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- Selling CD's and Vinyl in 2025?
Hey friends!
Today we’re going to talk about some Meta ad campaigns i’ve run recently for selling CD’s and Vinyl! This is an action packed, detailed edition of Music Marketing Monday so strap in…
If you’ve been around in my ecosystem for a while you might remember a few years ago I did a YouTube series covering my own explorations of selling physical music through sales funnels and ads.
I sold 800+ CD’s in 2022 using a Free + Shipping & Handling (FSH) campaign and actually profited when all was done when factoring in the tail of recurring orders from fans in the year that followed.
Recently i’ve launched a slew of this exact type of FSH campaign and today i’m going to give you a peek behind the curtain!
What is Free + Shipping & Handling?
Free + Shipping & Handling, which we’ll call FSH going forward, is a sales / marketing strategy where you give something away for ‘free’ but you bake the entire cost into the cost of the shipping.
In this case we’re giving away a CD for free, but charging $7.95 for shipping. The CD itself cost less than $2 and the shipping too, in our case it’s about $3 for the CD + Shipping. This means there is about $5 of margin in the shipping so that we don’t lose money.
Keep in mind we also have to pay for packing materials, credit card processing fees etc. So more like $4 per sale of margin.
BUT, if we’re going to run ads to this page we can’t rely on $4 of margin. Our cost per conversion will be higher than this almost all of the time. This is where we get into the concept of a funnel…
The Sales Funnel
A funnel is similar to a store, but instead of letting people go and look at items they want and piece it together themselves, we’re carefully curating their purchase experience and making offers along the way.
Look at this page (for the sake of client anonymity i’m going to use examples from my own catalog, but the data I go over later will be real data!):
This is a cart that offers a free CD if someone pays for the shipping. But we also have something called a bump offer offering them the digital downloads of the instrumental version of the album for $5.
BTW, the funnels shown in this newsletter were all made using FanFunnels. This is my all-in-one sales funnel, website builder, online store, email / sms marketing and more platform.
Everything i’m showing here could also be done in MusicFunnels, my other all-in-one platform. Both have free 14-day trials, so if you need software to do this see which one fits your style best!
You could of course also use Wordpress + FunnelKit, Shopify + Zipify, ClickFunnels, Thrivecart and many other options. But my options are drastically cheaper than all of those ;)
On top of that I also have something called a one-click-upsell on the next page. Meaning, AFTER they check out i’m asking if they want to upgrade their order (do you want fries with that?).
I already know they like CD’s, because they just bought one. So here i’m offering them 3 more CD’s for $17, which is a GREAT deal considering a full price CD is $15.
In my funnel I had another upsell step, and I experimented with other bump offers, downsells etc. But in the interest of time let’s dive into some real world data!
Real World Funnel Data
Time for some real funnel data from something current…
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