Ep 113 Common Mistakes That Kill Digital Product Sales - Part 2

Have you ever created a digital product that you genuinely believed would fly off the shelves... only to hear crickets?

It's frustrating, isn't it?

You know your resource is good. You've poured hours into creating it. It's beautifully designed, full of value and solves a real problem for your audience.

Yet the sales never quite arrive.

The truth is, creating great digital products for dietitians is only half the job. The other half is building a sales process that consistently brings people from "That looks interesting" to "I'm buying this today."

Last week I talked about the foundational mistakes people make before creating a digital product. Things like choosing an offer nobody has actually asked for or pricing it in a way that doesn't make sense. Those foundations matter enormously.

But even if you've got all of that right, there are still a few common mistakes that quietly stop your product from selling.

Let's look at three of the biggest ones.

 

Mistake 1: Not Using Email Marketing

If I could only choose one marketing channel for selling digital products, it would be email every single time.

I know that's probably not the glamorous answer.

Instagram is fun. Podcasts are brilliant. Blogging is one of my favourite long-term strategies.

But email is where sales happen.

The people on your email list have already raised their hand and said, "I'm interested."

They've downloaded a free guide.

Taken your quiz.

Signed up for a webinar.

They're no longer strangers scrolling past your content while waiting for the kettle to boil.

They're people who've invited you into their inbox.

That changes everything.

 

Why Email Converts Better

One of the best examples comes from my children's nutrition business.

More than 5,000 parents downloaded my Fussy Eater Quiz.

Around 4,600 of them then entered an automated email sequence that nurtured them over the following days.

That sequence generated around 300 sales.

A conversion rate of roughly 6.5%.

Now imagine if I'd simply delivered the quiz and left it there.

No follow-up.

No education.

No reminders.

No encouragement.

Most people would have forgotten they even downloaded it within a few days.

The email sequence was doing the heavy lifting while I was out walking Dustin, spending time with my family or working with clients.

That's exactly what good systems should do.

 

"But I Don't Know What To Write..."

This is the objection I hear most often.

Closely followed by:

"I don't want to sound salesy."

Or...

"I simply don't have time."

The reality is these aren't reasons to avoid email marketing.

They're reasons to build a simple automated system that works in the background.

Once you've created it, it continues working for you every day.

If email marketing feels overwhelming, I'd recommend reading my post on How to Build a Successful Healthcare Business, where I explain how lead generation and email marketing fit into a sustainable business model.

 

Mistake 2: Only Talking About Your Product When It's New

This one catches almost everyone out.

You launch your new guide.

You're excited.

You mention it on Instagram.

You send a couple of emails.

Maybe you pop it onto your website.

Then...

Silence.

You assume everyone has seen it.

You worry you're becoming repetitive.

So you move on to talking about something else.

The problem?

Most people never saw it in the first place.

Only a tiny percentage of your audience sees each social media post.

Many subscribers never open every email.

And new people are joining your audience every week.

For them, your product is completely new.

 

Repetition Isn't Pushy

One of my own digital products, my portion size guides, taught me this lesson perfectly.

When I mentioned them consistently from different angles, they regularly generated between £400 and £800 each month.

When I stopped mentioning them...

Sales slowed almost immediately.

Nothing about the guide had changed.

Only my marketing had.

That's why I always encourage my clients to stop thinking about repetition and start thinking about variety.

You don't need to repeat the same post.

You simply need different conversations around the same solution.

For example, you might:

• Bust a common myth.
• Share a client success story.
• Explain a common mistake.
• Answer a frequently asked question.
• Show what's actually inside the resource.
• Explain why you created it.

Same product.

Completely different conversations.

That's what effective marketing for dietitians looks like.

If you'd like more ideas for building a sustainable marketing strategy, my article Starting an Online Health Business: 3 Simple Shifts to Grow expands on how consistency always beats trying to be everywhere at once.

 

Mistake 3: Having No Next Step

Here's something I think many clinicians overlook.

Buying isn't the end of the customer journey.

It's the beginning.

Imagine seeing a patient once and then never arranging a follow-up.

It would feel incomplete.

Yet that's exactly how many businesses are set up.

Someone buys a £19 guide...

And then that's it.

No next offer.

No continued support.

No natural progression.

Your digital product should act as the first stepping stone.

