You’ve come up with an amazing idea.
You’ve created an offer that you’re really excited about.
You’re an expert in your field, and you know how you can help people.
So you post your offer on your website, announce it on your social media, and . . . crickets.
It’s not selling. The sales aren’t rolling in like you’d hoped. Only a few of your most loyal customers have bought your offer. Otherwise, nothing.
What went wrong? Why did something that you poured your heart and soul into fail to sell?
A lack of sales is a form of feedback from your clients. Something isn’t working, and this now gives you an opportunity to change things and more effectively communicate with your potential customers.
At the Holistic Business Academy, we know that not getting the sales you want can be heartbreaking and devastating. We’ve coached countless clients through this exact situation, and as a small business, we’ve felt the pain firsthand ourselves. But there’s hope!
From our years of experience and expertise, we’ve learned that there are four primary reasons that your offer isn’t selling. And the good news is that every single one of these issues can be resolved. So let’s dive in and troubleshoot.
You’re Not Actually Promoting It
You’ve sent an email to your mailing list. You shared a post about your offer on Instagram with all the details. That’s adequate promotion . . . right?
Sorry to break the bad news, but a single email and a post or two about your offer on social media are not enough.
Of course, there’s the occasional well-known person with a mailing list large enough that they can send one email and be sold out in minutes. But let’s be frank here—that’s not who most of us are.
For the vast majority of online coaching, membership, and healing businesses, you’ll need to actively promote your offer multiple times in different ways in order to reach your sales goals.
It’s important to remember that your audience is busy. They have dinner to cook after an exhausting day at work, children to take care of, personal challenges to contend with, and horrific news stories to process. You can see why your one email and Instagram post can be forgotten in a flash. Even your biggest fans are likely to forget about your offer in the midst of today’s constant urgent messaging from, well, everywhere.
But there’s an upside to all of this. Relying on multiple strategies and channels to promote your offer more than once means there’s much less pressure to produce the perfect email or the perfect Instagram post in one shot.
Instead, you can create a series of assets that address the concerns and challenges of your potential customers and how your offer helps to overcome them. This is a win-win for both you and your customer.
If adding a ton of new promotions on top of your existing workload feels overwhelming, we get it. So try starting small. Here’s a few tips on working with what you’ve already got:
- If you’re sending just one email, send two! Send a follow-up email just before the registration deadline or before you stop actively promoting your offer. The messaging can be similar to your first email—just adapt the language to reflect the deadline.
- If you’ve been posting on your Instagram Story and you’re afraid of bothering people, try creating a grid post, and vice versa.
- Don’t be afraid to repurpose. Your one sales email can probably be reworked to two or three. And that content can be used for social media posts. Again, your customers are busy. Repetition will actually help the information you’re providing to sink in over time.
Remember: if you don’t tell anyone about your offer, they can’t buy it. It’s that simple. Now go out and promote!
Your Messaging Is Ineffective
So maybe you are sharing a lot. You’ve got a full email sequence you’re sending out, you’re posting on social media every day during your launch, but you’re still not seeing results.
At this point, it’s time to assess your messaging. Messaging is a marketing term for the content of your promotional assets. What is the primary message that your assets are communicating to your audience?
Knowing how to write effective messaging is a skill that needs to be learned. Even if you’re already a great writer in other ways, writing good marketing copy can be challenging. Practice how to write about your offer in a way that’s compelling, clear, and encouraging for potential customers.
Be careful not to fall into the trap of centering yourself in your messaging. If your copy starts out with something like “I’m so excited to announce my new membership!” be sure to pause and rethink who you’re writing this for.
Your copy should speak directly to your customer. Take out all the “I” statements, the “me” statements, the “my” statements. Get to the heart of what your potential customer really needs to know: what concerns and challenges does your offer address? How will going through your offer address those concerns and solve their challenges? What becomes possible for your customer once they buy your offer?
Once you learn this skill, you can apply it again and again to new offers.
Your Audience Is Saturated
Audience saturation happens far later than you might think for a given offer, and we don’t suggest placing a lot of emphasis on audience growth until your messaging has been refined. But at some point, all the interested members of your audience will have already purchased your offer.
Here are the parameters to get a better sense of when your audience might be saturated:
- You’ve had a minimum of two successful launches of your offer, and the third (or fourth, or fifth) has not done well.
- Your audience has been relatively stagnant, with no flow of new members or followers for a while.
If you fit these criteria, it might be time to expand your reach. The goal in expanding reach is to increase awareness of your company, your work, and how you help people.
Our favorite strategy to reach new people is through collaborations, which you can learn more about in The Holistic Business Podcast Episode 188.
(It’s Possible Your Offer Just Kinda Sucks)
Yikes. But we have to talk about it.
Let’s be clear here: this is not the same as your work being bad. So the first step here is to separate out the work from the offer.
The work is what you do. You’re a tarot reader, or an astrologer, or a coach, or a healer, or an online educator.
The offer is how you package and present your work, and this is the part that tends to need improvement—not you, not your work.
You’re probably emotionally attached to your work, and that’s understandable. But that attachment can make it difficult to impartially assess how you’re presenting that work, and can lead to frustration when it seems like our potential customers just don’t get it.
But the confusion and lack of commitment from potential customers is a form of feedback, and it just means something is missing.
Consider these questions: Is this offer something that your customers really need? Or does it stem from your needs, which are important of course, but when misaligned with your customers’ needs, will often bomb?
What’s Next
The fact that your offer didn’t sell doesn’t mean you need to start your business over from scratch. Adequate promotion, excellent messaging, sufficient audience reach, and an offer that your customers actually want can all be refined as you learn more about what works and what doesn’t in your business.
So the next time your inbox is devoid of sales, just ask yourself: what can you do differently next time?
To hear more about what to do when no one is buying your offer and learn from real-life examples, click here to listen to The Holistic Business Podcast episode.
Refining your offer is an excellent stage to get help from expert coaches and likeminded business peers. To learn more about our business education membership with robust coaching support, trainings, workshops, and a thriving community, join the Holistic Business Academy Membership waitlist!