Should you create a paid email lead magnet?

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I recently generated more than 800 pounds in sales from a 9 97 digital product are products I normally wouldn't sell separately. Now in relation to my overall business turnover, 800 pounds isn't a lot, so why did I bother? I'm Janet Murray. I'm an online content and business strategist. I'm also the creator of the Courageous Content Planner and Content Kit, along with a whole host of content kits that will save you time and trouble with your content.

In this episode of the Courageous Content Podcast, I'll share why I decided to sell this 9 97 product, what I learned from the experience and why I did it. If you sell digital products or you'd like to, you'll find this episode super useful, particularly when it comes to understanding how to increase sales and conversions.

So

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last week I sold my October content templates for 9 97. That's in pounds, by the way. That's a hundred fill in the gap. Social media post templates I created as a bonus for my recent courageous content planet and kit launch. Now, this is a product I normally wouldn't sell separately because the investment of time and energy and the resources from my team in selling a product at that price point.

% on my: 2023

So I wrote three promo emails, three promo social

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media posts, and I think it was a four email follow up sequence. And this all took place over, I think it was a five day period. We ended up selling eight courageous content planners and kits to those people who invested in the October content templates, which generated more than 420 pounds in sales.

Now, that's a 20% conversion rate. Just to put this into context, the average is one to 2%. Now, 800 isn't a large amount in relation to my overall turnover and put that into context. It costs about 10,000 pounds a month just to run my business. So why did I bother? Well, I did it because I wanted to test out a funnel without doing a big product launch.

It took me about two to three hours to create the content. I

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mentioned three social media posts, three emails and four upsell emails. A little bit of time from Julie on my team to set up those emails in Active Campaign, and that's a great conversion rates. Which means I now know that if I want to repeat that funnel next month, so I have a set of fill in the gaps templates for November.

I could sell them at 9. 97, and I know what to do to increase sales and to increase conversions because I've tested out that funnel. I'm sharing this with you because it's so tempting to go big too soon with digital product sales. I've seen it happen time and time again. People spend months, even years, sometimes creating online courses.

They launch and they sell a handful. I've talked about this in many podcast episodes, but

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starting with something small, if it's your very first digital product, I often refer to it as a one module online course. And instead of building a big all singing, all dancing multimodal online course, you just create one thing, one e-book, one online master class, one small toolkit.

You do a launch even if you have a tiny list and you take the data that you generate from doing. You use it to have bigger and better launches, but spending months creating a digital product and then doing a launch for an offer and a funnel that you don't even know if it's gonna work, that just seems like madness to me.

And tweaking and testing is crucial. So based on what I learned from this test and also my previous launch experience, the first thing I would change would be to

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create a wait list for this offer. So tell people ahead of time that my November templates are gonna be available. They're only going to be available for a limited amount of time.

I actually just told people about it. No warning. Showed up and said, Do you wanna buy my templates? Which is fine for a test launch, but to increase sales, you want to give people more notice, not necessarily more time to buy, because if your sales period is too long, then people won't take action. But letting people know that the November templates are going to be available for a limited time, and giving them notice, telling them to get that date on their planner so they don't miss it.

That's the kind of thing that I know from experience will increase sales. And I can also do strategic things like, for example, I've recorded podcast episode every month with content ideas

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for the follow. Month. So I could, for example, publish my November content ideas a little bit earlier than I usually do, and include a call to action to get people to sign up for the wait list for my November templates.

So I've got a warm list of people who are already aware that the templates are gonna be available for 9. 97. They know they're only gonna be available for a limited amount of time because I don't normally sell them separately, which means they're far more likely to take. Another thing I might consider, but possibly not, I need to give this some thought, is possibly extending the sales period to 48 hours rather than 24.

Because 24 is short. It does prompt people to take action, but possibly 48 hours would be better, but I wouldn't want to extend it any longer than that. If you've ever done a digital

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product launch, you'll know it's exhausting and you can't sustain. Over the course of the year, you can't keep showing up and doing launch after launch, after launch.

So short and short is usually better, and it does prompt people to take action. Maybe 24 hours is too short, so I might experiment with that next month. And that is a keyword experiment because that's what you are always doing with this stuff. You're experimenting, you're learning, you're tweaking, you're testing.

That's how you get better. It's how you increase your sales and convers. So essentially what I created here was a paid lead magnet, and you may have been surprised by how few templates I sold. You might have heard me talk about the size of my email list on the podcast before. It's actually 27,000. I don't typically market to the whole list for my recent courageous content planet

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and content kit launch, we only sold to 9,000, but I do have a large list.

You might be thinking, Well, 40 is not very much, is it? A few things I'd say here is there was no warning. I just rocked up, sent a couple of emails, did a couple of social media posts. Very low investment of time, and so it should be for a test offer, but also whenever there is a payment involved, the engagement is always going to be lower.

If I hadn't charged 9 97, I suspect I would've got well over a hundred people signing up, possibly multiple hundreds. But do I need hundreds of people on my list who are going to download by October templates, not use them, not find them valuable, possibly just leave them in their inbox and never touch them ever.

No, I want

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people who genuinely have the problem that my courageous content plan and kit solved. So people who are looking for ways to create more content in less time, people who are looking for a source of inspiration. I don't want time wasters in the nicest possible way. And remember, every person you add to your list, you have to pay for them to be on your list.

So I don't wanna be paying for people who are on my list who are not action takers. They're not ever going to be interested in investing in my products or services to make their life easier. So the average conversion rate for online sales is just one to 2%. So 20% is an excellent conversion rate. Much better to have a smaller number of people who are likely to go on and buy it than to have hundreds of people who are not.

So if you are wondering about that, then that's why I didn't offer it as a free. I have

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done a number of experiments over the years with essentially what are paid league magnets and noticed some really interesting things, which could be a whole podcast episode in itself, but when it's free, you would be amazed by the number of people who don't even open it.

When people have made an investment, even a small investment, they've got some skin in the game, so they're far more likely to take action and actually implement. So to use, in my case, those templates and then to go on and invest in a higher cost product or service. So the takeaway here is if you want to increase sales and conversions from your digital products, a paid lead magnet or a tiny offer, or a small digital product that's really closely linked to the bigger product or service that you want to sell at the end may actually get you better

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results.

If you found this episode useful, then I do have tons more episodes on launch content and launch strategy. I'll just share a few now, but do have a look through the back catalog. Say there's, Do you need an email list to launch an online course? How Kate sold 19 digital products in just 15 minutes, How Susan made six K from her first digital product launch.

de coming up, a debrief of my: 2023

How many posts I created, how long my launch period was, all of the juicy

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stuff that I'm sure that you would love to know that led to a 31,000 pound launch in seven days. That episode is coming soon. That will be a deep dive into the report that I published recently about that launch. If you want to get your hands on that before the podcast, if so comes out, then I will put a link in the show notes.

Look out for the phrase launch debrief report.