After the pandemic boom, when everyone was living online, digital products (courses or others) have steadily dropped, both in terms of sales and completion.
Why?
Who’s to blame?
How can you fix it?
We’re exploring all of the above today, after we welcome this issue’s partner, someone whose sage advice I keep returning to whenever I steer away from the healthy path.
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In the digital product world, as in any other industry, there are two types of failures:
- The failure to sell the product
- The failure to fully use what has been purchased
You could say that the latter is on the client — they bought the damn thing, why don’t they get their money’s worth? But the issue is thornier and more nuanced.
More on that below. Let’s start with the first type of failure.
Failure to sell. Why aren’t people buying digital products anymore?
I’m sorry to break it to you, but they are. People are consuming more digital goods than ever before. There was a lull in the consumption of digital goods after the pandemic, especially in the educational area, but we seem to have passed that (see the last section of this email for a sad explanation).
The online education market is still growing healthily year-over-year. The user penetration rate is expected to surpass 15% in 2025. In other words, 15% of internet users will pay for online education.
If your digital products aren’t selling as well as you had hoped, here are a few reasons why this might be happening.
Why aren’t people buying MY digital product?
The first reason is the easiest to fix:
- There’s no clear outcome
You’ve heard it before: people buy outcomes, not features. That’s true in every industry.
Fix it: tell people what transformation they can expect. Think of those before-and-after fitness pictures — can you paint such a picture with words on your sales page.
For example, on the Guided Strategy Framework landing page, I tell readers that they can “go from idea to ROI”. A clear transformation is outlined.
However, outcome isn’t everything. There are a lot of empty promises out there and, lo and behold, people have caught on.
2. They don’t need it
It’s very tempting to “productize” your knowledge. There are countless advisors who tell you it’s the only way to sell at scale i.e. make more money than you possibly could by offering it as a service.
However, not everything is a good fit for productization.
Fix it: the easiest way to avoid launching something people don’t need is to ask before you even start working on it. Not sure how to do that? I wrote an in-depth piece on how to build something there is demand for and I gave away my full process for building a product with the help of my audience.
Another read to help you decide whether you should productize your knowledge or not.
3. Your products feel transactional, not relational
The downside of digital products (courses, PDF downloads, templates) is that users are left to fend for themselves once they buy. It’s up to them how they implement it — if they ever do.
Again, people have caught up, and many prefer to pay for a service that fixes the problem or a 1:1 consultation. This way, there is a relational aspect and the buyers feel supported.
Fix it: how can you add a bit of relational value to a digital product? For the same product, the Guided Strategy Framework, the full headline is “go from idea to ROI with expert marketing guidance”.
Throughout the page, I tell people they have me in their corner every step of the way, explaining how to fill in the framework and where to source the data from.
There’s another way to do this: add a 1:1 component to your digital products.
My Audience Accelerator clients can choose their experience: entirely DIY (but with action items for every lesson), limited support, and full support for a month.
Katelyn Bourgoin does a similar thing for one of her products.
You can buy the cheat sheet as is or you can grab a 30-min call to make sure you use it right.
4. Information overload
The curse of knowledge is real. You know a lot about the topic of your course or PDF (or, you should, if you’re selling educational products), so you feel compelled to add every bit of information in there.
In some cases, we do it because we want to prove we were the right choice — everyone’s a bit insecure in this industry.
In other cases, we do it out of a genuine desire to help the buyer get from newbie to proficient as fast as possible.
However,
- The product isn’t about you and people can sense insecurity.
- Most of your clients don’t need to be as proficient in [course topic] as you are, they just need to learn how to get by.
Fix it: ask yourself this: “will this lesson get my clients closer to the outcome I promised?” If the answer isn’t a resounding “yes”, delete it. You don’t need it. THEY don’t need it.
I spoke about resisting the urge to add a million bonuses to your course or program in last week’s issue. You can read it here if you missed it.
If your course has a curriculum that rivals a college textbook, your potential buyers are going to feel overwhelmed just by reading through your landing page.
Side note: do you know how hard it was for me to condense Audience Accelerator to 84 minutes including action items?
I wanted to talk about social media algorithms at length, why building an audience matters, and give a ton of examples of how a large audience means a more lucrative business. But I knew that people either knew all that or they didn’t care. So I stuck to stuff they could actually use to grow a relevant audience.
Lastly, the toughest pill to swallow:
5. They don’t trust you enough
It stings, I know. You’re an expert (a real expert!) and people would still rather buy from the latest internet sensation who’s been at it for a whole six months, whereas you have decades of experience.
Here’s the thing: expertise is not the same thing as reputation.
Back in 2007, the Washington Post did a social experiment. They had Joshua Bell, one of the world’s best violinists play outside a crowded metro stop to see if anyone would notice. He used a $3.5 million violin. Granted, he played an obscure piece.
Over 1,000 passed by within 45 minutes. “Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run — for a total of $32 and change.”
$32 and change for a musician whose concert tickets sell for $100.
A single person recognized him.
Sure, classical music doesn’t have hordes of fans anymore, you could argue. Still, it’s a harsh lesson on why context matters.
