Marketing
A one-time offer is extremely powerful. We have all been hit up with one time offers at one point or another. Think about the last time you bought a product online and the very moment you bought the product you were taken to a page that said, “Hey Wait!” or “You Will Only See This Page Once!”
Understanding the guidelines of how to create a successful one-time offer is the most important step that most people forget to take.
Some important facts to remember about your one time offer as follows:
- A one time offer is shown to the customer only once, immediately after the customer has paid for your front end offer.
- A one time offer has to be compelling
- A one time offer has to impart a sense of urgency
- A one time offer must make sense in the mind of the buyer
Just do a search on Google for, “Free One Time Offer Scripts” and you will come up with all sorts of results.
You may have to hire someone to set this up for you if you do not have the technical knowledge already. But well worth adding it into you marketing mix.
FACT: People are far more likely to make another purchase when their wallet, purse, credit card, etc. is already on the table than at any other time in the purchase cycle.
- Offering your customer a chance to upgrade (as an upsell).
- Upsells can double or even triple the amount of revenue.
Think of up-selling as tacking on a product that can enhance the value of the original product.
Do you need them? No, but it sure does add extra money to your bank account on the original sale.
Many marketers fail to capitalize on upselling and are leaving an insane load of cash on the table by not asking their customers to buy more.
What exactly Is Upselling?
Upsell is basically a Win-Win situation. You are happier and your customer is happier.
- An upsell is an offer given to a customer during an initial purchase to bump them to another purchase.
- Customer must get a good deal so the extra value they receive must be worth more than the extra price. Clearly see benefits.
- The customer needs to see that at the time of the sale in order for the higher priced item to make sense
- Continue to believe it after the sale. (low refunds- Higher trust factor).
- If you buy a computer you are “upsold” on things like the memory, hard drive space, monitor size, etc.
- Upselling is used worldwide in business and is a common practice.
- McDonalds used to use “Would you like to super-size that?”
Here’s Some Examples of Upsells
- Sell a £47 info product you can easily up-sell to a platinum version which includes the written transcripts for only £67.
- Up-sell to an ‘Inner Circle Members Only’ monthly webinar series for an additional £29/month! Call it your “Super Success Program”.
- Sell a £17.00 e-book and upsell a video training course showing them the how to step by step process you outlined in the e-book for.
- Deluxe Upsell – You could sell a basic product and tell people for a little more money they can receive the deluxe edition.
- Make Money Upsell – You could offer people the rights to sell the product they are buying.
- Time Upsell - If you’re selling a product or service people subscribe to monthly, offer them a discount to subscribe for a full year.
- Free Upsell – You could offer a free sample or trial of your product (membership). This usually works for a months free trail and then they pay for the service after that.
When Should I Upsell?
Always have something of value to offer.
- Upsell any time a customer makes a purchase from you.
- Upsell products that fit and flow with your offer.
Create a Sense of Urgency
The general rule in business is to always have something of value to offer.
Selling points such as “limited time offer” or “limited quantities on hand” create a sense of urgency and improving the conversion rates of upsells.
Upselling is huge! Look at Amazon. Profit margins are high on upsells. In some cases 70% of sales will come from the upsells. That is the difference between £30,000 and £100,000! It’s a lot of money to leave on the table.
Myth: Create a hundred page ebook, sell it for $37 and make a fortune.
Truth: One ebook does not contain the key to make you rich, you’ll be lucky if you break even. Right now many successful people online are losing money on that first product that you see.
That’s why you have to learn Backend strategies.
If you think a fortune is £1 million, then you have to sell 27,028 e-books. Not going to happen ever. Sorry!
Even if you think a fortune is £100,000, you would still have to sell 2703 books, which is almost impossible as well.
Here’s what your front end purpose is; To create a relationship to continue selling.
What Type of Products or Services Can I Use In My Backend Strategy?
- Boot camps
- Workshops
- Coaching programs
- Home study courses
- Field trips
- Mastermind groups
- Do-it-for-them services
- Membership sites
- Physical version of your digital product.
- Consider breaking your product into two separate offers.
- And much, much more
- Offer the “what comes next”.
Remember: The money is in the back end. Your strategy needs to include numerous front ends to bring people in but focus all leads from those towards the back end. This is where you money is.
A QR (quick-response) code is a two-dimensional barcode-like image that can be read by software on a smart phone, usually via a downloadable app. When someone scans the QR code it directs the user to a mobile-optimized web page for more information. It means that a smart phone user can access your website without having to remember the URL. Remember when using QR codes that they are an innately mobile experience so the content you want consumers to view must be mobile optimised.
