These days many information marketers are seemingly like lemmings, following the crowd mindlessly into danger without testing the waters themselves first. And many will drown. The current danger is what I call the “Digital Only” pond.
There seems to be a big push these days to do entire information products in digital only format – PDFs, mp3s and the like. The belief is that due to the lower costs of digital delivery you will have increased profits. You may. Or you may not.
The natural conclusion one might draw from lowered delivery costs is that you’ll put more money in your pocket for each sale because you didn’t have to go to the expense of printing up manuals, duplicating CDs and DVDs, packaging it all together and shipping it to your customer.
But what about the sales you might have lost because of those people who didn’t buy because they are tactile. They like to see the big box arrive and see all the stuff they have bought. They want to be able to curl up on the couch and read your manual, not stare at a computer screen for several hours reading a PDF. They want to be able to pop a CD into their car and listen to you on the go.
If these people didn’t purchase because there wasn’t a physical component to your package then you lost out entirely. And it’s these lost sales that you must factor into the determination of your potential overall profits.
Do I believe you should have an immediately downloadable version of your entire course or at least parts of it? Absolutely. Immediate gratification is an important aspect of building an information marketing business. Do I also believe you should have a physical component to your package? Absolutely.
I can just hear some of you crying “But what about all the hard costs of doing a physical product?” Here’s an interesting case study as reported by Dan Kennedy in the April issue of his ‘No B.S. Marketing Letter’ you’ll want to consider.
“I have a client who switched delivery of a very elaborate home study course to PDF, online without lowering its $495.00 price, added a “deluxe option” including a printed copy i.e. “library edition” delivered in a box for $200.00 more, and in 3 months, over 65% of the 300 or so buyers have bit on the deluxe upsell, and overall conversions barely dipped a smidgen.”
Interesting. Very interesting indeed. So here’s the bottom line. Don’t blindly follow the pack into the “Digital Only” pond. Test. Find out what your market responds to. You may make more money doing digital only. You may make more offering both. But don’t assume one or the other will win up front. Test it and let the numbers tell you who the winner is in your situation.
