If you sell ebooks, videos or other downloadables, watch this video to learn how to put your digital product delivery on autopilot.
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Home > Ontraport for payments > Fulfilling digital orders > Delivering PDFs or other downloads
Home > Fulfilling digital orders > Delivering PDFs or other downloads
Delivering PDFs or other downloads
You'll learn:
- How to upload your digital product files to Ontraport
- How to create a product delivery email
- Steps for automatically delivering your digital product
- How to add triggers and product delivery emails to your automation
- How to publish your automation so you can start getting paid
Jason Howell
Delivering PDFs or other downloads
If you sell ebooks, videos or other downloadables, watch this video to learn how to put your digital product delivery on autopilot.
- How to upload your digital product files to Ontraport
- How to create a product delivery email
- Steps for automatically delivering your digital product
- How to add triggers and product delivery emails to your automation
- How to publish your automation so you can start getting paid
Course Instructor
Jason Howell
Related resources
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Transcript
Selling a digital product is great. Getting paid for it is even better. And getting that product to your customer without laying a finger on a keyboard? That’s what I’m talking about!
In this video, you’ll learn how to deliver your digital download product to customers automatically.
This is perfect if you sell ebooks, PDF guides, downloadable videos or any other file for your customers to download.
These steps also work for delivering registration codes for webinars or other online events. You’ll follow the same process — the only difference is how you add your product to your delivery email.
You can get your digital delivery automation up and running in six steps:
First you’ll upload your digital product file to Ontraport (unless you’re using a join link or meeting ID).
Second, you’ll create a delivery email.
Third, you’ll create and publish a new automation to deliver your digital product.
...and ta-da! You’ll be delivering your digital product on autopilot.
Let’s get started.
Before you can deliver your digital product, you’ll need to add it to Ontraport as a digital download. It’s simple — just upload the file to your file manager to get a download link to share with customers.
If your file is already hosted on the web and you’d prefer to use that link instead, go for it! Ontraport can still share it with customers for you.
And if you’re delivering a “join meeting” link or a meeting ID, we’ll do it a little differently: we’ll create a tracked link instead of a download link. I’ll show you how.
Alright — let’s get started.
Go to your Administration menu, then hop over to Data and File Manager. Click Upload File here to pick the file you’re delivering to customers.
Make sure your file is saved under the right name, because your customers will be able to see it when they download. So if your digital product is saved under something that might give people the wrong idea — like “STILL NEEDS REVIEW” or “ILLEGALLY DOWNLOADED COMEDIES” — you should fix that now. Use something straightforward. For example, my digital product is called “Marketing Analytics for Beginners Ebook.”
Once your file is uploaded, you’ll see it here in the collection of files. Later on, you can use this screen to delete, re-download or add these files to systems in Ontraport.
Hot tip: If you need to update your digital product later on, you can re-upload a file with the same name as the original — Ontraport will replace the old one for you. That way, if you decide to create a new-and-improved version of your product down the road, you won’t need to go back and update your automations, emails or anything else.
One more thing before we move on: You can also tag your files using the same system as contact tags. If you’ve got lots of products to keep track of, this can be a good way to keep them all organized. You can do this over here on the left side of the window.
Now, for those of you who are delivering a meeting link or a file that’s not hosted in Ontraport, it’s a great idea to use a tracked link for this. To do that, we’ll go to Administration > Data and click on tracked links. Click on the + New Tracked Link button and just give it a name, like ‘Join Meeting Link’ or ‘Ebook Download’ or whatever will help you remember what this is - the public won’t see this name, so if you want to name it ‘illegally downloaded comedies’ you can do that here. And then just put the destination URL in here. That’ll be the meeting join link or the download link or wherever you want your people to end up when they click your tracked link. Save it, and you’re done.
So now that your digital product is uploaded to Ontraport, you need a way to get the link to your customers. Nine times out of ten, this will be in the form of a delivery email — though you could just as easily do it with an SMS text message.
You can always create your delivery email on the fly as you build out your automation. But let’s go ahead and do it now instead so you won’t have any interruptions when you build the automation later.
To do this in Ontraport, go to Messages under Campaigns, then create a new message. If you have Deals, Companies, or any other Custom Objects set up, you’ll find this under Contacts instead.