Perhaps someone buys a guide.

That leads to a membership.

The membership leads to a group programme.

The group programme leads to one-to-one support.

Each offer naturally prepares them for the next.

Not because you're trying to squeeze every penny from them.

But because you've genuinely solved one problem and they're now ready for the next stage.

The hardest sale you'll ever make is the first one.

After that, trust already exists.

Don't waste it.

 

A Simple Sales Process Beats Constant Content Creation

One of the biggest misconceptions I see is that more sales come from creating more content.

Actually...

They usually come from improving the journey your audience takes after they've found you.

Think about it.

If someone downloads your free resource today, what happens next?

Do they receive helpful emails?

Do they hear about your digital product?

Do they understand why it helps?

Do they know what to do after they've bought it?

If the answer is no, that sales process is probably where your biggest opportunity sits.

 

Three Questions To Ask Yourself Today

Before you close this page, ask yourself:

• Do I have an automated email sequence that gently leads people towards my digital product?
• When was the last time I talked about my product from a fresh angle?
• What is the natural next step after someone buys from me?

If you can answer all three confidently, you're already ahead of most people.

If not, don't panic.

These are systems you can build one step at a time.

 

You Don't Need More Ideas. You Need Better Systems.

Creating digital products isn't really about building another PDF or another course.

It's about creating a business that gives you more freedom.

More consistency.

More financial stability.

That's exactly what I help dietitians, nutritionists and other registered health professionals do inside Accelerate.

Together we validate your ideas, create offers people genuinely want, build simple marketing systems and put the sales process in place so your business doesn't rely on constantly chasing the next client.

If you'd like to explore whether it's the right next step for you, I'd love to chat.

You can book a free 20-minute discovery call here:

https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/yes

Sometimes one conversation is all it takes to see exactly what's missing and where your biggest opportunity lies.

The Master Plan:

Helping you build the business of your dreams. Get your 22 point step-by step workbook here: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/master-plan

Connect with me:

Website: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dietitiansinbusiness/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dietitiansinbusiness

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/beyondtheclinicbusiness

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BeyondTheClinicPodcast 

Episode transcription:

Welcome along. Digital products can be one of the best things that you can add into your business, in my opinion, because when they're working well, they can bring in passive sales every single day and help you build a business that supports you financially without you needing to be on all the time. However, just because you create a digital product, doesn't automatically mean it will sell consistently, even if the offer itself is fantastic. And a lot of people realize that the hard way.

There's usually a few critical mistakes that people make along the way. Now in last week's episode, we talked about the foundational mistakes that you might be making when creating your digital products that are costing you sales. So things like having an offer that isn't validated, for instance, make sure you go back and give that episode a listen first before you jump into this one. Because today we're going to be talking about why, despite the fact you've actually done a lot of those foundational things right,

your digital product still isn't selling the way that you expect it to.

Now your digital product might be perfectly validated. People want it. It's perfectly priced and you have all of those other foundational bits and pieces ticked off. But if there are mistakes in the sales process, you're still going to struggle to sell your offer, no matter how brilliant the offer itself is. So today we're diving into three mistakes in your sales process that could be quietly costing you digital product sales right now.

And this includes the one mistake that I see almost universally, and that is single-handedly responsible for more lost revenue than anything else. So go and grab a cuppa or whatever your drink of choice is, and let's dive into today's episode.

So mistake number one is not using email as part of your sales process. And you know what? This is a really important one because email is genuinely the single most effective place to sell your offers, including digital products. If you aren't leveraging email marketing in your business, trust me, you are missing a massive trick. There are tons of reasons for this. Firstly, because

People on your email list have already taken some kind of action to get there. They've clicked something, they've downloaded something, they've opted in for something.

However they've got onto your list, they've actively shown interest in what you do.

And that means they're not randoms anymore. They're warmer. And as a result, email is where most people typically move from interested to ready to buy. And the other key reason email is so powerful is because it allows you to properly nurture people over time and guide them from that initial interest in getting a solution for their problem, likely via a freebie they downloaded, into making a buying decision.

To show you just how important email really is for selling digital products, let me give you a very quick example from my nutrition business. So a total of 5,100-ish people downloaded my Fussy Eater free quiz. And from there, around 4,600 of those people went through the full email sequence that I created and set up in the background. And that ultimately resulted in around 300 sales.

