Selling to your existing customers is one of the most valuable skills you could develop as a marketer.
Because your customers already have trust built up with you and you can market to them over a longer period of time, back-end sales techniques are a little different than front-end techniques.
Most Importantly: Have a Good First Product
More important than any other technique is to have a stellar first product.
If someone buys a $20 product from you and the quality is shoddy, chances are they’re not going to buy a $200 product from you.
On the other hand, if they spend $20 with you and the quality is off the charts, they’re going to be much more willing to spend $200 with you next time.
Thank You Page Upsells
Selling someone a second product when they’ve already purchased is one of the most effective techniques around.
This was one of the most successful techniques for McDonald’s. You’ve heard the line: “Would you like fries with that?”
Likewise, if you were selling bed sheets, you might ask after a customer placed their order if they’d also like pillow covers.
When someone decides to buy something, they’ve switched into “buying mode.” They’re much more likely to buy something else at that moment than any other.
Take advantage of that with the Thank You Page technique.
Cross Selling During Checkout
Another common technique is to sell other related products during the checkout process.
This is slightly riskier than selling on the Thank You page, as you risk alienating some buyers by trying to sell them more products before they can purchase what they wanted to purchase.
That said, the gains from using this technique often offset the risk. You have to test it to see what the real-world results are, of course.
One good example of this is GoDaddy. Before you checkout, they’ll try to sell you all kinds of products, but it’s still fairly easy to checkout and buy a domain with them.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is the ultimate back-end selling technique. If you can’t make the sale today, you can make it tomorrow – Or next week, next month or even next year.
If you have your customer’s email, aim to build a relationship with them by sending them useful emails that they’ll actually want to read.
Over time, they’ll come to trust you. Once you have their trust, all you need is great copywriting that gets them excited about a product to make a sale.
These back-end sales techniques are used by both giant companies like Amazon.com to small mom and pop online shops to great success. Apply them to your own business and you may be shocked at just how effective they truly are.