Because we like to keep things simple, we’ll pick Simple Mail.
Ok, in your email you’ll need to use either a link or a button that customers can click to download it.
I’ll go over links first.
Add the text you want customers to click on to download your product. This should be a clear CTA — something like “Click here to download.”
Then highlight your text and click this hyperlink icon. Choose “Ontraport Hosted File” from these options in the pop-up, then “Select File.” Now select your file from the list, and click “Insert Link.” There you go!
If you created a tracked link in step 1, then simply use the “Tracked link” feature here instead. Choose the tracked link that you made, click Insert Link and boom, we’re done.
Great! Now let’s try doing the same thing, but this time instead of a simple text link, we’ll get fancy and add a button to our email.
Since you’re in Simple Mail, just add an image of a button by clicking this image icon in the editor, clicking “insert hosted image,” and selecting the button image. If you need to upload a button image, you can do that here.
Then click “Insert” and “Submit,” and boom! There’s your button image.
Heads up, sometimes these come out a little big. If that happens, just double-click on it and pick a smaller width — maybe 100 or 150 pixels. That looks nice.
Now add your link. Click the image once to select it, then click the little link icon at the bottom. Just like before, you’ll link to your file or your tracked link. Looking good!
The rest of the email is up to you. You probably want to write a little message thanking your customer for their purchase, or maybe provide some instructions about how to get the most from your product. So take a second to write the rest of your email — and don’t forget the subject line!
One more thing to note here: Since this email is in direct correlation to a product the recipient has purchased, it counts as transactional! You can indicate that with this checkbox.
To learn more about what transactional emails are and how they work, check out our video called “How not to be a spammer.”
When you’re satisfied with your email, save it and then you can start building out your automation. This is where things really start to heat up.
Start by going to Automations and creating a new one.
Create your automation from scratch and name it in the top left corner. I’ll call mine “Ebook Delivery.”
Kick off your automation by adding a trigger. Just like every other delivery automation, start this one with “Product is purchased.” This will add customers to the map as soon as they buy your product.
So click this Add Trigger button from the pop-up and type “purchases.” Select “Purchases product.” Then click into this product dropdown and pick out the digital download product you just uploaded. Here’s mine — it’s called “Marketing Analytics for Beginners Ebook.”
Now, before you save your trigger, take a look at its settings:
The first setting is “Who can activate this trigger?” By default, “Any contact in this account” is selected. That’s fine, because you want anyone who buys your product to be added here.
The next setting is “If contact is already on the map, then…” The default here is “Ignore this trigger.”
I want to change this setting — because what if one of my customers decides to buy the ebook twice? If I leave this setting as is, my repeat customer would never receive my product delivery email after ordering, which would be a major bummer.
So we’ll change this setting to “Move here when triggered.” That way, your customer will drop back into the top of the automation if they buy your product again.
Once you’re happy with these settings, click Done to save and move on.
Now it’s time to add your delivery email to the automation. The good news is you’ve already made your delivery email and added a download link to it — so the hard work is done! All you need to do here is add a “Send an email” element to your automation and pick out the email you saved earlier. Or if you wanted to create a new email now, you could do that too.
Click this empty “What happens next?” button below your trigger. Select “Send an email” from the actions tab.
Then click your “Send an email” element to edit it. Find your delivery email from before in this “Select message” dropdown. After you select it, click “Done” to save your settings.
Now for the final step — drumroll, please — publishing your automation!
Once you’ve added your email, all you need to do is wrap up a few loose ends before publishing. It’s really just a matter of cleaning up all these “What happens next?” elements that are still left over.
Start with the element under your default “Added to campaign” trigger. In this automation, you might want to add a contact manually at some point to deliver this email — even if it’s just for testing. We know that when someone is added to this automation manually, they’ll always start here, so we’ll add a Go To element to put them in the right place on our map.
Select a Go To element from the filters tab, then click the “move” icon on the dotted line at the bottom. Drag it on over to your “Send an Email” element. When you manually add contacts to this automation map, they’ll go down the same path as everyone else to receive your delivery email.