Now that was a six and a half percent conversion rate, which is a really phenomenal percentage by industry standards. Now just imagine for a second, if email wasn't part of that, imagine if those same 5,100 people downloaded my free quiz and then they got sent to a thank you page with their quiz results and maybe they got a confirmation email too, but then no email sequence was set up behind it. In other words, there was no strategic

next step set up.

If that was the case, the majority of those people probably would have downloaded the quiz, looked at it once and then completely forgotten about me a few days later. And I certainly would not have made those 300 odd sales because without the email sequences, there's no consistent automated relationship building, no sales mechanism doing the work between opt in and purchase. The email sequences I set up in the background

were what kept bringing them back into the conversation, reminding them of their problem, building trust and showing them the next steps when they were actually ready for it. If I didn't have any of this, I'd basically be relying on social media alone to carry the weight of the sales. And what you'll find is social media is great for grabbing attention, but that's pretty much it. Email is what actually turns attention into sales.

Now I found there's usually three reasons health professionals avoid using email in their business. Number one, they don't know what to say. Number two, they don't want to be salesy. And number three, they say, I don't have time, which is usually the biggest one. But none of those are actually reasons for not using email marketing. In fact, they're all reasons to build the right system so that you're not continually doing email manually. Because when it's set up properly,

with nicely automated sequences, it becomes one of the most powerful and time efficient parts of your entire sales process. And once you know what you're doing, it actually becomes really, simple to set these things up. So honestly, do not let the tech side put you off. It's far easier than most people think.

Okay, now let's move on to mistake number two. And that's only talking about your digital product when it's new. So what tends to happen is you create your digital product, you get it out into the world, you're excited and you start talking about it on social media and in your emails, you do it for a few weeks, you'll pop it on your website, but then you start to pull back a bit. It might start to feel a bit like you've been talking about the same thing a bit too much. You might think,

Well, surely people would have seen it by now. Surely people who wanted it would have already bought it. And so you ease off, you stop talking about it as much, you might go on and do other things, and it kind of just sits there on your website, occasionally gets mentioned by you now and then.

And what ends up happening as a result is that digital product only ever makes a small fraction of the sales that it could be making. Remember, people need to be reminded of things more than we think they do. Most people also aren't seeing everything you post. And even if they did see it once, they're not usually ready to buy the first time they hear about it. On top of that, your audience is constantly growing. Well, ideally anyway.

So new people should be coming into your world all the time. And for them, your digital product isn't something that they've already seen. For them, it's brand new. So if you're only talking about it for a short burst of time after you've created it, you're missing all of those new people completely. So I'll give you another real example from my children's nutritionist business. Those potion size guides that I've talked about before are a really great example of this.

There were months where they brought in anywhere between 400 and 800 pounds. And the only thing that really changed was how much I talked about them. When I talked about them consistently across my Instagram stories and in my emails with different angles, they'd sell closer to the 800 pound mark. When I didn't, slowed right down. It was as simple as that. And I had the same experience with my food bingo game, another one of my low price offers.

I remember looking at sales at the end of one month thinking, well, why hasn't no one bought this this month? What's going on here? And then I realized rather embarrassingly that it was simply because I hadn't mentioned it to them that month. Silly, right? My audience hadn't seen it anywhere near enough. And this is where a lot of dietitians feel uncomfortable.

There's this deep discomfort around repetition in marketing because it can feel like you're being pushy or persuasive. But the reality is most people don't see the content that you're posting. On Instagram, only a small percentage. The last statistics I read suggested it was around 6 % of your audience who sees anyone post. And the average email is only opened by 20 to 40 % of subscribers.

And then on top of that, people need to see something multiple times in different ways before they actually take action. That's just human buying behavior. So repetition isn't annoying your audience. You can sell the same thing, but you do need to talk about it in a different way. And often it's just giving them enough chances to stop and take notice. For instance, with those portion size guides, I could talk about them from a dozen different angles.

One post might be busting a myth. Another might be a post showing that I understand the struggles and worries and anxiety around feeding your child enough. Another might then be around sharing an example of a client and how they use the guide. And another might be what the portions actually look like on a child's plate. So instead of repeating the same message over and over and over again, you just find different angles.