You can download your QR Code for free using one of the following sites:
http://www.mobile-barcodes.com/qr-code-generator
And here’s 10 quick ways you can use your QR Code to enhance your business. Add it to your email signature, business cards, leaflets, handouts, gift giving, sharing a musical message, promotional gift, personalised gift card message, initiate a competition, quick pay option. Be creative!
Note: To set your phone up for scanning QR codes, you need to download the QR application for your phone from your phone provider.
Are you stuck for ideas to promote your business, or fed up with the mundane advertisements? Then try these quick ideas to help promote your business:
- Think ‘Richard Branson dressed as a bride’ which was just one of his publicity stunts to promote the launch of his Virgin Bride Business. Okay, you don’t have to go that far but what can you do that would be a great publicity stunt to promote your business?
- Start your own radio show. Its easy to use. Go to www.blogradio.com and you can do that today.
- Spot a trend in your market place and comment on it to your local news or radio station.
- Give your opinion on something that’s hot in the news and relevant to your business.
- Give away a freebie, providing it’s cost effective and easy to deliver. Use it to drive traffic from newspapers, magazines, social media and websites.
- Do a survey to your customers and offer a free incentive for completing it. You could do this via www.linkedin.com very easily. And use the software at www.surveymonkey.com to put your survey together.
- Help a charity. But don’t do that dreadful publicity stunt with the photo and enormous cheque (groan). Think outside of the box and look for ways you can really help rather than give money. Could you give your time? Promote one of their products or services through your business that would also benefit your customers too?
Remember, you don’t have to do all of these at once. You can make it a regular fun promotion that you focus on something different to try each month of the year. That way, you will have 12 new fun marketing strategies by the end of the year – great stuff!
If you had $5,000 in your marketing budget… what would you choose to do?
Is it more effective to:
- Buy a major list and send out to those people, five hundred postcards promoting your offer.
- Find a list of 25 individuals and send them something that’s very specific to what you do?
I was in my local garden centre recently and I came across some of those nice little ‘messages in a bottle’ which you can send instead of a card. But these were $4.95 each as against the $0.85 postcard.
However, can you imagine if you ran a marketing campaign and you sent out the message in a bottle as against a simple postcard. That’s something much more expensive to send out than a post card, but can you imagine the impact?
And this is especially important if you are targeting to the more affluent clients because, you’re in there marketing to affluent people, you can charge premium prices. For instance, let’s just say that you’re charging $5,000 for your offer, well, even if you only got five clients that’s $25,000.
So think in terms of your target market and if you want to attract more affluent clients who will pay premium prices, then you need to be more creative and prepared to spend more to bring them in.
It’s also a lot more fun coming up with some of those creative promotional items too!
It’s difficult to find the time to do everything in your business and that’s one of the reasons you really MUST make time for this one activity – List building.
Why is list building so important?
Here’s a number of reasons why this needs to be a priority activity.
i. When you have a list of people you already have a warm target audience to turn to when you want to run your seminars or workshops.
ii. It takes five times longer to find new clients and costs almost five times as much too! That’s scary. But if you already have a list building strategy in place then this needn’t be a long drawn out activity or have a huge cost attached to it.
iii. When you launch a new product or service you already have a database of people who have already previously held their hand up and said “I’m interested”, so they are open to your offer.
iv. Testing out something new isn’t so daunting when you have a list. And you might even segment your list into different categories and do some split testing with different segments.
v. Its also a really good way to find out what your direct market want as you’ll be able to keep in contact with them on a regular basis. Ask questions or gauge their response by having a poll on your blog.
vi. Automating your list building activities as much as possible frees you up to work on your business … rather than in it. So you get to spend more time with clients and doing some of things you love doing the most.
vii. Your list (providing it’s a quality list) is considered an asset in your business, and as such can have considerable monetary value should you wish to sell your business at a later stage.
By making list building a priority activity in your business you are creating a system that will serve your business for many years to come, or provide an excellent monetary incentive as part of your exit strategy.
One of the biggest blunders I see that many small businesses make is by not defining what their ideal target market is. So here’s the 7 steps you need to take to do this:
Step 1: Acquire a Thorough Understanding of the Mindset, Attitudes, Beliefs and Values of the people you want to target.
Step 2: Research the Market and find out what people want. What are their fears, desires and the things that will life and business easier for them?
Step 3: Define Your Ideal Client. What age are they? Male, female, couples, children, adults? What do they currently do? What are they interested in? Hobbies? Where do they live? How do they spend their spare time? What income do they have?
Step 4: Segment Your Market. Think of this as you would an orange. Each segment of an orange makes up the whole, so break down your target market into segments that you want to focus on.
Step 5: Conduct a Competitive Analysis. See who else is doing what, and how.
