Printable products are big sellers, but they’re often priced low. That means it can be a challenge to boost your profits because you need high sales volumes to earn the money you deserve. One way to do that is by offering bonuses when your customers purchase products from you.
Which bonuses should you offer? How can you be sure you’re not giving away too much? Keep reading to get our best tips on how to brainstorm, create, and use bonuses to boost your printables sales and increase your profits.
How Do Bonuses Affect People’s Brains?
Let’s start with some information about how getting something for free affects our brains. In one famous experiment, researchers offered subjects a choice between a premium chocolate that cost $.26 and a lower quality chocolate that cost $0.01. The participants split almost equally, with half buying the more expensive option and half, the cheaper one.
When the researchers lowered the cost of each chocolate by one cent, making the lower-quality option free, nearly all participants chose to accept the free chocolate. It’s undeniable that people respond positively to getting something for free.
What Are the Two Types of Bonuses?
When it comes to offering bonuses to go with your printable products, there are two main categories to consider.
Related Bonuses
Related bonuses are just what they sound like: bonus items that relate directly to the product you’re attaching them to. Here are a few examples of primary products with related bonuses that go with them.
1. A printable daily planner with bonus printable stickers.
2. Printable menu cards with bonus place setting cards.
3. Printable party invitations with bonus stickers to seal envelopes.
You get the idea. When your bonus item is related to what people are buying, they know immediately that they’ll be able to use it!
Unrelated Bonuses
While most bonuses should be related to the products you’re selling, it is an option to include an unrelated bonus. Businesses give out unrelated bonuses all the time. Examples include mugs, t-shirts, or pens.
Printable bonuses that could work with a variety of products include things like a free guide for printing images or a selection of editable stickers. You’ll need to decide which option will work best for you. In my opinion, related bonuses are the most effective because you’re giving shoppers something that’s going to be useful to them based on what they’re buying from you.
How Much Should Your Bonuses Be Worth?
As a rule, bonus items should be inexpensive items that don’t cost you much time or money to make while still increasing the perceived value of what you’re selling. After all, the purpose of a bonus is to add to your profits, not decrease them because you’re giving away something that you should be selling.
One of the real benefits of focusing on related bonuses is that they don’t need to be worth much to be valuable to your customers. For example, if you’re selling a wedding planner, giving away a basic sheet of printable stickers to go with it is something you can do without cutting into your profits. In fact, you could even add to your profits! People who know they’re getting simple stickers for free may be more likely to dip back into your product listings to buy more stickers to go with the bonus ones.
Since most printable items sell for under $5, I suggest choosing bonus items that you’d be willing to sell for $1 or less. You’ll still be offering your customers a bonus, but without hurting yourself in the process.
How Should You Package Bonus Items?
There’s an art to packaging bonus items. One of the most common mistakes online sellers make when giving away bonus items is including them in the same download as the main item being purchased. While the buyer still receives the bonus, it feels like it’s part of the main product and thus less valuable.
Our recommendation is to package each bonus item in a separate downloadable file. For example, if you were offering bonus place settings with some Halloween party decorations, you could offer a larger download bundle that included a party banner, invitations, and cupcake toppers. In a separate file, you would put the place settings.
It might seem silly, but when a buyer needs to download two separate files, they feel that they’re getting more than they would if they only had to download one file. Again, it’s the psychology behind the bonus that matters—and it’s what will keep your customers coming back to your shop again and again.
Tips for Promoting Printables Bonuses
It’s easy to create bonus items to include with your printable products, but what’s the best way to promote your bonuses to increase your sales?
Let’s start with your product listings. One of the best ways to get people to click on your product instead of the others that are available is to include information about your bonus in either the main product image—the one that appears in Etsy’s thumbnail on a page of search results—or your product video. That way, people who search for your products will know immediately that you’re giving something away with each purchase.
It’s also useful to highlight bonus items in your product description. For example, you might do this.
Printable Wedding Planner with BONUS STICKERS
You may also want to promote your bonus items on your social media. For example, you could do all of the following things.
• Run a Facebook ad that highlights your bonus products to entice people to visit your shop.
• Feature your bonus items on Pinterest and in your Pinterest shop if you have one.
• Create a short Instagram video or TikTok showing how to use your bonus items.
You get the idea. Any of these things will inform prospective shoppers about your bonus items and incentivize them to visit your printables shop.
Do you need some guidance to increase your printables sales? Check out Printable Sales Made Easy, my complete guide to creating and selling printables online!
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