you just focus on following the next step on the roadmap, knowing I’ve got everything planned and happening at exactly the right time…

DPSA is for you, if you want to…

👉 Earn more from the traffic you already have: Digital product RPMs are considerably better than RPMs from ads, affiliates and sponsored posts.

👉 Stop worrying about whether you’ll be wiped out in the next Google algorithm update: Because you don’t need those crazy-high pageviews, selling digital products makes you A LOT less dependent on Google.

👉 Mitigate against cookiepocalypse: Truth be told, no one really knows what will happen when Google finally gets rid of 3rd party cookies – but if the doom-mongers are to be believed it could have a significant negative effect on ad revenues.

👉 Be ahead of the curve: Google has said it plans to phase out cookies for 100% of Chrome users in Q1 2025. If cookiepocalyse is bad, guess what every blogger will be doing at the beginning of 2025? Get ahead of the curve by starting NOW!

👉 Have a less precarious business: If you get the majority of your traffic from Google and the majority of your income from ads, you don’t need me to tell you that is a very precarious place to be… Diversifying into digital products reduces risk and increases income – so it’s a win-win!

👉 Have a lot of fun along the way: Join a community of like-minded bloggers and online business owners who are all working towards the same goal!

Want to know what it’s like on the inside?

If you’re wondering what it’s actually like inside the Digital Product Success Academy, you can check out what other DPSAers are saying about the DPSA experience here.

Here’s a sneak peek:

“What I love about DPSA is that it is a hands-on, guided, and methodical approach to creating information products. Each step builds upon the previous one, and each task is small enough so there is no overwhelm.

Information is provided in multiple formats, which reduces confusion and fosters focus. The community is refreshingly helpful and supportive”

Michelle Dear-Moncrief, Makers Corner Crafts

“The DPSA is pretty much the best thing ever if you’re serious about making money and seeing growth with your blog. Eb is the perfect person to provide this kind of membership; her background in both marketing and teaching and then, of course, blogging is so evident and so helpful.

Having the DPSA broken down into challenges is genius. It helps keep motivation high since there is a finish line to get to and celebrate every few weeks. And each challenge is broken down into perfect bite-size pieces that are doable and not overwhelming but new and challenging at the same time.

One of my favorite things is that I know Eb has everything planned out and taken care of. I am a super detail-oriented person who wants to do everything and do it right, so it is SO nice to be able to just do what Eb says each day and trust that if something needs to be done, she will tell me and she’ll tell me how and when to do it.

My other favorite part is the DPSA Facebook Community. Having a place to go to ask questions and get feedback is invaluable — especially because Eb is so active in the group and does her best to respond to everyone’s questions.

Honestly, she really should be charging more. I 100% recommend signing up for the membership. Thank you Eb!”

Allison Clark, Give Birth Give Life

“With the information provided so far I feel much more confident that I can build a successful digital product side to my business. The way Eb delivers the information is easy to understand and follow. There is so much support from Eb and the other members of the DPSA. I am loving it so far!”

Lauren Woodger, The Scatty Mum

“If you’re looking to launch your next digital product, Digital Product Success Academy is for you. It’s not just about the easy-to-follow challenges on marketing strategy, and how to launch your product the right way. It’s also about a community of like-minded people to bounce ideas off and get feedback and help from. And I love that you get direct feedback from Eb as well.”

Mariska Ramondino, My Chef’s Apron

“As a food blogger who’s put off digital product marketing for a long time, I find Eb’s DPSA incredibly useful.

It feels like she’s done all the tedious planning for me—from starting out, to what’s needed, and how to reach my goals.

I also really enjoy the DPSA Facebook community. It’s a fantastic place to ask questions. Eb answers each one personally and provides valuable feedback and ideas. You can really tell she has a background in teaching.”

Zerrin Gunaydin, Give Recipe

If that sounds like something you’d love to be a part of, head here to find out more >>> Digital Product Success Academy

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