Reputation is what people pay for above everything else. Yes, even above outcomes and money-back guarantees.
Your buyers need to trust that you are the person to guide them through solving their problems.
Fix it: building your reputation isn’t a one-and-done type of thing. It’s something you work on continuously. You don’t have to be Seth Godin to sell a course or a PDF cheat sheet but you have to tell people why they should buy from you.
Make sure you answer this question on your landing page and in every sales asset you have: “why YOU and not someone else?” Go beyond the product’s value and explain why YOU are the ideal seller.
OK, now that you know what to do to sell your digital products, let’s see how you can get buyers to use them too.
Why would you even bother getting them to use the products?
I mean, they already paid, right? You cashed in on your knowledge, the ball is in their court now.
Fair. Almost fair.
Supermarket owners don’t follow you home to see whether you’re going to eat those 7 bananas or let them rot on the counter, right? So why should you bother?
Well, for two reasons:
- It’s the decent thing to do. It’s not an obligation (the obligatory steps ended when you delivered the product) but it’s something that sets you apart.
- Happy clients make excellent brand ambassadors. They are more likely to recommend your products to someone else if they actually used them.
If your clients win, you win.
Why buyers don’t use digital products and what you can do about it
The average digital course completion rate is 12.6% across industries.
Abysmally low. And that’s if you convince some people to buy, which is hard in itself.
Audience Accelerator, my course, has a 41% completion rate, well above average but I still consider it low.
I plan to help my students along the way — I will implement some of the things below, something I should have done when I first launched it. But hey, better late than never, right?
Here we go:
- People have more money than time
A pretty great problem to have. This is why many of them buy courses, cheat sheets, PDFs, and more only to add them to a digital graveyard they never visit.
Sometimes, life gets in the way. It took me three months to go through a course I had every intention of completing within a week because I got sick, the deadlines started to pile up, and I got more clients than I had expected in a very short time.
Fix it: there’s nothing much you can do when life gets in the way, really. This one’s not on you. You do, however, have a say in the things below:
2. You minimized the complexity of your product
You get what you put in with DIY products. Your buyers know there is some work for them to do but do they have the full picture?
A marketing trope encourages you to “sell the destination, not the trip.” Lead with stunning beaches, not the cramped economy seat you’ll be stuck in for ages to get there.
You can’t quit mid-trip to an exotic beach (it’s dangerous AF!) but you can ditch a digital product you bought because it takes more of your time than you expected.
Fix it: tell people about the trip too. Tell them how long it takes to complete a course, fill in a template, or how long until they see results.
For instance, on the Guided Strategy Framework landing page, I tell readers it takes hours to fill it in. Since I can’t possibly know how long it takes each individual buyer, I don’t give a precise timeframe.
I can do that for my pre-written launch email sequence, though, because I timed it: it’s as little as 45 seconds per email.
Pro tip: if you have to do estimates, be generous with them. I know, saying it takes one hour to become a millionaire would sell more products. But be realistic and remember that, unlike you, the person who is proficient enough at something to sell educational products about it, your audience is not. That’s why they bought from you in the first place.
3. You leave buyers to fend for themselves
Even if it’s a DIY product, the buyer shouldn’t have to feel all alone.
Fix it: check in with your buyers after a couple of days. Ask if they need support to complete the course or use the product. Ask them if they find it useful thus far. Ask anything relevant, just don’t vanish.
It’s something I’m guilty of for some of my products and I plan to fix that soon.
4. You don’t make it easy to get a win from your product
Most courses and educational products in general are longer than they should be and they’re rarely as actionable as they could be.
We tend to cover our bases by giving a lot of background information, justifications, and explanations. So people quit after going through 12% of the product (see stats above).
Fix it: don’t go too deep if you don’t need to. If you’re not teaching an academic course, you can skip the history of the platform and the typical best practices that everyone knows.
Also, give your buyers a way to apply this as soon as possible. It’s something I struggled with for a while (and, honestly, the reason it took me so long to launch my first course).
The way I solved it was by adding a short (1 minute or less) video after each lesson called “Action Item”. This tells my students exactly what they need to do to apply what they learned. Some of these action items take them 10 minutes (quick wins FTW!), while others take longer.
But they’re there. They’re a way for buyers to apply what they learn, not rage quit the course because there’s no clear next step.
Your action item
See what I did there?
Listen, there are a lot of variables to a successful product and a few of them are not within your control. What is always within your control is how honest you are with yourself.
Like it or not, this will determine the success of your product.
Is there demand for it? Are you the right person to teach it? Do you have a format that’s easily digestible and applicable? Do you have a large enough audience to sell info products?
Answer these questions honestly and you’ll either build a product everyone raves about or invest your time in something more lucrative. Either way, you win.
Adriana’s Picks
We tend to blame low sales on post-pandemic slumps. People spend less time indoors, so less time consuming digital products. Do they, though? A new study has revealed that 74% of restaurant traffic came from orders. Fewer and fewer people dine with friends and more and more people spend an increasing amount of time in their homes, alone or with their immediate family.
Read the full article: The Anti-Social Century. It’s a fascinating, albeit harrowing read.
