Gumroad

Our mission at Gumroad is to empower sellers to make a living doing what they love. Besides giving you the tools to sell your work, we want to help give you the knowledge to use them effectively so that you can maximize your sales.

Despite the growing use of social networks, email is still the best way to market your product. Research shows that email converts 3-5X better than Facebook and Twitter and leads to more revenue. That’s why we’ve put together some helpful email tips for you.

Test subject lines

Attention grabbing headlines are crucial. Just like your middle school teacher taught you, you need an intro to capture your reader. Readers respond to emotional hooks. In fact, 35% of people open emails based just on the subject line. As perhaps the biggest contributor to your email campaign’s success, be sure to test and optimize your subject lines: many email services allow you to see open rates. 

Send multiple emails

Sending multiple emails is a great way to increase sales and ensure that your message is getting in front of as many of your fans and subscribers as possible. Even if it’s “just a reminder”, sending a second (or third) email can drive a huge bump in sales. Gumroad seller Nathan Barry utlized this tactic on the release of his latest product, Authority. Nathan writes:

I sent two emails on launch day. The first email was at 9:20 a.m. Eastern (supposed to be 20 minutes earlier) announcing the launch, and the second was later that day as a reminder that the launch sale would end soon. In this chart of revenue per hour, can you figure out when the second email was sent?

Yep, about 8:00 p.m.

Looking at the stats for that second email, you may think it was a failure. The open rate was only 40.2% and the click rate was only 9.3%. Both are quite low compared to the list average. Even worse, 89 people unsubscribed, which is 1.3% of the entire list. Compared to my normal list stats, those are terrible.

But then you look at the hourly sales graph and see that email drove at least $5,000 in revenue. Does it still seem like a failure?

Mix content with commerce

While sending multiple emails can be a winning strategy, nobody likes to be bombarded with emails that just say “Buy, Buy, Buy”. By adding useful content to your emails, your readers will want to open them. Adding free content to your emails is a great way to get your fans hooked, and give them a tease of what your product is all about. As Gary Vaynerchuk said in his interview with Gumroad:

Content and commerce are becoming brother and sister in this war of business opportunities.

Email offers

Providing your email list with a special offer is a great way to boost conversion. Buyers are always looking for value. An “exclusive” or “limited time” $5 off can make a huge difference in whether people buy or not. 

Reach your audience at the right time

Open and click rates vary based on the time of day. While morning emails are opened most, as that’s the first thing most people do when they get to their desk, clicks of links in emails peak in the late afternoon. As you’re aiming to get users to click through to your product, be aware of where your subscriber base is located. You can even segment emails based on time zone. 

Keep it short

While you can’t technically make a sale from your email, you can certainly lose one by having too long of an email. The last thing you want is for your readers to delete your email before they even get to the call to action. Your goal is to provide value to the reader and get them intrigued enough to click through to your product.

Have some of these ideas worked for you? Have other tips we should include? We love hearing your feedback, so feel free to get in touch here. 

Your profile page is your showcase, your gallery. It houses all the items you’re selling on Gumroad, so it only makes sense that your fans be able to purchase right from there. Now they can! It’s like buying from the museum, without having to stop in the gift shop.

Enabling purchases from the profile page simplifies the buying process and eliminates a step for your fans, as they no longer need to click through to the product page. Now, instead of driving fans to a unique product page, you can send people to your profile page where they can see everything you’re selling, and hopefully buy more than just one product! 

If you’d like a profile, but haven’t set one up yet, visit your settings page, add a username, and then hit “Update account details”. Now your fans can visit gumroad.com/YourUsername to see all of your products

If for any reason you don’t want a product to show on your profile page, you can disable it from showing up by clicking ‘More Options’ and un-checking ‘Visible on profile page’. 

We’re extremely excited about buying from profile pages, and believe that the improved simplicity will lead to increased sales of more of your products. For additional information on profile pages, please see our guide to reaching your audience. As always, we love hearing your feedback, which you can send here.

You really outdid yourself with your last creation. You’ve written the next great American novel, or recorded the next Billboard Top 10 single. It’s no wonder people would want to buy multiple copies or give a copy to friends and family. Now they can with our simple “Buy Again” option.

Buy Again allows your fans to obtain multiple quantities of your products, right from their purchase receipt for items that have fixed prices.

To make this as easy as possible, hitting Buy Again will pull the credit card information from the first purchase. If your customer bought a physical item or an item with variants, Buy Again allows them to get a second one shipped to another address, or get a different variation of the product. If they’d like to gift the product to someone, they can input that persons email address. 

