A POWER TECHNIQUE FOR BOOSTING SALES
So you've built your site and started to promote it. You're
getting some sales, but you want to generate more.
There is one simple sales technique that almost every Internet
marketing expert agrees will DRAMATICALLY boost your sales every
single day - follow up with your prospects.
The bottom line is this - if you want to vastly increase the
number of your visitors who turn into valued customers, you need
to contact them over and over. Through a series of messages, you
need to convey the emotional and logical reasons why they MUST
buy your product.
If you assume that your visitors are going to buy from you on
their first and only visit to your site, you are mistaken. It
just doesn't happen that quickly. Approximately 80% of sales are
made AFTER the initial contact. Do you see how many sales you
could be losing if you don't initiate further contact?
Consider your site's visitors perspective. Do you grab your
credit card every time you pass through a store and see
something you like? It doesn't mean you're going to buy it right
then and there. When you decide to buy it, do you go back to
that same store? Maybe, maybe not! Would you be more inclined to
return to a particular store if the sales associate gave you a
courtesy call?
How do you follow up for maximum effect and what tools and
techniques should you use?
o The Tools
Begin by realizing that you can't do all this by yourself!
Suppose you get 500 visitors a day to your site and one in fifty
of them requests information. That's ten e-mails you're going to
have to send manually for the next few days or weeks. And
tomorrow you get another ten, and the next day another ten...
can you imagine how complicated managing this process could be?
What is the best management tool available? Sequential or
follow-up autoresponders.
Autoresponders are the e-mail equivalent of "fax-on-demand"
systems. Someone sends your autoresponder an e-mail or
subscribes to it on your web site and the autoresponder sends
the messages and manages the follow-up process from that point.
It does the managing for you!
A good autoresponder system will send out the right message on
the right day, address your prospect by name, keep track of the
follow-up sequence while automatically building you a database
of interested contacts.
Most web site hosting packages come with autoresponders.
Usually, however, these send out a single message and therefore
can't be used for continually following up with prospects.
Instead, you can pay monthly fees to an autoresponder service or
install software on your site and run them directly from there.
o The Techniques
So what techniques can you employ in your follow-up messages to
turn your prospect into a customer?
- Technique 1: Build Trust and Credibility The more you contact
your prospect with useful and relevant information, the more
they will assume you can be trusted. By offering valuable
credible information, you prove to your prospect that you know
what you are talking about.
- Technique 2: Create the Emotional Reason to Buy With each
message you send, you can work on the need or desire that your
product will satisfy. More money to pay for that holiday? More
free time to spend with the family? Less stress? People buy
because they WANT something, secondly because they NEED it.
- Technique 3: Increase the Offer Gradually increase the
perceived value of your offer until your prospect has to find
reasons not to buy from you! You can do this by offering free
bonuses, discounts, or free shipping. But here's the golden rule
- all of them must be time-limited to push your prospect to make
that final decision.
- Technique 4: Logical Justification People buy for emotional
reasons, but they need that decision backed by solid logical
reasons. Your follow-up plan should include logical reasons why
your prospect should buy - reasons based on facts and figures,
not on emotional desire alone.
- Technique 5: Avoid the After-Sale Blues How many times have
you bought something and then immediately regretted it? You can
avoid this situation (and refunds) after the sale by reassuring
your new customer their decision to purchase was a good one. You
simply need to remind them that your product will save time,
increase sales, boost site traffic, help them lose weight or
whatever. They have already bought it - they just need reminding
what it will do for them.
In summary, to dramatically increase your ratio of visitors to
sales, you ABSOLUTELY MUST follow up with your prospects and
site visitors. It works, it's proven, and it's easy if you use
the right tools.