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"How to Get
Your Customers or Clients to Buy More
and Buy More Often"
by Charles Sisk
In many of
my marketing consulting relationships, clients are looking for ways
they can quickly grow sales and profits. One of the most successful
ways to add revenues is to develop a series of marketing strategies
that get your current customers or clients to buy more and buy more
often.
Here are 6
powerful techniques you can put to use right away:
1. Use
Up-Sell and Cross-Sell.
You up-sell
when you graduate your customer or client to a larger or superior
alternative product or service that you know will give them greater
performance and a better result.
They don’t
have to buy it, but you owe it to them and to your own business to
demonstrate the differences in performance and the outcome they can
expect to receive, and to make them an offer that gives them an
incentive to consider upgrading.
A cross-sell
is introducing to the customer or client an additional product or
service that will add to the result they get from your basic product
or service. Your
customers will appreciate you for making them aware of this
additional value.
2. Use
Point-of-Sale Promotions.
These are
usually displays that grab your customers’ or clients’ attention
right at the point of sale. Once
they have decided to buy any product or service, they have already
started envisioning themselves owning, possessing, using or
benefiting from that product or service.
It is very
easy at that point to assist them in getting even greater value or
enrichment from the transaction by offering them other items at an
advantageous price that will compliment their original purchase.
3. Package
Complimentary Products and Services together.
This differs
slightly from the concept of cross-sell.
Packaging refers to combining products or services together
and offering them as the initial sale rather than waiting for a
customer to buy one thing and then adding another after the fact as
you do in cross-selling.
Instead,
you’re bringing two, three or maybe even four different products
or services together and making this “package” your initial
offer to the customer.
4. Increase
Your Pricing (and hence your margins).
It’s
important to recognize that how your service or product is perceived
is largely determined by the value you charge for that service or
product.
If you
don’t hold yourself to a high standard - if you don’t revere the
value and performance of your product or service and charge
accordingly - it shouldn’t surprise you when the market doesn’t
either.
Also, if you
keep your prices too low, you don’t allow yourself enough margin
to deliver all of the services and all of the value your product or
service has the capacity to offer.
So you could actually be doing your customers or clients a
disservice by charging to little.
5. Change
The Profile of Your Products or Services To Be More “Up-Market.”
This means
positioning your company or your professional practice at a higher
level of distinction and quality than the competition does.
It means
holding yourself to a higher standard of performance, holding
yourself and your customer or client in higher esteem, adding more
“dimension” to your business or practice, and doing so in a
compelling way.
6. Offer
Larger “Units of Purchase.”
If most
people buy one a week’s supply of your product, offer them a
month, a three-month, a six-month or a year’s supply at an
attractive price. If
people normally buy one ticket, offer them a special deal if they
buy tickets for their whole office or for their entire family.
If people
come by themselves to purchase your services, offer them an
inducement for coming with a friend, a colleague or a family member.
I have not
run across any business that cannot use some variation of almost
every one of these powerful marketing strategies to help them grow
sales and profits.
See how many
ways you can use these techniques to impact the increased revenues
of your business.
 By:
Charles Sisk Contact: Charles Sisk
Charles
Sisk is President of Marketing Prosperity, a small
business marketing consulting firm and publishes the
Marketing
Prosperity Super Tips Newsletter,
the #1 Source of Small Business
Marketing Ideas.
Subscribe now at: http://www.MarketingProsperity.com.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
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