Now there’s only one “What happens next” element left, right here under the delivery email. Click on it and select an “End” element from the filters tab.
Now your delivery automation is complete — huzzah! Click Publish and then Save & Publish to watch the magic happen. Or, if you want to add a few more touches and aren’t ready to pull the trigger yet, you can just click Save.
You’re all set up to deliver your digital download product to customers —sweet!
I mentioned this a few times, but as a reminder — this process is also perfect for coaching calls, webinars, consulting sessions, and other online meetings and events.
Now take a little break, stretch and grab some coffee. You earned it! Keep watching to learn about delivering physical products.
In this video, you’ll learn how to deliver your digital download product to customers automatically.
This is perfect if you sell ebooks, PDF guides, downloadable videos or any other file for your customers to download.
These steps also work for delivering registration codes for webinars or other online events. You’ll follow the same process — the only difference is how you add your product to your delivery email.
You can get your digital delivery automation up and running in six steps:
First you’ll upload your digital product file to Ontraport (unless you’re using a join link or meeting ID).
Second, you’ll create a delivery email.
Third, you’ll create and publish a new automation to deliver your digital product.
...and ta-da! You’ll be delivering your digital product on autopilot.
Let’s get started.
Before you can deliver your digital product, you’ll need to add it to Ontraport as a digital download. It’s simple — just upload the file to your file manager to get a download link to share with customers.
If your file is already hosted on the web and you’d prefer to use that link instead, go for it! Ontraport can still share it with customers for you.
And if you’re delivering a “join meeting” link or a meeting ID, we’ll do it a little differently: we’ll create a tracked link instead of a download link. I’ll show you how.
Alright — let’s get started.
Go to your Administration menu, then hop over to Data and File Manager. Click Upload File here to pick the file you’re delivering to customers.
Make sure your file is saved under the right name, because your customers will be able to see it when they download. So if your digital product is saved under something that might give people the wrong idea — like “STILL NEEDS REVIEW” or “ILLEGALLY DOWNLOADED COMEDIES” — you should fix that now. Use something straightforward. For example, my digital product is called “Marketing Analytics for Beginners Ebook.”
Once your file is uploaded, you’ll see it here in the collection of files. Later on, you can use this screen to delete, re-download or add these files to systems in Ontraport.
Hot tip: If you need to update your digital product later on, you can re-upload a file with the same name as the original — Ontraport will replace the old one for you. That way, if you decide to create a new-and-improved version of your product down the road, you won’t need to go back and update your automations, emails or anything else.
One more thing before we move on: You can also tag your files using the same system as contact tags. If you’ve got lots of products to keep track of, this can be a good way to keep them all organized. You can do this over here on the left side of the window.
Now, for those of you who are delivering a meeting link or a file that’s not hosted in Ontraport, it’s a great idea to use a tracked link for this. To do that, we’ll go to Administration > Data and click on tracked links. Click on the + New Tracked Link button and just give it a name, like ‘Join Meeting Link’ or ‘Ebook Download’ or whatever will help you remember what this is - the public won’t see this name, so if you want to name it ‘illegally downloaded comedies’ you can do that here. And then just put the destination URL in here. That’ll be the meeting join link or the download link or wherever you want your people to end up when they click your tracked link. Save it, and you’re done.
So now that your digital product is uploaded to Ontraport, you need a way to get the link to your customers. Nine times out of ten, this will be in the form of a delivery email — though you could just as easily do it with an SMS text message.
You can always create your delivery email on the fly as you build out your automation. But let’s go ahead and do it now instead so you won’t have any interruptions when you build the automation later.
To do this in Ontraport, go to Messages under Campaigns, then create a new message. If you have Deals, Companies, or any other Custom Objects set up, you’ll find this under Contacts instead.
Because we like to keep things simple, we’ll pick Simple Mail.
Ok, in your email you’ll need to use either a link or a button that customers can click to download it.
I’ll go over links first.
Add the text you want customers to click on to download your product. This should be a clear CTA — something like “Click here to download.”
Then highlight your text and click this hyperlink icon. Choose “Ontraport Hosted File” from these options in the pop-up, then “Select File.” Now select your file from the list, and click “Insert Link.” There you go!
