Making More Sales By Not Focusing On Selling
Going straight for the sale is not necessarily the right thing to do. Many web sites are losing out on big profits because of this. It’s true. I’d risk losing a sale up front in order to get more email addresses. Does this sound crazy?
It’s not. Its paying me back handsomely. Here was the dilemma. I started realizing how important newsletter follow-ups were when I finally signed up with an autoresponder. I saw a dramatic increase in my sales conversion rate once my autoresponder newsletters were being sent out every four days. By getting their email address, I was able to approach them repeatedly over the next few weeks with their permission. I supplied excellent information that they wanted with very mild references back to my web site. (Note: not a hard core sales pitch). What was the result? My conversion to sales ratio increased by almost 50%. It soon became pretty obvious that the newsletters were a powerful selling tool. I knew that I wanted as many people as possible to signup for the free newsletter because they converted many visitors into customers. I was struggling though with the idea of whether I was pushing the newsletters too much. After all the free newsletters offered SOME of the information that was included in my ebooks that I was selling. I was concerned that maybe people would avoid buying the products because they could get the newsletter for free. After some testing, I realized that I had nothing to worry about! By carefully tracking where my sales came from I learned the truth. I was able to determine that repeated exposure via email was helping out my sales considerably. I prominently displayed the newsletter and learned a hot tip to pass on to you: HOT TIP: Work at selling your newsletter just as you would work at selling whatever products you are offering your customers. Don’t just put up a “Free Newsletter” form and hope they will sign up. Yes some will sign up but not as many as you could be getting. After more heavily promoting the newsletter with bullets explaining the benefits and what they are getting, my signups rose about 40%. According to my traffic logs, I was capturing the email addresses of almost 45% of everyone who visited my site. This is VERY good. I did not see a decrease in immediate sales. I attribute this to the fact that some people arrived at my site ready to buy regardless of the free newsletter or not. In fact, a decent percent of purchases were made from people who never even bothered to sign up for the free newsletter. I did see an increase of followup sales even higher once I started promoted my free newsletter more. FINAL ADVICE: You would do well to try and get as many email addresses as possible. You are then in a great position to repeatedly approach all of these people for sales with their permission. All in all, I received a very strong increase in my conversion to sales ratio with a strong use of my free newsletters. This of course means that I came close to doubling the amount of sales I was making with very little extra marketing cost (simply the cost of the autoresponder). The autoresponder pays for itself many times over every month with the extra sales it has given me. --------------------------------------------------------------------
Article by Tim Kerber of the Smallbusinesswebsite.com
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