And then last but not least, mistake number three isn't actually about the digital product itself. It's about what happens after someone has bought it. And that is not having a backend offer for people to move into once they bought from you.

So someone might buy your digital product and absolutely love it. It might help them solve a key problem that they've been struggling with, but then you might not have a next step for them. So there's nowhere for them to go next to help them with their next struggle or their next goal. And you know what? That is a huge missed opportunity because the hardest part of selling is getting someone to buy from you the first time.

that first sale takes trust building

but once someone has already bought from you once, a lot of the hard work, it's already done. They already trust you enough to buy from you. They already believe that you can help with their problem and they've already had a really good experience from your first offer. If you don't have a next step, it means every sale is just a one-off transaction. So what I'd recommend is you having a backend offer.

That way your digital product becomes the entry point to a much longer customer journey. And I always explain this using a really simple clinical analogy. Think about this. A patient doesn't usually come for a one-off appointment and that's it. There's often an assessment and then perhaps a prescription or a treatment. And then there's the follow-up and then there's typically some form of ongoing support. And your offer suite should work in exactly the same way.

So for example, your digital product might be the first step, so the entry level support. Then your backend offer might be something that's a bit deeper, more ongoing or even more personalized. So for example, a low cost guide might lead onto a subscription. Then a subscription might lead onto a group program. And then a group program might lead onto one-to-one support. So see how each step naturally builds on the one before it.

So the key question to ask yourself is really simple. If someone buys this offer from me, what would genuinely be the next thing that they'd need afterwards? Because that next step is your backend offer. It's worth saying that this doesn't all need to exist before you launch your first product. You don't need a fully mapped out, perfectly polished ecosystem of offers before you start selling your first digital product.

But what you do need is an awareness of where it could naturally lead next, because your first offer is really just the starting point. It's you testing and learning and seeing what people respond to and beginning to understand what your audience actually needs more of. The backend offer can evolve over time. It can come from listening to what people ask for after they've bought and noticing where they still feel stuck. Or it can work the other way around. You could start with the backend.

and your front end offer can evolve from there. So think of it less like something that you need to perfectly create upfront and have ready and more like something that will just become clear over time. The overall lesson here is really simple. Your happiest customers are always your warmest audience for whatever comes next.

So a really quick reminder. Number one is email, email, email. Email is the one of the most powerful tools you have when it comes to selling in general, but definitely for selling digital products. Ideally, you want to have a simple automated email sequence set up so that when someone downloads a freebie, you're gently guiding them to take that next step with something that's relevant and low cost that feels like a really easy yes for them at that moment.

Number two, talk about your digital products more than you think you should because sales come from consistency and from repeating the same message, but in different ways. And then number three, every buyer needs a next step. Without a backend offer, your digital product becomes a one-off distraction instead of the start of an ongoing relationship.

Now here's a few quick questions to ask yourself based on what we've covered today. Do you have an email sequence set up that actually supports your digital product and moves people towards it after they've shown interest? Or are you relying on social media alone to try and make those sales? When did you last talk about your digital product? And are you giving people different reasons to be interested or care about it?

or are you just repeating the same message? And last but not least, do you have a backend offer for people to move into after they've purchased your digital product?

Now there are some amazing dietitians inside Accelerate, my business coaching program, who are now selling their digital products really successfully. And it's made a huge difference to their business. These offers give them more consistent income, more stability and more freedom in how they work. And that's come from me supporting them with the full A to Z of everything from validating and shaping their ideas to creating those digital products that actually convert.

pricing them appropriately, and then building out the simple systems to sell them consistently without adding loads more to their workload. But this is just one part of what we do inside My Business Coaching. I meet you where you're at in your business. We look at the whole picture and what actually needs to happen next to accelerate you forward. No matter if you're brand new to business or five years in.

If you want consistent clients and a predictable income every month and also a business that feels easy and effortless to run, that's exactly what I can help you create inside Accelerate. If you're a bit interested, it's worth booking a free discovery call. We can then have a 20 minute chat about what's currently happening in your business where things might be stuck and what might be realistic in order to move the needle forwards for you.

And even if we decide that now is not the right time, or this is perhaps not the right program for you, you will leave with a clearer direction and a better understanding of what needs to shift in your client getting process. So if that sounds helpful, I'd love for you to book your call using the link in the show notes. Bye for now.