If an item has pay what you want pricing enabled, Buy Again will give way to “Give More”. The coolest part about Buy Again is that it’s another way for you to make more sales, without any additional work!

As we continue to make selling easier for creators, we welcome your feedback, which you can send here. 

You’ve worked hard to build your audience. Your fans recognize and love your brand. To help you give them more to love, we’ve given you the ability to customize your Gumroad product’s background image.

To upload a background image for your product, go to your products url and find the Edit Panel on the right hand side. To help you get started and make customizing your products even easier, we’ve given you the ability to pull styles from your Twitter profile. Importing styles from Twitter will match your product’s background image, background colors and link colors with those on your Twitter profile.

If you don’t want to take your background image from Twitter, you can manually add one. Under ‘Background Image’ click “Add” and select the image from your computer. If you’d like to tile the image, you can enable that by clicking the checkbox.  To remove your background image, simply click “Remove”. 

The ability to add a background image to your product page is just one more way that you can customize Gumroad to fit your branding needs. For more information on how to customize your product, see our guide on styling Gumroad. 

Gumroad is extremely excited to announce the addition of video streaming and are pleased to partner with Maria Menounos and “Serial Buddies“ for the debut of streaming. Your customers can get instant, on-demand video, on any device, at any time. Just like all other products on Gumroad, streaming can integrate right into your existing site, or can be a stand-alone product at your unique Gumroad url.

The addition of streaming on Gumroad allows film creators to sell and instantly distribute their work, with no overhead cost. Currently, filmmakers are stuck paying between 15 and 50% to offer downloads and streams of their films, while having to push potential buyers to external marketplaces to purchase. Using our overlay, filmmakers can integrate the payment and streaming right into their site, where transactions can happen securely inline.

Our simple fee structure of 5% + 25¢ ensures that creators take home as much money as possible, and with the ability to upload files up to 4GB in size, Gumroad is ideal for hosting film.

Our launch partner, Serial Buddies, is coming off a highly successful run in AMC theaters, with pre-orders done exclusively through Gumroad. Featuring an all-star cast including Maria Menounous, Kathy Lee Gifford, Artie Lage, and Christopher Lloyd, it is sure to kill!

We’re extremely excited about streaming and offering yet another way for creatives to sell directly to their audiences. For more information on streaming and how to sell films on Gumroad, please see this guide. As always, we love hearing feedback, which you can send here.

Part of enabling creatives to make a living doing what they love is helping them reach the right audience at the right time. Previously, we wrote about our great analytics, and now we’ve enabled the ability for sellers to tie their Gumroad accounts to Google Analytics.

Linking your Gumroad and Google Analytics accounts will allow you to track traffic to your Gumroad product pages or to the overlay embedded on your site. The added ability to track with Google’s analytics allows you to see what browsers and devices your audience is viewing your products on, real time traffic, and compare sets of dates against each other. 

To link your accounts find your Google Analytics Property ID number and input it on the ‘Profile’ tab in your ‘Settings’. For a step by step walk through of how to do this, please see this video.

Linking your accounts allows you more insight into your audience, so that you can reach them better and make more money. As always, we love hearing your comments, which you can send to us here. 

Gumroad enables creators to sell directly to their audience — so that they can make a living doing what they love. We want sellers to make as much money as possible, so we developed the ability for buyers to ‘Give More’.

Think an item you purchased on Gumroad should be worth more? Didn’t have the deep pockets then that you have now? Buyers can now make an additional contribution for any item that uses our “Pay-what-you-want” pricing.

Our new ‘Give More’ feature provides the average product a 9.4% increase in sales. The coolest part is this is additional revenue for sellers without having to do anything!

The average additional contribution has been $11, but we’ve seen contributions up to $56.

Additional contributions can be made by clicking “Give More” in the top right corner of your purchase receipt.

As we continue to empower creators to make a living doing what they love, we enjoy hearing your feedback, which can be sent here.

Today’s seller story comes from Kyle Webster, an artist who has done work for huge publications such as Time, The New Yorker, Wall St. Journal, and ESPN. Kyle is using Gumroad to sell Kyle’s ULTIMATE Photoshop Brush Pack 1, a pack of 26 custom brushes he’s created over the past two years.

What are you selling? What’s the story behind it?

I am selling a set of custom Photoshop brushes. I have been creating brushes for my own illustration work since this feature was first introduced in Photoshop nearly a decade ago. When Photoshop CS5 was released, the power of the brush builder was greatly amplified and I decided to put together a set of ‘Ultimate’ brushes that emulate natural media. Other illustrators and designers consistently asked me about my brushes and the ‘natural’ look of my work. I started to see the real value in my brush set and decided it would be worth selling to the digital art community.

