If you share my belief that our goal as an online marketer is NOT to simply ‘make the sale’ but rather to acquire what we hope to be a lifetime customer, then you know that having a smooth, reliable product delivery process is paramount.

I’m going to review four methods of delivering an infoproduct to the customer following the payment process. We’ll start with the worst method and end with the best.

Manual Email Delivery

There are two methods used when delivering the product via email.

a. Product is delivered as an email attachment

b. A link to the download is included in the email. This could be a direct link to the downloadable file or a link to a page, from which the customer can download the file.

In an age in which immediate gratification is the norm, making customers wait for sometimes many hours before delivery just is not good business. They will wonder if something has gone wrong, may become annoyed, and lose faith.

Moreover, many ISPs may view an email with attachment as a security risk and either block it at the server, or the customer’s email program may mark it as spam. Including a direct link to the download is somewhat better, but the customer still has to wait for manual delivery of the email, and using a direct link doesn’t enable us to build our list.

The best way of implementing this method is to provide a link to a download page which includes the option for the customer to opt-in to a mailing list. Forced an optin in order to get the download can have a negative impact on customer perception.

Overall Rating: Poor

Automated Email Delivery

This method has some of the same drawbacks as the first method, although it has the great advantage of being able to be delivered via autoresponder. This provides the customer with the instant delivery method he or she is expecting, but sill suffers the same risks of being routed into the spam folder where the customer may never see it.

This is not to say that there is no value in this method of delivery, but rather that it is better utilized as a secondary, backup method of product delivery.

Overall Rating: Fair

Automated delivery through PayPal

In an earlier post we talked about how to create a PayPal button to include on your website for payment processing. As mentioned in that post, there are several customization options for your PayPal button.

For one thing, you can specify the URL for your product, which  can be either a direct link to the file itself, or a link to a ‘thank you’ page from which the file can be downloaded. Once again, the advantage to redirecting to a page rather than directly to the download file is that you can use the page to communicate valuable information to your customer. That information may be the opportunity to subscribe to your newsletter, or to download some extra bonuses, and so forth.

The benefit to this method is that it has a backup plan. That is, in addition to being redirected to the download or download area, the customer will also receive an email from you with the download information. When you’re creating your button, you will be able to add customized notes to your customer in the email that is generated.

The limitation of this method is that while the payment button itself is encrypted with your information (if you accept the default, which is to encrypt), the file location itself is not encrypted. With the file location being somewhat transparent and there being no time limit on the download, an unscrupulous customer may share the download link with others.

While PayPal is the most popular online payment processor, there are others as well. These others enjoy the same advantages – and suffer the same limitations – as does PayPal.

Overall Rating: Good

Automated Delivery with Download Protection

The last, best, and in my opinion, the only method we should use to deliver our infoproducts is by using a delivery method that both hides the file location from the customer and also sets a time limit on delivery.

This strategy can be implemented by using download protection software, which is composed of a script which, once installed on your webserver, will establish a window for downloading that you specify, provide an encrypted link for downloading, AND send a customized email to your customer with the purchase receipt and download information as well.

After some fairly extensive investigation into what specific applications could do this for me, I settled on DLGuard Download Page Protector. This application provides all this and more. It also provides for creating membership sites, and will soon have a full-blown affiliate management module added to it as well.

I purchased this product a few days ago and have already installed it and am using it to protect one of my products. I’ll be digging more deeply into it and will soon post a full review of it for you.

Overall Rating: Excellent