You’ve heard information product marketers praise the benefits of shipping digital products such as ebooks, audio files, online streaming videos, basically anything that can be delivered in a download fashion.
One of the fastest ways the information product marketers we work with over at InfoMarkter’sZone turn their business into a full time income generator is by offering a physical version of their product to their market.
Yes, delivering your products over the internet in a digital format is powerful, very profitable and prevents you from getting into the sticky business of designing, rendering, fulfilling and shipping physical products…but are their advantages to offering your information products in physical format?
5 Reasons To Offer A Physical Version of Your Product
1. Having physical products boosts your credibility, reputation and perceived status in your niche market. Put two information marketers together and the one that can ship his or her own home study course, training program or course to their customer’s doorstep will be seen to have an upper hand on their competition shipping only digital ebooks or info products.
2. Higher profits. Presuming you plan, develop and market your products effectively, you can get anywhere from double to 10X the price for a physical product over the exact same information delivered digitally. The value of getting a course delivered to your house is seen as higher than purchasing an online ebook. This will only become more true as ebooks become a commodity in the world of Kindle, Sony’s ebook reader and the Apple ebook readers that will soon be a part of their various smart devices.
3. Lower return rates…yes, anyone that wonders if this is true can rest assured, you will have fewer returns with physical products than with digital products – even if you have the top information product in your field. Return rates of around 5% are not unusual for ebooks and other digitally delivered info products (there are exceptions for information delivered via monthly subscription sites for example tend to have extremely low return rates) whereas physical product return rates are typically in the 1-2% range
4. Makes you stand out from your competition – offering a physical product in a market where there are hundreds of ebooks and digital infoproducts will differentiate you and give you a shot at becoming the new leader in already competitive markets
5. More flexibility – what I really love about offering both physical and digital info products is that you can package different “levels” of product offerings at incremental price points. For example, you could offer your bare bones digital information package for $67, a home study course with written and video material for $297, a Silver option combining digital and physically delivered products with access to a monthly updated digital newsletter for $397 and a Gold package that combines group or personal coaching options (by email, teleconference, telephone, webinar, etc..) for $597 or more…you now have multiple products, more flexibility for your customers and will make a great deal more money from these combined offerings.
Two Points of Caution:
So yes, we suggest anyone who is planning or is already selling their own digital information product to consider one or more physical product offerings to their market…with two points of caution:
1. Watch out-of-country orders, these will be tough to get to your customer on time, you will get complaints if it doesn’t show within the first week or two. You can begin by creating your own physical products and handling the shipping yourself, but really today there are so many fulfillment options at low costs that it may serve you well to use one of them. A great source for fulfilling DVD orders is Kunaki – another alternative where you can get both videos and written material fulfilled is Corporate Disk
2. Do consider offering a combination of multimedia content (audio or video) with written material – could be a workbook, a chapter summary, an ebook, a checklist, a resource guide, some diagrams…depends on your niche topic, but these work well to boost perceived value.
Do you have questions on starting or growing your own information marketing internet business? Post it to the comments section below and we will get back to you.
