5 Unique Strategies Most Entrepreneurs Aren’t Using To Increase Sales (and Profit)

Here’s a scary thought: every single time you open your eyes in the morning, you will have HUNDREDS of new competitors.

Every single day, these competitors are desperately trying to scratch and claw their way to getting just a tiny sliver of market share. Market share you once had.

Put that on top of the fact that it’s becoming harder and harder to gain attention from your audience, add in higher advertising costs, and you come to one conclusion.

When you get a new customer, you must do everything humanly possible to provide as much value as possible while developing that relationship.

If you’re like most people, you might have a traditional upsell sequence in place which helps fill out your back-end to increase customer lifetime value.

That’s a good start, but it’s just the beginning.

In this post, I’d like to give you 5 unique ways to increase your sales and profits BEYOND a traditional upsell sequence.

Please understand that some of these are only available to those who use advanced CRM’s such as Infusionsoft, Ontraport, or similar platforms. However, most are applicable even if you aren’t using one of those platforms.

Strategy #1 – Surveys

Surveys are a fantastic way to segment your buyers and discover their unique interests, without them even realizing it.

If you integrate your customer relationship database (such as Infusionsoft, Ontraport or HubSpot) with a survey tool such as Survey Monkey, you can quickly tag and segment your customers based on their answers.

This allows you to send customized campaigns based on your subscribers’ specific interests. This increases sales even if you have a small list. I believe email marketing is NOT dying. Instead, it’s requiring you to become more targeted and selective with the messages you send to your database.

Using surveys is the fastest and easiest way to create sub-lists of customers who are able and willing to tell you exactly what they want from you, both in terms of content, and in terms of products or services.

You can use surveys in several different ways for several different purposes, including:

• At the beginning of your optin pages to segment your prospects
• Directly after a sale (or even on the checkout page) to segment your buyers
• Within emails themselves to gather more information about your audience
• Before creating a new product so you know exactly what your audience wants

No matter how you choose to implement your surveys, the point is to use them to gather data. Then use the data from the survey to increase your sales while sending messages just to those parts of your audience that you know are interested.

I once created a survey on an optin form for a client selling pain relief products. We used it as a “quiz” and asked for first name, email, and level of pain. Based on the answer they gave for the level of pain question, they were sent to a separate sales page where the message was clear, precise, relevant and effective.

Strategy #2: Personal Coach Campaigns

I work with all sorts of entrepreneurs from business owners with brick & mortar stores, to information marketers and software companies.

What’s the one thing they all have in common?

VERY few of them have a specific sequence going out to new customers. In other words, a customer buys a product… and then never hears about it again after the initial “thank you for buying” email.

I work with my clients to setup personal coach campaigns. This is a 15-30 day autoresponder sequence in which you send emails every few days. The purpose is to offer your audience:

• Tips for using your product/service properly to extract the most benefit.
• Case studies of other successful customers to reduce buyers’ remorse.
• Reassurance that they’ve made a great purchasing decision.
• Information about other products/services that they would find helpful.
• Ways to give you feedback/testimonials in exchange for gifts.

It’s a very genuine way to help customers and increase your back-end sales at the same time. Plus it’s easy to setup. You can learn how to write emails in 15 minutes or less. Then put new customers through the sequence before sending them other offers. Trust me, you’ll “wow” them… because nobody else is doing it!

Strategy #3: Retargeting

Retargeting is a huge opportunity that most online businesses are missing. If you aren’t familiar, retargeting is a way to track visitors to your website and then present them with a banner ad for your product or service later, when they’ve left your site. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of visiting a company and then seeing that company’s banner on other websites you visit.

For example, go to a website like Victoria’s Secret, click around a few pages, and then leave. Within 24 hours or so you’ll begin to see their ads everywhere, typically inside Facebook and sprinkled throughout other websites.

Retargeting allows you to follow people even after they’ve left your site. You can stay top-of-mind for a fraction of what you’d pay for regular cost-per-click advertising.

It can be even more effective on existing customers. Here’s what you do.

Place a tag on your thank you page. That way you know you’ll only be sending that retargeting message to existing buyers, who are worth more money to your business. Then, rotate your ads, showing different offers.

When a customer clicks on one of those ads, they get put into a specific autoresponder campaign giving them more information about that product or service.

It takes work. It takes time. But it’s WELL worth the effort to increase sales.

Strategy #4: Stick Letters

Most people marketing online today refuse to test going offline. And they’re making a huge, huge mistake.

One of the strategies used by those who use both online and offline marketing is called a stick letter.

Think of a stick letter as your first upsell page.

It is a 2-4 page letter which first thanks the customer for the order. It then gives a few tips on getting the most out of what they have bought (like the personal coaching campaign above). Finally, the letter transitions into telling that customer about a special offer because they’re a new customer. Just like an upsell page.

They’re easy to create. You can even automate it by creating a postcard which gets sent to the customer, leading to an online video.

Here’s a quick example.

One of my clients sells nutritional supplements. We crafted a stick letter to send new customers who had just bought “Chelation Cream” (which helps remove toxins and heavy metals from your blood).

In the stick letter, we reassured them of their purchase and then offered another supplement which complimented the first and increased results even further.

The results?

Somewhere between a 5% – 8% conversion rate, depending on various factors. More importantly, the campaign had a very, very high ROI.

Just try it. You’ll enjoy the results.

Strategy #5: Personal Consulting Calls

If you call yourself an “online marketer” – you are losing money.

That phrase may be the most damaging meme ever created by entrepreneurs. And that’s why for this last strategy, we’re going offline again.

This time, we’ll be using the good ‘ole telephone.

Most people hate telemarketing. They don’t think it works anymore. And in a sense, it doesn’t.

Unless you do it right.

These days, people throw up red flags the second they feel an incoming pitch. So instead of calling customers and immediately pitching them, you do something like this…

Hire someone to call each new customer. The purpose of this call is to acknowledge who you are and why you are calling them.

The reason you’re calling them is to make sure they are doing OK with whatever they just bought from you, and to make sure they don’t have any questions or need any assistance to get the most out of their purchase.

In the process of answering their questions, you then become a consultative adviser.

Instead of trying to “sell” them, you are instead trying to HELP them. You can now ask probing questions to determine exactly why they bought, what they’re struggling with, and what their goals are.

Then if you have another product or service which would meet their needs, you can discuss it with them with full authenticity.

If you won’t be doing these calls yourself, you need to find someone who is trained in consultative selling. These people sell in a way that is very different from (and more effective than) a traditional sales person.

Earlier this month I advised one of my clients to follow this strategy. He helps people setup entities for more asset protection. Since this is sometimes a 6-12 month buying cycle, I told him to have his staff call customers 6 months after buying, for a “half year anniversary check up call”.

I recommend you do something similar.

Putting It All Together

It’s likely you’re feeling a little overwhelmed now. That’s good! My goal was to give you SEVERAL ideas that directly apply to your business.

Now it’s time to get to work. Figure out which of these makes the most sense for you to implement right away. Either do it yourself, or hire someone with the experience to get it done for you.

Then, get started on whatever makes the second most sense for you. Continue doing this until you have implemented all 5 strategies. Then, take a step back and see how much your sales (and profits) have increased!

If you have any questions about these strategies, let me know in the comments below! I’m happy to answer any questions, and I also love hearing that I helped you grow your business.