Step 6: Identify Powerful Niche.What is it that makes you special? It’s not you deliver a fantastic service as everyone says that. Look for something that is unique and sets you apart.
Step 7: Create Your Ideal Client Profile. Be crystal clear on who they are. All your marketing and promotions should speak directly to your target market.
This takes time to research and develop but it’s well worth the effort in increased sales!
Article by Wendy Howard
Join me: www.twitter.com/wendyhoward & www.linkedin.com/in/spiritofvenus
Looking for tips on e-marketing? Here you go:
i. Use email newsletters to keep customers informed. This helps maintain brand awareness and gives you the opportunity to advertise andy new products or services you might have.
ii. Don’t use span words, especially in the title of your email. These are words such as ‘free’ or ‘discounted’. If you do then they will likely be picked up by the spam filter.
iii. Ensure your message is personalised with your signature and add a photo if you wish. Personalising improves responses.
iv. Write engaging content but don’t make it too long or your reader will lose interest. You are better to have 2-3 short snippets than longer content.
v. Avoid using templates. You are better to have a newsletter and email designed and personalised for you. This communicates a message consistent with your branding.
vi. Consider which is the best day of the week and time to send out your correspondence. Research shows this differs per industry. For instance training & coaching businesses have better opening rates on a Wednesday as well as better track through rates.
vii. Always use tracking reports to measure your success of any campaigns. In your newsletter make sure every offer has a separate tracking link too.
I know much of this may seem straight forward but ask yourself do I do all of that? If not, why not?
Article by: Wendy Howard
Join me on www.twitter.com/wendyhoward & www.linkedin.com/in/spiritofvenus
10 Marketing Mistakes To Avoid At All Costs!
We all make mistakes but some of them can be fatal to your business if you’re not careful. So try to avoid making these:
1. No market research – Just because something feels ‘like a good idea’ or ‘I developed it because my friend or family like it’ and then not being able to find a route to market is a fatal mistake. You really do need to test out your potential market place and potential product BEFORE you spend a lot of time and money in developing it fully. You can find out what people are looking for on forums and chat sites online very easily. Join in the conversation and ask the questions you need answers to that way.
2. No Marketing Plan – A marketing plan is crucial even if you never bother with a business plan, don’t skip this. A marketing plan lists the strategies you will use to reach your customers to sell your products and services. When this is not in place you will be working randomly, inconsistent and probably ineffective aswell. Set out a step by step marketing plan for each of your products and services.
3. No set goals – Without having a set goal in mind your marketing efforts won’t have direction. You need to set goals that are achievable within a set timeframe and have a monetary aspect to them. You need to attach how many leads, referrals and clients you want to achieve from each of your marketing efforts. These all need to be tracked so you know exactly what is being achieved and what isn’t so you can adjust for your next marketing effort.
4. No Idea of your actual customer – You might think your product or service is great for everyone but when you try and speak to everyone you end up speaking to no-one. You need to focus on a niche market and even a ‘niche within a niche’ with a very strong message that speaks only to them. You may need to set up more than one place to direct people to in order to get your message across to the different niches you have identified.
5. Niche is too small – Sometimes you can make your niche too small so you’re not reaching enough potential customers. Having a small niche is great if the price of your product or service is so high that it doesn’t matter if only one or two people buy from you. On the other hand if your niche is so small that only a few potential people qualify, then you need to widen your niche.
6. Selling to the wrong audience – You can have the best product or service in the world but if you are trying to sell it to the wrong people who can’t afford your product or service then you will soon go out of business. Find your groups of carefully. Look to see where your ideal customer is currently residing and start to make contact that way.
7. Copying others – Copying advertisements or other marketing efforts which others have carried out without knowing the results they have achieved is another common marketing mistake. Just because people are placing advertisements or distributing leaflets in publications doesn’t mean it is actually working. You need to model yourself on those who already know what’s working and then make it your own.
8. Marketing stops for delivery – many people stop marketing once they have brought sales in so they can deliver the service. Of course, this leads to ‘feast or famine’ as sales dry up when no marketing is taking place. You need to have a marketing system in place so that marketing continues even when you’re delivering your services.
9. Searching for new customers – while ignoring the ones you’ve already got in your sales funnel. It takes more than 10 times the effort and expense to bring in a new lead whereas you can easily convert past clients with new product lines. So look for ways that you can expand what you’ve already delivered to people and give them a call.
10. Not systemising – your follow-on process when you bring leads into your business. There needs to be a system in place taking your prospect into a paying customer and then into repeat paying customer. This all needs to operate as an automated system.
Article by: Wendy Howard
Join me on www.twitter.com/wendyhoward & www.linkedin.com/in/spiritofvenus
Want to improve your sales skills? Go here www.grow-training.com
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