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Selling physical products can seem relatively straightforward—the product is developed, packaged, and sold to the consumer through an ecommerce platform. However, people who sell services online, such as coaches, strategists, instructors, and mentors face the challenge of selling more abstract “products” that may not fit into an online store format. Rather than delivering something physical, these providers sell their time, expertise, or other professional services through their website.
If you run a service-based business, continue reading to learn the basics of concretely packaging, selling, and marketing online services effectively to your customer base.
How to identify your sales strategy and select a focus
When it comes to pinpointing the perfect digital products or type of service to offer to potential customers, consider what your clients need most from you, and what you enjoy doing in your business. That intersection of value and passion provides the foundation for creating a suite of services that sell.
For example, the clients of a small wellness and fitness studio might be most interested in remote, mid-day yoga classes that they can take virtually on their lunch breaks. The instructors’ passions might revolve around supporting working mothers and their hectic schedules. Therefore, providing daily online yoga classes around lunchtime both serves the studio’s interests and client demand.
By creating online classes, the studio can add value to their online communities, reach new customers, and ultimately scale their business.
Once you’ve identified the service you want to sell online, there are multiple ways for business owners and entrepreneurs to approach turning their time, expertise, and services into an online business.
Running online classes and workshops
Online classes and workshops are an effective way to monetize your work and deepen relationships with your clients. You can offer live or pre-recorded online workshops and promote them on social media, in email marketing, and through simple updates to your website like adding an announcement banner to the top of your own website homepage. You can list and sell pre-recorded classes in an online store just like you would a physical product, and even sell multi-class packs, like a 10-pack of midday yoga classes.
You can offer real-time classes in person or via video conference. Tools like Acuity Scheduling help you automate the sign-up process and easily integrate a payment processor. Those benefits free up the majority of your time to devote to developing your class or workshop.
Looking at the fitness studio example from above, adding an automated class registration functionality means the instructors only need to set up the class schedule, max number of attendees, and pricing in order to let clients enroll themselves in the lunchtime yoga session.
Meeting one-on-one with clients
Service providers can also offer individual sessions with clients—virtually or in-person. You can charge more for your individualized time, and make sure clients know they have your undivided attention by personalizing the process.
Use a scheduling software to create personalized onboarding emails, custom intake forms, and send built-in email reminders to show clients their investment in your services has added value. The right scheduling software will eliminate the logistical hiccups of selling your services, and ultimately save you time that you can reinvest in other areas of your business—like the paid time you spend with your clients or digital marketing to bring in new customers.
Offering services to clients
Service providers can work on projects for clients, such as offering graphic design work, event planning, or wedding photography services.
You’ll save time by running your business on a platform that allows you to promote your services, collect leads, track project milestones, and process payment invoices. Squarespace’s project management tools that can help you to manage your service selling business, so you don’t have to jump between or pay for multiple platforms.
Creating members-only content
Selling courses, workshops, and private sessions isn’t the only way to monetize your skills. You can also launch a gated content strategy and charge a membership fee for premium content on your website. This approach creates recurring revenue and helps you build deeper connections with your audience through virtual events, group workshops, email newsletters, and more.
Tools like Member Sites enable you to sell memberships and build custom content experiences for specific audiences. For example, a chef who sells membership access to recipes and other food content might launch multiple Member Sites based on experience level:
Tier 1: New to cooking
Tier 2: Intermediate chef
Tier 3: Advanced
This ensures that every target audience the chef is focused on gets high-quality content. The chef also gets an opportunity to build stronger customer relationships by interacting with members and strengthen their online presence by encouraging members to share testimonials or make a referral for their gated content subscriptions.
Learn more about setting up a membership fee structure with Member Sites
With Member Sites, you can also offer free access to your content to readers who provide their email address. You can then target that audience with email marketing or create a monthly newsletter with audience-specific content. Curated, custom content experiences will show prospective members that a membership fee gives them access to the tailored content they’re looking for—a great way for bloggers to make extra income.
Learn more about selling digital products on Squarespace
This post was updated on May 31, 2024.