If you’re looking to make additional revenue from your website or blog by selling products online, there are a few basic options:
1. Find new customers and complete more sales.
2. Increase prices while making the same number of sales.
3. Increase the value of the customers you already have.
Anytime it comes to selling products online, finding ways to reach new customers and make new sales is often the focus. While there is nothing wrong with completing more sales and getting more customers, increasing the value of your current customers can be an equally effective method. In this article I will discuss a few different things you can implement to increase the lifetime value of your current customers. Considering these prospects already have a history with you, there is a high probability they will purchase again!
Offer Quality Products & Customer Service – First things first. In order to get more value out of your customers you’ll need to strive to offer a very high level of quality in your products, along with offering great customer service. Increasing the lifetime value of a customer goes hand-in-hand with business reviews. Obviously, if you want sometime to buy from you again they’ll need to have a great experience their first time around, correct? If you went to a restaurant for the very first time and didn’t enjoy the food or have good service, you probably wouldn’t go back. The same applies when selling things over the internet. If a customer purchases one of your products and has a bad experience either with the product itself or with the customer service they received, that customer is highly unlikely to make another purchase from you in the future.
Encourage Referrals – Increasing the value of a customer doesn’t necessarily require that customer to have previously spent money with your company. The value of a customer can also be increased if those people are telling others about your products. Remember the reviews I was just talking about in the previous section? Referrals and reviews are practically the same thing. Referrals (like reviews) are extremely powerful because consumers tend to trust the recommendation of a friend, family member, or colleague more than they would an advertisement. If you have satisfied customers going out and spreading the word about your products it can make each of those customers more valuable.
Upsells – Another fairly common approach to increasing the value of customers is to make good use of upselling. With an upsell you would make an additional offer to your customers while they checkout or immediately after their purchase is complete. For example, if someone is checking out at your website and purchasing some video editing software, you could offer a pack of royalty free music for an additional charge as well. These two products go hand-in-hand with each other and if someone is purchasing one it’s very likely they will also be interested in the other. Another example would be related to you selling an eBook. Immediately following their purchase you could forward that customer to a landing page where you offer access to an exclusive webinar that provides training on a related topic. As you can see, in most cases the first product is priced low to attract as many customers as possible, and then the upsell is priced higher to maximize revenue.