Why is Gumroad a good fit for the brush set?

The brush set is a small download (2.3 MBs) and it can instantly be installed by the user. Gumroad’s streamlined sales pages are perfect for such a product. My customers do not have to cut through any clutter - they immediately see the video that demonstrates the brushes, they see the price, and they click to buy. I can’t imagine a more perfect delivery system.

What were the biggest contributors to your success?

I have a substantial number of followers on Twitter and I am plugged into the illustration and design communities. Before launching the product, I did some pre-release marketing with teaser images, descriptions of some of the brushes, and a sort of countdown, if you will, before the big day. This got the sales engine revved up before the product was even available and it built up some anticipation that really helped things take off from day one. Having a consistent message about the product across Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr helped a lot, and a couple of popular blogs announced the release of the brush set on the first and second day, which led to great sales bumps. Word spreads so quickly over the internet when something of value becomes available - I think the timing was good for this kind of product. There are so many digital artists now and most of them are constantly looking for new and better tools.

What have been your favorite things about using the Gumroad platform?

First of all, the intuitive and easy user experience for the seller AND the buyer is second to none. I created a sales page in a matter of minutes. I was astonished at how easy the process was and when it was over, I had a moment of disbelief when my first sale rolled right in. I thought, ‘How can it be this simple to sell online?’ Second, the ability to update products and stay in touch with customers is amazing. And third, I love the Analytics page - there is just enough information there to help me figure out where to focus my marketing efforts and it’s addictive to watch the sales grow.

What could we do better?

I wish I had something to offer here. I really love Gumroad. The only complaint I have received (and it is a small one) came from customers who wished to pay via PayPal. Mind you, this request came from perhaps only 2% of the total number of customers.

To learn more about how to sell Photoshop Plugins on Gumroad, see our guide.

We’re very excited to announce a new and improved seller analytics dashboard. Our new analytics unlock even more powerful insights, as we aim to help you improve conversions and make more money. 

We’ve redesigned the dashboard to make it more crisp, colorful and to show more detail for referrals, sales, and conversions. You can access it right now by clicking on the ‘Analytics’ tab once logged into your Gumroad account.

One of the biggest changes is the new dashboard can now display custom dates, as opposed to the previous sales data for just the last month. This allows you to see how conversion shifts month to month over time. Additionally, you can toggle this to show all products, a selection of products, or just one at a time.

We’ve also expanded the referrer table to show all sites that drive traffic to your products. The referrer table can be sorted by views, conversion rate, number of sales, or total money generated from that source.

We believe that this more in-depth sales data can be a powerful tool for understanding your customer base, optimizing your marketing efforts, and increasing bottom line revenue. We’re excited to continue building powerful tools to unlock this data in useful ways and help you be more successful. As always, we’d love to hear what you think.

Gumroad aims to help creatives sell to their audience, no matter where they are or what you make. We recently published a guide on How to Sell Photoshop Plugins and today we’d like to expand on how to sell eBooks. The barrier to writing and publishing an eBook has lowered significantly in the past few years; and, there are some tips and tricks that we’d like to share to make it even easier still.

While they say “don’t judge a book by it’s cover”, cover images are very important. It’s the first thing people see when they arrive at your product, and it should increase people’s interest in making the purchase. A good cover image can drive significantly more revenue, as well: products with cover images convert 4.5% higher than those without them.

There are a growing number of eBook readers, devices, and file types, and not all devices support all formats. Because of that, we recommend offering your eBook in different formats. You can do this by creating multiple products for the different types, or packaging the different types into one zip file. This gives the buyers the power to select the type that is right for them.

The simplest format to offer your book in is a PDF. You can easily create a PDF from any word editor, and buyers can easily consume the PDF on any device they choose (their computer, iPad, iPhone, or Kindle). If you do decide to go with a PDF, make sure to use our PDF Stamping. Stamping your PDF will apply a special graphic, as well as the email address of each unique buyer, to the top right of the first page of your PDF.

As always, pricing your product is one of the most important aspects to your sales. Products that enable pay-what-you-want pricing earn up to 20% more than their asking price, on average. This gives the buyers flexibility to pay what they want for the product, and then give more later on if they feel it was worth more than they originally paid. Additionally, you can create offers to give buyers discounts for a limited time. You can distribute an offer code to your mailing list subscribers, Twitter followers, or even use an offer code as a launch-day special to drive extra buzz. 

We always love hearing your feedback on what works for you, and encourage you to shoot us a note. For more information on how to sell eBooks on Gumroad, check out this handy guide.