If you created a tracked link in step 1, then simply use the “Tracked link” feature here instead. Choose the tracked link that you made, click Insert Link and boom, we’re done.
Great! Now let’s try doing the same thing, but this time instead of a simple text link, we’ll get fancy and add a button to our email.
Since you’re in Simple Mail, just add an image of a button by clicking this image icon in the editor, clicking “insert hosted image,” and selecting the button image. If you need to upload a button image, you can do that here.
Then click “Insert” and “Submit,” and boom! There’s your button image.
Heads up, sometimes these come out a little big. If that happens, just double-click on it and pick a smaller width — maybe 100 or 150 pixels. That looks nice.
Now add your link. Click the image once to select it, then click the little link icon at the bottom. Just like before, you’ll link to your file or your tracked link. Looking good!
The rest of the email is up to you. You probably want to write a little message thanking your customer for their purchase, or maybe provide some instructions about how to get the most from your product. So take a second to write the rest of your email — and don’t forget the subject line!
One more thing to note here: Since this email is in direct correlation to a product the recipient has purchased, it counts as transactional! You can indicate that with this checkbox.
To learn more about what transactional emails are and how they work, check out our video called “How not to be a spammer.”
When you’re satisfied with your email, save it and then you can start building out your automation. This is where things really start to heat up.
Start by going to Automations and creating a new one.
Create your automation from scratch and name it in the top left corner. I’ll call mine “Ebook Delivery.”
Kick off your automation by adding a trigger. Just like every other delivery automation, start this one with “Product is purchased.” This will add customers to the map as soon as they buy your product.
So click this Add Trigger button from the pop-up and type “purchases.” Select “Purchases product.” Then click into this product dropdown and pick out the digital download product you just uploaded. Here’s mine — it’s called “Marketing Analytics for Beginners Ebook.”
Now, before you save your trigger, take a look at its settings:
The first setting is “Who can activate this trigger?” By default, “Any contact in this account” is selected. That’s fine, because you want anyone who buys your product to be added here.
The next setting is “If contact is already on the map, then…” The default here is “Ignore this trigger.”
I want to change this setting — because what if one of my customers decides to buy the ebook twice? If I leave this setting as is, my repeat customer would never receive my product delivery email after ordering, which would be a major bummer.
So we’ll change this setting to “Move here when triggered.” That way, your customer will drop back into the top of the automation if they buy your product again.
Once you’re happy with these settings, click Done to save and move on.
Now it’s time to add your delivery email to the automation. The good news is you’ve already made your delivery email and added a download link to it — so the hard work is done! All you need to do here is add a “Send an email” element to your automation and pick out the email you saved earlier. Or if you wanted to create a new email now, you could do that too.
Click this empty “What happens next?” button below your trigger. Select “Send an email” from the actions tab.
Then click your “Send an email” element to edit it. Find your delivery email from before in this “Select message” dropdown. After you select it, click “Done” to save your settings.
Now for the final step — drumroll, please — publishing your automation!
Once you’ve added your email, all you need to do is wrap up a few loose ends before publishing. It’s really just a matter of cleaning up all these “What happens next?” elements that are still left over.
Start with the element under your default “Added to campaign” trigger. In this automation, you might want to add a contact manually at some point to deliver this email — even if it’s just for testing. We know that when someone is added to this automation manually, they’ll always start here, so we’ll add a Go To element to put them in the right place on our map.
Select a Go To element from the filters tab, then click the “move” icon on the dotted line at the bottom. Drag it on over to your “Send an Email” element. When you manually add contacts to this automation map, they’ll go down the same path as everyone else to receive your delivery email.
Now there’s only one “What happens next” element left, right here under the delivery email. Click on it and select an “End” element from the filters tab.
Now your delivery automation is complete — huzzah! Click Publish and then Save & Publish to watch the magic happen. Or, if you want to add a few more touches and aren’t ready to pull the trigger yet, you can just click Save.
You’re all set up to deliver your digital download product to customers —sweet!
I mentioned this a few times, but as a reminder — this process is also perfect for coaching calls, webinars, consulting sessions, and other online meetings and events.
Now take a little break, stretch and grab some coffee. You earned it! Keep watching to learn about delivering physical products.
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