For any business to thrive it needs to generate profits, and the same thing applies to your online home business. This discussion is going to talk about a variety of ways that you can use to promote your business and lead you to make sales.
To do this, i want to walk you through a typical sales process, that will help you identify your potential customers, and lead them into buying something from you. First of all, you need to identify your ideal life time customer base.
Suspects
A suspect is someone you think might be interested in what you have to offer, they just either don’t know it yet, or have not been exposed to your business yet. For the kind of business we are in (the online home business model), you can think of this category as your target demographic. If you are selling a male enhancement pill for example you are likely targeting gentlemen over the age of say 50. If you are selling a new style bikini your target audience is probably younger women.
Basically, your target demographic is whomever your product or service is perfectly suited for. The next step is to make them aware of what you are offering, and get them interested in learning more, and eventually into making a purchase.
This step involves targeting the right demographic group, considering factors such as location, gender, age, background, income, hobbies, marital status, do they have kids? and so on. Then, you display your ad in relevant publications, and basically making people aware of who you are and how you can help them.
Take note there that i didn’t say to try selling directly to this group. Letting your target demographic know about how you can help them out in some way is a far better pre-selling tactic than bluntly putting your product or services in someone’s face.
Prospects
Prospects are people who have shown an interest in you, your product or service, or your business generally. These are people you can follow up with over time to increase the likelihood of them making a sale by constantly adding value to their life in some meaningful way – you might solve a problem they are having, or offer some way to improve some aspect of their life.
While your suspects above may be your ideal customers, not all of them will ultimately be interested in making a purchase from you, and since this is our ultimate goal, we need to be focusing more on the folks who are actively interested in how we can help them. At this stage you need to start filtering the suspect group down and organizing the more interested portions into prospect lists.
In the offline world this used to be done by gathering telephone numbers and mailing addresses.
The absolute best way of doing this in an online home business is to gather their email addresses so that you have a means of reaching out and helping them more over time. As you help them more, you are warming them up for a future sale.
Customers
As you advertise to more suspects and collect more prospects for your business you will begin making sales, turning your prospects into your customers. Every contact you have made with these folks should have increased their confidence and their trust in you, so that over time they consider you almost like someone they know.
On average it takes 7 separate contacts with a prospect to turn them into a customer, which is why capturing their contact information, in our case their primary email address, so that you can communicate with them repeatedly over time.
Repeat Customers
Your sales funnel might also include one-time-offers or upsells, downsells, or cross-sells – all fancy ways of saying you offer multiple items for sale in an effort to appeal to every prospect and every budget. you may offer improved versions of a product, or complimentary products over time. It’s a lot easier to sell to an existing satisfied customer than it is to create a brand new sale.
Lifetime Customers
The goal here is ultimately to have your customer buy from you (or through you if you follow the affiliate marketing business model) on a recurring basis. Depending on what you are selling you may offer recurring services, consumables that require people to re-buy regularly, a regular magazine or newsletter or some other form of recurring billing model.
Providing you treat your customers like royalty and offer them way more value than they are actually paying for, they will keep coming back to you.
Think about the brands of food you buy every week, i bet there are some in there week after week after week, right? That’s usually because you like that particular brand, it suits your individual taste, and you want it again and again.
Attract Recurring Sales By Over Delivering On Value
The same thing that causes you to repeatedly buy the same brand foods applies with your customers. Give them what they want, give them what they need, and over deliver on what you promised. You can do this by offering free complimentary products or services to your main item
- if you are selling vacation packages, offer a free carry on luggage case
- if you are selling collectible coins, offer a free wallet or case to keep them in
- if you are selling the latest line of bikini’s offer a free bottle of sun tan lotion
In our online home business model, we might be selling software packages or WordPress to which you add some free relevant ebooks or reports to sweeten the deal, or we may be selling high-end training courses plugins and offering a free 30 minute personal consultation to address questions or show them best practices, etc.
Learn the Lifetime Value Of Your customers
To keep it simple, the bonuses you add should be lower in cost than the profit you are making from the original sale, so that you stay in profit. This technique helps you generate more sales, so while your profit per sale may be a little lower, the increase in volume of sales will see your actual profits rise. As your business grows you will become familiar with the long-term or lifetime value (LTV) of your customers and you can better evaluate how much you charge for products and services, and how much you can afford to give away in order to obtain that initial sale.
LTV, Long-Term or Lifetime value of a customer is, on average, how much money you earn per customer, over the lifetime of your relationship with them. If you know this value you can use it to determine how much money you can afford to spend on acquiring each new customer. In many businesses the company loses money on the initial sale, but accepts that loss because it knows that, on average, each customer they acquire this way will ultimately lead to more profits over the lifetime of the business relationship.
In the online world you may see product owners offering up to 300% commissions on their front end product (e.g.: selling a $10 eBook, the affiliate will get a $30 commission for each one sold). That small eBook might be the lead into a sales funnel where the average customer spends $100. Knowing that there is $100 per customer, the product owner can afford to pay out 3 times the commission over what he receives from the customer on the initial sale, and still make $70 for ever $10 eBook sold.
Now, while this is great information that you need to know as a business owner i am sure you are also interested in just how to go about generating sales, am i right? You want to know about how to market to your suspect pool, how to create interest so that they become prospects, and how to turn those prospects into actual paying customers, right?
Check out the next step in this tutorial on how to take complete strangers and convert them into life-time customers.
Part 1: How to Take Complete Strangers and Convert Them Into Life-time Customers
Part 2: How To Attract Leads To Your Online Home Business Using Face To Face Marketing Offline
Part 3: How To Attract Leads To Your Online Home Business Using Remote Marketing Offline
Part 4: How To Attract Leads To Your Online Home Business Using Online Techniques
Part 5: How To Attract Leads To Your Online Home Business Using Online Techniques – Continued