increase sales, marketing tactic

Professionals and Online Businesses: Are You Leaving Money on the Table?

0 Comments Posted By Dan Janal

Do you sell products and services online? Chances are very good that you are leaving money on the table when you make a sale.

Many professionals are so happy to make one sale, they don’t realize they could be making more money and serving their clients better if hey done one simple thing: offer more products to their new customers.

The process of asking for additional orders is called “upselling” and it is a process that many thought leaders, authors and speakers have not heard of. This article will explain how to upsell and ask for the order.

In fact, you probably have heard about selling every time you hear, “Would you like fries with that?” Upselling is a basic part of sales and marketing. It is a great way to increase the size of the order and to satisfy the customer’s needs. Professionals who run online businesses might not realize that what works at restaurants could work for them as well.

It is important for small businesses and entrepreneurs to realize that the sale is just the beginning of the relationship. If you have more products and services to offer your new clients, and you don’t tell your new clients about these additional products then you are doing a dis-service to them and to yourself.

Examples of upselling

Here’s how an upsell would work.

Let’s say you are a travel company. You sell someone a plane ticket. Now you can offer them a discount on a hotel or a rental car.

If you sell restaurant coupons, you might make one sale for one restaurant and then upsell people to more coupons at other restaurants.

If you sell coaching services, you might upsell people on books or training products you’ve created.

If you sell books, you might offer other books in the category by other authors. Or you might suggest readers to buy your coaching services.

If you sell shirts or shoes, you could upsell people to additional clothing items or accessories.

If you sell software, you might upsell clients to buy a service contract.

As you can see, the list of possibilities is limited only by your imagination. You can upsell customers on your products or products that were created by others that you can resell.

Software Solutions to Help You Sell More Effectively

Not every shopping cart can help you upsell. In fact, most shopping carts don’t have this feature at all – even though it is an essential tool that can help you make more money and provide more services to your clients.

One shopping cart marketing system that includes an upsell component to manage this process for you is available from www.MyEasyOnlineStore.com

This program can manage the entire upsell process for you, no matter how big or small your company. This software can automatically display sales messages you write to people who just bought your product or service. People can read about the new offer and decide to order directly via the shopping cart.  For maximum flexibility, it can also display multiple offers to each customer based on what they bought.

You have complete control over the system. That means you can set the prices for each product and the product offerings. For example, you might bundle a set of services of products for one price and another set of services for another price. The customer can then decide which package to purchase.

The software will track all sales so you can see which offers are working and which ones are not.  This step is essential to make more sales and spend less time and money to make those sales. By monitoring your sales conversions, you will be able to find which sales packages and which sales messages work best, so you can continually modify your messages to get the most sales at the highest prices.

To learn more about the shopping cart and upselling, go to www.MyEasyOnlineStore.com

Dan Janal is an entrepreneur and marketing coach who helps clients with issues related to publicity, marketing, Internet marketing and e-commerce and sales. For more information, go to www.prleadsplus.com

This article can be re-printed on your website, blog or ezine.

autoresponder, increase sales, marketing tactic

Effective E-commerce – How You Can Benefit from Shopping Cart Software

0 Comments Posted By Dan Janal

As you start your new online business, whether it be for business services or hard goods like shoes or flowers, you will want to use shopping cart software. This essential tool will help you run your business more effectively and safely. This article will show you 10 ways you will benefit from using shopping cart solutions.

1. Customers expect it. Customers are very used to ordering online and using their credit cards. If you don’t have a shopping cart, you will lose sales as people might not pick up the phone to call you to order.

2. Get orders from customers 24 hours a day. The Internet is a world-wide service and you could have people wanting to buy your product when you and your staff are asleep. With a cart, your online store is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It is ready, willing and able to take orders for you when your customer is ready to buy  — even if they are halfway around the world.

3. Fraud protection. Each credit card order is verified by a certified company. You will know instantly if the card is valid. This service will protect you from fraudulent charges.

4. Security. Most shopping cart services operate under the highest level of security the Internet can offer. When customers see the code “https:’’ in the URL, they know that your website shopping cart is secure.

5. Sales reports. At the flick of a button, you can create sales reports that show how many of each product were sold on each day, week or month. It’s like having a super assistant!

6. Tracking codes. Higher end shopping carts provide unique tracking codes so you can measure the effectiveness of any advertisement, promotion, article or any other inbound marketing tool. No longer will you wonder where your leads and sales come from. You’ll know the source of your sales so you can spend your marketing dollars effectively and you won’t waste any more advertising dollars.

7. Coupons and discounts. These handy tools can help increase sales. Not every cart has these tools, so be sure to ask. You has complete control over these features so you can determine how large the discount is and for how long the offer lasts.

8. Newsletters and ezines. Some carts let you send newsletters and ezines to your members and subscribers. This service can save you a lot of money because you won’t have to buy another service to send out your newsletters. Again, not all shopping carts have this feature, so if you use one that does.

9. Autoresponders. You might not know the term, but you’ve probably seen this handy tool in action. An autoresponder is a pre-written message that is sent if a condition is met. To put this in plain English, here are a few examples. You buy a product from a company and you immediately find a confirmation message in your mail box. You sign up for a webinar and the codes are sent to you via email. You subscribe to a home study course and each lesson appears in your mailbox. Each of those examples is powered by an autoresponder service. Autoresponders can save you time by sending messages. These powerful tools save you lots of time by delivering your products, supplying customer service or just staying in touch with the customer on a regular basis. You create the messages and you decide when the messages go out. This tool could be the most important feature of a shopping cart. Make sure your cart has it because it will save you time by reducing tasks that you repeat frequently.

To help you make this choice, check out my free report, “7 Ways to Make More Money and Save More Time with Autoresponders” click here

10. Sales tax and shipping calculations. A good shopping cart will have up-to-date information on all the different tax rates that are charged. This feature can save you a lot of time and prevent a lot of headaches — plus it will keep you on the right side of the law when it comes to collecting and paying taxes!