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backend
Using Upsells And Backend Sales To Increase Profits
Once you have managed to persuade someone to buy one of your products or services, you should have a good sales funnel in place to try to increase the minimum order value (MOV) as this will make it much easier to be profitable if you are going to use paid traffic.
Your front-end offer should allow you to break even with any ad spend; this means that you are acquiring customers for free.
Then your sales funnels work to add profit to your business.
So, let’s look at a couple of components of a sales funnel which can have a big impact on your profit margins; upsells and backend offers.
Giving More Value with One Time Offers
One time offers are a great way to increase the money you make from each offer. You can get people to agree to purchase a product from you at a lower price that’s only available right that second, making the sale a bit easier.
This is a good way to increase the amount of your sale since they’re already in buying mode. A One Time Offer is shown right after the customer clicks the Buy button. But before they checkout, the OTO is presented for them to consider.
One time offers are a very good way to give customers more value. It’s less expensive than the product would normally be, giving your customers the opportunity to grab another great deal from you while they already have their credit card out.
Another great way to offer additional value is to trade OTOs with other marketers. For example, if you have a product that complements another marketer’s product (and vice versa), then each of you would present the other’s products to your customers as the OTOs, either sharing the revenue or giving the owner 100% in exchange for a reciprocal arrangement.
If you can’t find someone who will JV with you on an OTO offer, you can try to find someone with an affiliate program who will allow you to offer their product as an OTO at a discount. Simply tell them you expect a good volume of sales and you’d like to offer their product at a slight discount.
You probably won’t be able to land a deal like this unless you can prove you can do a large volume of business, because it would mean setting up a special sales page (or at least setting up a coupon code that could be easily tracked with your affiliate ID).
The best OTOs are usually very difficult to say no to. They offer exceptional value at a very special price. There are three separate types of one time offers. One is usually an upgrade to the first product, such as a more comprehensive version of it.
The second could be a coaching program that takes the ideas of the product and offers them in a one-on-one coaching system. And the third could be a turnkey solution that goes along with the product you sold. For example, if you’ve sold an eBook about making money with AdSense, you could offer a package of AdSense templates as the OTO.
Membership sites can also have OTOs. When someone joins your membership site, you could offer them an upgrade to a higher access level. Let’s say you have two access levels – silver and gold.
The silver level typically costs $50 per month, and the gold level costs $100 per month. You could offer anyone who joins at the silver level an upgrade to gold for only $25 more, at $75 per month – a $25 savings from the normal gold level price. You can also offer one-on-one coaching as an OTO for membership sites. Since memberships are already a monthly fee, coaching is a perfect complement to many membership sites.
Make sure you test your one time offers just like you test any part of your sales copy or site performance. Replace the offers and see which ones convert better and then tweak that offer until it performs as well as it can.
Have A Plan for Your Backend Sales
Every good marketer knows how important it is to increase the lifetime value of the customer. It’s much cheaper to make a sale to a previous customer than it is to get a new one onboard. The cost of acquiring new customers can be high but getting more money out of existing customers won’t cost you a penny.
Building a backend to your business isn’t hard but without one, you’re limiting your financial potential. A backend is how you continue selling to an existing customer. Let’s say you sell an eBook on how to make money blogging.
Your eBook could discuss what a blog is, how to set one up, and how to make money from it. Your backend sales could come from affiliate items (if you don’t feel like taking the product creation route again) or a new eBook, membership site, or video/audio package you sell.
Whenever you first start selling online, always think of complementary topics you can tack on as a backend. For our example, your backend sales could be about social networking on other networks like Instagram, Twitter etc..
After they’ve begun seeing success, your backend sales could focus on more paid methods of marketing, such as AdWords. You progress your offers with your audience like steppingstones, moving from the first logical starting point to a more advanced stage.
Plop your offers right into your autoresponder system and it’ll automatically cater to the needs of your subscribers the longer they stay on your list. Another common way to add a backend onto a product is to offer personal coaching.
Personal coaching can be expensive, sometimes costing thousands of dollars per month. A lot of marketers offer this as a backend strategy, giving them the potential to significantly increase the return on their investment (ROI) of acquiring the prospect.
If you take care to create backend offers that add value to their needs and which are of top quality, they’ll continue buying from you. If you promote anything and everything just for the sake of cashing in, they’ll lose trust in you.
Your backend sales strategy isn’t all done just through your autoresponders. You can put links to backend products on your “thank you” pages. And don’t forget that each product can act as a backend item for another one. So, you might start with an eBook about WordPress and then use a blogging eBook as your backend item for the customer.
Just make sure you don’t set yourself up for limited profits by using a single product without implementing a backend strategy that will work to increase your ROI repeatedly. You’re building a business, not dabbling in a few hit or miss sales.
