The client: a successful creator of beautiful, useful digital planning tools and resources.

The problem: she had hit a 15K month in passive income through digital product sales before, and wasn’t sure how to 1. Hit it again and 2. Make it a regular thing. She also wasn’t sure what part of her marketing to focus on, or whether she should create new products instead.

1. How could she get more consistent revenue?
2. How could she increase sales overall?
3. In order to hit those goals, should she 1. Create new products or 2. Focus on marketing, and if so, which parts and how?

The goal: scaling her income, having more control over her marketing, hitting 30K months and a more stable income. Helping her answer the question:
“What’s actually working and what do I need to spend my time and energy on to get to my goals?”

Meet Karen! She’s a lovely, enthusiastic, hard-working digital planner creator and texture designer from Mexico. We met in person when she came to my very first meetup in London, and we’re now diving in to her strategy for growing her business.

Together, we identified a few things.

1. All of her products were low-priced (around $25) and the same type of products (digital planners).
2. Most clients just bought one.
3. Most of her sales came through her Etsy store.
4. Karen also wanted to build more of a community

Karen had great statistics on her social media, such as a million impressions on Pinterest a month and engagement on Instagram and Youtube. However, the big challenge was customer retention.

Think of it this way – a customer or client who has already bought from you has already gone through a lot of the relationship-building process with you. They know you and trust you enough to have paid you for something!

With her social media reach, Karen already had visibility and enough customers to have hit a 15K month – but to stabilise her income, we had to focus first on getting the existing customers coming back for more.

But the big problem was that people were buying but then she had no way of contacting them again.
This is a big deal in the online marketing world.

1. You want to warm up the relationships you just built.
2. You want a way to connect with your past customers when you have new products or offers to share about
3. You want to have a better idea of what your customers want next. We can’t create in a vacuum!

Brainstorming:

Increasing revenue:
We came up with the idea of a membership. This would tick several of Karen’s goals – building community and increasing her revenue! Great, right?

Karen’s average price for her one-off purchase planners was $20. If that’s the price her customers are already used to, a recurring membership option would have to cheaper. Imagine if you’ve always seen H&M coming out with $10 shirts, and suddenly there’s something you have to shell out $300 for. Raising prices is a whole other marketing process, with messaging being extremely important, but that’s a story for another time.

When deciding which services or products to create, and what to price them at, you need to first run the numbers.

Audience size, conversion rate (1-2% of your total audience will buy), price

3000 x 1% x $15 = $450 a month.

Considering how much Karen was already making on one-off sales of her digital planners, and how much work, time and effort a membership would cost her, this wasn’t a result we were happy with. It’s simply not a profitable idea for her to focus on next. It could however be a great idea to put on the back-burner and pull out once her audience was larger so she could hit a nicely monthly income from this.

Conclusion: in the long-term, Karen should focus on increasing her audience size so that a low-cost community and membership would become profitable for her to pursue.

So, what else could be done to increase Karen’s revenue?

Increasing Customer Retention

We already saw that Karen’s customers loved their planners – the sales alone give solid evidence for this! She has the audience numbers but there’s not much need to keep making new products. However, a big challenge right now was that she had no way of contacting them. This impacts her revenue because:

1. She can’t reach out to past clients to tell them when a new product is launching.
2. She has limited ways of strategically nurturing her audience to show them how her digital planners can help them.

Which means currently her marketing and revenue is stuck consistently trying to get new customers, when she already has loyal customers – she just doesn’t have an easy way to reach them. This could mean building her email list through content, lead magnets, and offers to potential and existing customers so she could email them with new offer, or creating a community like a Facebook group.

Conclusions and action steps:

Free Facebook group for her customers.
Almost like an alumni group for people who use her planners, to help foster more community, build a stronger relationship with her customers, and have more control of letting her past customers know when she launches a new product.

Email list.
She had resisted the idea of an email list because it felt so daunting, and she didn’t know if her ROI would be worth it. Once we looked at the potential revenue increase by being able to reach past customers and share new or seasonal offers (like quarterly planners!), she saw the ROI. And the best part is that it doesn’t mean she’s stuck with weekly newsletters from now till eternity.

Website
Currently, Karen also has little control over her marketing. Because all her products were on Etsy, she couldn’t see which marketing sources were converting to clients! This meant that she also didn’t know what was working, what she should stop doing and what she should do more of. We decided she’d start building a digital shop on her website as well and start sending some of her traffic there! Her Etsy would continue, but this would give her more information.

Want to get my eyes and brain on your strategy, too? Click here to book a no-strings-attached clarity call together!

Love + magic,
Maggie