Making Sales

This is the final post in the series How to Build a Business Online in 7 Steps.

Step 7: Making Sales

This final step is all about making the sale and getting your customers to buy more from you.

Many business owners I deal with sell a customer once and that is it. As you are probably already aware constantly having to find new customers is a time consuming and expensive business. It is much easier to sell to someone who has already bought or to get someone who has credit card in hand to buy more.

You can increase your chances of making sales and increasing the value of each sale by:

1. Making sure the calls to action on your website are compelling. By this I mean they should be very attractive in terms of the value the customer is going to get from your product or service and should not just be based on offering discounts.
2. When someone is ready to buy a product from you offer them a product upgrade for more money, a service contract for your product, a related product item, some spares for the product etc. A large percentage of people who are in a buying frame of mind are more likely to buy something extra if they can see a benefit to doing so. Think of the famous McDonalds upsell of “do you want fries with that?”.
3. Obtain the email addresses of people who visit your website and customers who buy from you. Offer them something in return for their email address and then email them product offers once a month interspersed with free and helpful information about your products. For example, if someone buys a lawn mower from you the first follow up email could give them information about how to maintain their lawn mower to keep it in tip top condition, another one could remind them of the service interval for the type of mower they purchased (this gets them spending more with you for the servicing), send them tips of the right and wrong way to mow a lawn, send them an email about lawn care and offer them your related lawn care products. I am sure you can translate my example to make it relevant to your products and services. The key factor here is to provide helpful, problem solving type information before sending them a sales message.
4. Look for partners who could sell your products and services to their customers. Find a local company who has a related product or service that does not compete with you, and offer to let your customers know about their product in return for them letting their customers know about yours. You could even go as far as offering them a fee or percentage of the sale. One example of this is two customers of mine who I got to promote each others businesses. One was a zoo who offered all of their guests discount tickets for a meal in the local restaurant, in return the local restaurant handed out discount tickets for the zoo to all customers who bought a family meal.

EXERCISE

Look at the ideas I have given you in this step for increasing your sales and the value of each sale, and come up with one way you can increase your sales. Put it in place in your business.

 

Congratulations

If you have read the whole of this series and followed each step, you now have a very powerful way of building your business online.

Don’t worry if you feel intimidated or confused by all of this. Each step is simple in its own right. All you need to do is to take each step one at a time and at your own pace.

Building a business online only takes the 7 steps I have shown you, everything else you read online on this topic is just confusing the issue and does not necessarily work. The steps I have described are exactly the same ones I use successfully with my clients every day and their businesses are growing in leaps and bounds.

If you know these 7 steps are the way forward for your business but you are just too busy or don’t want to implement them yourself let me know, I would love to help you to be successful by doing the whole process alongside you or for you.

I hope you found this series of blog posts helpful. Many thanks for reading them and good luck building your business online.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed as I will continue posting valuable free training and further help on this very topic we have only just scratched the surface.

All the best and stay profitable

Greg Spence

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