My experimental sales approach...
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Hello everyone, so right now I'm running a different kind of summer sale over at Channel Robot. It's "Name Your Own Price" (min = $5 , max = list price). It's for my Kontakt instruments ONLY - and I'm pretty sure no one here needs or wants any of those but on one of the facebook groups I was asked to provide some feedback on how it went after the sale finishes. It occurred to me that this would be useful information to all of us - in case you were thinking of running with this format for your own product sets. So whenits finished I will try and remember to post some stats here.
Meanwhile - it's been running for 1.5 days now, so this is whats happened so far:
In the last 36 hours I've made 26 sales - selling 82 items (yep almost no one is picking up a single item..) for a total revenue of $429.00 - yes almost everyone (90%) are paying the minimum $5.00.
I am getting the feeling that if I'd set the minimum at $10 I wouldnt be so much down on sales and up a fair bit on revenue - but who knows. I will try and keep you posted - remind me at the end of August in case I forget.
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I like things like this. It's fun to play with the variables. I wonder if some amount was being donated to charity would people pay more... or what about a tiered payment, so every time you cross a certain threshold you get an additional product.
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@d-healey @Lindon Yep I like the idea of increasing the % discount when adding products.
It's something that can be kept all the time and you can add let say a fix X% when on sale...
But this makes sense when you have a certain number of products, I'm far from thatAside of that, what I wonder more is marketing strategies. I know it's about having different things (website, social media, banners & advert, videos…) well tuned, but what is more important first I have no idea (except website of course)
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This is great, I wouldn't be against a kind of sales tactic thread where we all pitch little tricks to help each other get more conversions.
A great thing I've learned is to bundle, then pitch the bundle on the product page of each individual item. Something like "this product is part of X bundle, grab it and save Y%", as long as it isn't too intrusive. I've doubled my average order value by upselling a bundle.
Edit: since others have already talked a bit about bundling, I'll add that a consistent brand/image is also very important. If someone clicks your green ad, and your website is purple, they're likely to bounce.
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I'm considering adding a one time pop up panel to my plugin that comes up after two weeks with a link to my website and a simple message like "Come check out the latest Crystal Audio Products!"
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@Crystal-Audio I would be annoyed if that happened in a plugin I bought to be honest.
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OK so as promised, here I am at the end of the "name your Own Price" sale... to provide a few stats.
So the sale ran from 27 June to 5th August ( so a little over a month) and I did spend a modest amount of time pushing it on VI-Control, KVR and facebook.
Referrer order:
- VI-Control
- KVR
- Reddit (who knew??)
- Search Engines
All up I had 169 orders for 469 products. Yep still got a lot of multiple-product orders. For an all up revenue of $2658.05 (who was that person who paid $5.05 for something?). As you can guess more than 90% of people paid the minimum $5.00 for each product - so if you are going down this path then make sure your minimum is something you can live with. I know most people who run these say most customers pay way above the minimum, but frankly I'm unsurprised given the audience here is musicians - never found them to be the most generous of individuals (sorry if that offend anyone - remember I'm a musician too...)
My take: As a vehicle for getting product into peoples hands its a good approach, many many customers were very grateful I ran this and said so in public forums, but as a sustainable business model its never going to fly. To do this you need a fairly extensive (and pretty played out) back catalogue- which is what I had/have so it was minimal pain for me.
OK thats it have at it..
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Really invaluable information for people starting out. Cheers @Lindon Woulda bet on irc over reddit..lol
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Thanks for updating us on this! Was that total profit, or total sales? Aka were you running paid ads on Vi/KVR/Facebook or just posting in groups and forums?
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@Lindon it is an interesting approach. however you haven't won much. can sponsor a little more? why didn't you sell your vst instead? the bank kontakt it's getting a bit out of date isn't it?
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Thanks for sharing , valuable info.
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@adriano said in My experimental sales approach...:
@Lindon it is an interesting approach. however you haven't won much. can sponsor a little more? why didn't you sell your vst instead? the bank kontakt it's getting a bit out of date isn't it?
well if you have a better way to "win" then please please share it with us...
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Thanks for sharing the details Lindon. I am asking myself how the pricing in this low-budget range affects the number of sales and I would assume that the sweet spot is a bit higher. I just can't imagine people seeing a plugin they want to have, but then say "5$ is fine, but I wouldn't pay 10$ for it".
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@Christoph-Hart said in My experimental sales approach...:
Thanks for sharing the details Lindon. I am asking myself how the pricing in this low-budget range affects the number of sales and I would assume that the sweet spot is a bit higher. I just can't imagine people seeing a plugin they want to have, but then say "5$ is fine, but I wouldn't pay 10$ for it".
Yep that's my EXACT feeling too. But of course there's some reputational push-pull here. Selling stuff for $5.00 can badly harm CR's reputation for making "professional" grade products - but then that's the nice thing about Name Your Price - I'm not actually listing the price as $5 - so that's an advantage for this approach. Plus there's a bunch of people out in the interwebs who say very very nice things about my products - and this was one more opportunity to do so - only on a bigger stage - which was a really nice add on benefit I didn't see coming.
But those things aside - yes I agree - I cant see how people wouldnt pay $10 - so setting your lower bounds is still "tricky"
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@Lindon instagram sponsorship, partnership with well-known djs +, paetenariat with youtube channels. a friend won more than 50k € with soundbank ...
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@adriano said in My experimental sales approach...:
@Lindon instagram sponsorship, partnership with well-known djs +, paetenariat with youtube channels. a friend won more than 50k € with soundbank ...
Great, do you know any of these DJs or youTube Channels?