Every business suffers from slow periods, where nobody seems to want to buy. One great way to get through such a time, is to get serious about prospecting your existing client base.
You’ll find four great ways to boost the sales you make from existing customers in this article. And they’ll work for you no matter what you’re selling.
Follow up immediately
Every time you make a sale, follow up immediately with a thank you email.
In this email, you want to thank the client for his/her purchase. You should also include any information required to use the product, as this will help the client to start enjoying its benefits much sooner.
The other thing you ought to do, is offer the client a related product or service.
The most responsive prospect you’ll ever come across, is one who just bought from you. That’s why it really pays to include an additional offer in your post-sale thank you email.
This offer should be for something related to the product the client has just bought. Ideally, it will be the type of product that has the client say “of course I need that.”
One great way to increase your chance of securing this add-on sale, is to include a voucher with an exclusive discount in your email. Put an expiry-date on the voucher, and stick to it. This will increase the pressure to buy.
Don’t have a related product? Maybe you can sell an upgrade on the product they actually bought? Maybe you can source a related product?
After all, even if only 1 in 10 clients responds, your overall sales will increase by 10%. And of course, you can automate the entire process (money without work). This is a way to sell more product, without doing any extra work, or spending extra on advertising.
Offer your clients a freebie
To make sales, you first have to get people to visit your site. So why not find a way to get your existing customers to visit your site?
One great way to do that, is to mail your existing client base, and offer them a freebie. This could be anything, but ideally it will be related to something you’re selling. For example…
An advertising site offered every one of their existing clients 1,000 extra banner impressions totally free of charge. All their clients had to do, was visit the site and enter a coupon number into a form.
On doing so, the client was then taken to a page that offered him/her another 100,000 banner impressions for $19.95.
It cost the company very little make this offer, and the take-up was high.
More importantly, the take-up on the $19.95 offer was also high. That’s because the mailing was sent to existing advertising clients (i.e. very well targeted), and because the client came under additional pressure from the law of reciprocation.
Reward clients for referring others
Referral programs are quite common, and generally focus on paying commission in return for referring new customers.
Another approach, is to offer people the product free in return for referring others who buy. I came across a site that gave away a free mailing to their list for every two clients referred. That’s essentially a “buy two, get one free” offer, but somebody else is paying for the advertising.
Use an auto-responder to send the thank you
You can be pretty certain that a new client isn’t going to know your product as well as you do.
Your clients are highly likely to appreciate a series of emails that explain how to get the most from a product. You might create a series of 10 emails. The first is the post-sale thank you letter, while the remaining 9 each explain a different aspect of the product.
You can then include a specific offer inside some or all of these emails. This is especially powerful if your offer relates directly to the feature or benefit you described in the email itself.
For example, an ad product might set aside an email to describe the extra visitors that will come if the client uploads a banner ad to their account. The reader is then offered a special deal on banner design, and possibly even extra banner displays.
The seller’s goal is to help the client get more from his/her initial purchase, and in doing so, create opportunities to sell more product.
