Five ways to sell moreTable of Contents
5 Ways to Sell More of Your Side-Hustle
When sales are down many entrepreneurs think they have a traffic problem. “If I could just get more traffic, I’ll sell more stuff.” However, this isn’t usually the case.
Sure, we need a steady stream of new traffic if we want to grow our business, but there are other ways we can sell more to the audience we already have.
In this article I’ll give you five ways to sell more of your stuff.
It takes a lot of time and money to earn a single customer. But we leave a lot of money on the table when we spend all our time acquiring new customers, versus the ease at which we can re-sell our current customers.
Keep reading and I’ll share how.
We Start with Two Pools of Customers
These five methods will cater to both types of customers: low-hanging fruit and long-term buyers.
Your low-hanging fruit are the 15% of your buyers who buy right away, every time you launch an offer. These people know what they want and buy it when they see it.
Low-hanging fruit are exciting. These folks are the reasons why launches are successful. They won’t even read your sales letters. The 15%-ers wait for the day you launch your work, they click the link, and they buy.
…but what about the other 85% of your customers?
The other pool, the bigger pool, is filled with the people who need more time to make a decision. Most of your readers won’t buy during a launch. This means you aren’t serving these people if your ‘store’ is only open a few days a year, closing the doors to your work at the end of your launch.
In this strategy, not only will we reach the low-hangers, we’ll also cater to the 85%-ers. It might take a few years’-worth of touches, before a long-term buyer finally decides to purchase your work. There’s real money in the long-game. It’s critical we cater to both buyers.
1. Sell Immediately
As soon as someone joins your email list, sell them immediately. Use your first email as an opportunity to earn a new customer. Most people won’t buy on this first offer, but your 15%-ers will.
You cater to their need for instant-gratification.
Those who worry about selling too soon need to understand the nature of the customer-business relationship. We don’t follow your business to be your friend. We follow you because we like buying stuff.
The stuff we buy is a representation of who we are.
When you sell to us immediately, this gives us the opportunity to share the person we are. Those who are early-adopters and low-hanging fruit are more than happy to buy immediately.
Not only will these immediate sales help you pay all your business expenses, they are a great way to test new offers to a cold audience. You can later repeat these same offers to cold traffic via ads.
2. Up-sell with Every Sale
When we buy, we’re in a buying mood. We’ve made the emotional decision to reward ourselves with the product in our cart. Once we’ve entered our credit card, it’s easy to make additional buying decisions.
“Sure, why not. I’ll take some of those too!”
This is the power of the up-sell. If your up-sell is the right offer, you can close and additional 50% of your buyers with an up-sell.
You’ve already got the customer in the store. She has agreed to buy your main product and entered here credit information. After agreeing to the first purchase the up-sell is offered (not before). You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how many more products you sell with this easy, automated strategy.
Whether you sell in-person or on-line, up-sells work.
You can double your bottom-line without adding a single additional customer to your list. Couple the up-sell with marketing and traffic-building, you’ve got a hockey-stick graph in your future.
3. Email Often
The more you email your readers the more stuff you’ll sell. This is the way you capture your 85% buyers. We might need 50-100 touches to make a buying decision.
If you email once a quarter those 50 touches will take a lifetime to reach.
But what happens if you email three times a week, or seven days a week? You sell more, faster. As long as your content is valuable and relevant to your readership, the more you email the more you’ll sell.
Some expert copywriters email multiple times a day.
Yes, people will unsubscribe, but you don’t need those people on your list anyway. The people you want on your list are the people who make a buying decision.
We must meet our readers when they are ready to buy, not when we’re ready to sell.
When you email often you don’t have to hard-sell or cram your offer down the reader’s throat. Frequent emails allow you to soft-sell. This means you encourage your reader to click a link if she wants your solution, or click a link to find out more.
Your email doesn’t have to sell the product directly.
All we want to do is maintain the reader’s attention and encourage her to find out more if she’s interested in your work. Your link can lead to a sales page, a video sales letter, or a testimonial page.
When you email frequently you get more times at-bat. You don’t have to be perfect or right with every email.
The early adopters will use your frequent emails to justify their purchase, while your 85%-ers will use these frequent emails to slowly make a purchase decision. Remember, it’s our job to meet people when they are ready to buy, not to try and force them to buy when we’re ready.
It’s easy to sell someone once, but if you want to make a lifetime customer, you need to meet them when they are ready to buy–either now or later.
4. Deadlines
We all operate on deadlines. When given an unlimited time-window within which to make a purchase, most of us choose later.
So, how do we get more of our customers to buy now?
As I mentioned, if we close the doors after a product launch, we also close the doors on 85% of our customers. But we can offer disappearing bonuses instead.
If you want to add a purchase deadline, but maintain an evergreen product, use the power of bonus deadlines. Package a bundle of valuable bonuses together. As your launch progresses, the number of items in the bonus package slowly disappears.
By the last day of the launch, maybe half the bonuses are gone.
After the close of the launch window, the customer can still buy the product, but she won’t get any of the launch bonuses. You can also use this same technique with price. Early adopters get your product at a large discount.
The discount disappears on the deadline.
You may think that anyone who didn’t buy during the launch will be aware of the deep-discount and won’t buy in the future. Not the case. As long as the price she pays for your product is lower than the value you deliver, you’ll still sell full-priced products to your audience after the launch.
Without deadlines we procrastinate.
Our brains are naturally energy-efficient. When we can put a decision into the future our mind conserves energy on the decision. Without a deadline, that decision is delayed indefinitely.
5. Re-Package the Same Product in Multiple Tiers
Not every customer will buy your products. Again, we must meet our customers at their position on the buying ladder.
One customer may have zero time but plenty of money. She wants a turn-key solution. Or maybe she wants someone to do all the work for her, and is more than willing to pay any price. This same customer won’t take the time to read your $5.99 book, but she’s happy to pay $4,997 for a turn-key answer.
Take your core product and re-package it.
An inexpensive book becomes a course, a membership group, a paid lecture, and an in-person consulting business.
We meet the customer where she’s ready to buy.
There are many business models that move a customer up the value ladder. But every person’s time and buying power is different. We can get almost any piece of information free if we search hard enough.
The reason we pay you for the same information is your curation. You saved our most-valuable asset, time.
You’ll have a pool of do-it-yourself customers with lower budgets, but plenty of spare time. You’ll have mid-range buyers with more money, but are willing to take a hands-on approach if you’ll walk them through a process via a course. Then, as-mentioned, you’ll have the top-tier buyers who are more than willing to throw money at a problem. They want the solution now and they’ve got no time to do the work.
Meet these buyers at all the buying tiers, by taking your core product, expand and contract it, and meet your readers where they land on the buying spectrum.
In addition, never run out of products to sell.
If you’ve got a person who loves your work, buying your product, the worst thing you can do is stop making offers. People who buy will tend to buy again. Buyers are the best audience to have and are the ones who will grow your business a lot easier than trying to gain more traffic.
August Birch is an author, email expert, and entrepreneur from Michigan, USA. As a self-appointed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indies how to make more work that sells and sell that work once it’s made. When he’s not writing or teaching, August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor