7 Day Customer Follow Up Challenge
DAY ONE
Your Customers Make Up Your Most Valuable List
You’ve heard the phrase “the money is in the list”. In other words, your subscribers have value. Today, I want to share one particular type of list with you that’s a lot more valuable than any other. That list is your customer list. These are the people that have spent money with you already. And guess what, they are the most likely to do so again and again and again. That’s what makes them one of your most valuable business assets.
Over the course of the next seven days, we’re going to take a look at this valuable subgroup of your subscribers. And we’re going to figure out how to get more sales out of them.
I challenge you to look through your site, your emails, and your funnel and work on more opportunities to mail them regularly.
First, though, let’s take a quick look at what makes these people so special to you and your bottom line.
Customers are people that already trust you.
If your product provides great value to them (which it should), they also like you. Over the course of consuming the product and being part of your funnel, they also get to know you better. In short, these are the people that know, like, and trust you the most when it comes to your business. This means that are more likely to buy something else you recommend. This could be your own product or something you’re promoting as an affiliate.
When you mail an offer to your customer list, you can expect a much higher conversion than with any other list. With a regular offer, a 2% conversion of visitors to sales is often what you expect. When mailing to your list of subscribers, you can often double or even triple that conversion. With a customer list, you can expect to see conversions of 30% or higher, depending on how targeted the product is. That’s a huge bump in conversion. It doesn’t take a lot of customers to make a good number of sales. That’s why this is the list you should work on growing the most.
And the benefits don’t stop there. Customers are your most loyal audience. They are more likely to spread the word about you and defend you online. They aren’t afraid to sing your praises. Treat them well, and you’ll have a steady supply of word-of-mouth advertising and testimonials to create valuable social proof.
How do you get more customers? By adding a low-cost product to your funnel and constantly promoting it to the rest of your list. Make it your #1 goal to grow your customer list. Create something of value that relates to your opt-in offer and promote it on your “thank you page”, in your first few emails and occasionally throughout. Work on converting a portion of your email subscribers into customers right away.
What can you do today to work on growing your very own customer list?
DAY TWO
Create An OTO To Instantly Boost Sales
Yesterday (scroll up) I shared my thoughts on the value of a customer list with you. Today, I want to share a simple but oh-so powerful strategy with you to start taking advantage of the fact that your existing customers are your most valuable assets. To grow your bottom line, you only have a few options. You can cut expenses, you can get more customers, or you can increase how much money each customer spends with you. Getting customers to spend more with you without having to raise prices (and often lower conversion) is what the remainder of this 7-day series is all about.
The hardest part of making money online is to get people to spend those first few dollars with you. Once they’ve done that, they are more likely to spend money with you again and again. One of the best times to get them to buy from you is right after they’ve made a purchase. That’s where one time offers or OTOs come in.
The idea is to present your customer with a great deal on a complementary product as soon as they finish buying. This could be a bigger version of the same product (so if you sold them 10 blue widgets on the initial sale, offer them 50 more widgets at a great price), it could be something related (an offer for 10 yellow widgets to go with the blue ones), or something that helps them make better use of what they’ve bought (a book on how to install those blue widgets).
The best place to start adding OTOs to your funnel is with your best-selling products. What’s making you the most consistent sales right now? Or maybe there’s something you’re thinking of launching in the next few weeks that could benefit from an upsell offer. It doesn’t matter if it’s a lower priced product. The volume of sales is more important than your actual profit on the initial offer, since customers won’t see the OTO unless they buy the first product.
There are two reasons why one time offers work so well. The first is because people are already in a shopping mindset and comfortable buying from you. They just bought one of your products when they are presented with this upsell offer. The second reason is fear of missing out. The whole point of a “One Time Offer” is that it is only available “right now”. Once they leave the sales page, the opportunity to take you up on the offer is gone. This creates urgency and scarcity, and with it the fear of missing out. Try it by creating an OTO for some of your best-selling products, and see for yourself how much you can increase your bottom line by adding this to your overall sales funnel.
DAY THREE
Make Backend Sales On Autopilot
How would you like to wake up to sales notifications every morning, or have them pop up in your inbox throughout the day, whether you’re working or not? Today, I’m going to share with you how to make that happen without hardly any more work on your end. Best of all, this is a system you’ll be setting up once that continues to work for you going forward with only minor upkeep.
To make this happen, we’re going to take advantage of the fact that people are more likely to buy from you again after the initial purchase. Your job is to simply give them more opportunities to buy. It’s called making backend sales. After the initial sale, the customer heads to the download page, and ideally he will also receive an email with the purchase and download information. These are the first two places you want to take advantage of to make more sales.
Start with the download page. Before sharing the link where they can download the product they just purchased, present them with a great offer for a related product. This could be something you’ve created, or it could be something you’re an affiliate for. The important part is that it is related to the original purchase and that it’s a good value. Promote it on the download page.
Next, you promote the same offer in the download email and in a follow-up email or two. Those emails don’t have to be pushy. Share a great tip for using the product they already purchased, or remind them to download it and put it to good use. Then casually mention the additional offer.
If you don’t do anything else, make it a point to put these two strategies in place and start watching the additional sales come in. From there, the sky is the limit. You can extend the auto responder sequence your customers receive indefinitely. Create a combination of helpful content to share and offers. Some of these offers will go out as solo emails, while others work well within the content or in the P.S. of one of your emails. The offers can be a combination of your own product offerings and affiliate promotions. Keep adding to this series of auto responder emails to expand your “backend” and continue to make more sales per customer.
Remember the minor upkeep that will be required to keep this running smoothly for years and months to come that I mentioned in the beginning of the blog post? It simply means that you take some time every few months to look through those auto-responder messages and download pages to make sure the offers you’re promoting are still available and still a good fit for your target audience. Spend a few minutes at the end of your workday here and there to fix and improve part of your backend. If you’re feeling ambitious, you could even add a few more emails to make even more sales going forward. It’s time well spent.
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DAY FOUR
Promote New Offers To Your Customers First
Your customer list is a valuable asset. These are the people whose trust you’ve already earned. Keep that in mind as you promote and be protective of your loyal fans. When you are coming out with a new product, they will be your first stop. In other words, make sure you always promote new offers to your customers first. In fact, I like to keep my existing customers in mind when I’m starting to think about a new product to create. What else do they need? How can I help them on the next step on their journey toward their end goal?
By asking yourself those types of questions, you’ll not only please your customers and make them feel included in the process, you are also giving yourself a much better chance of creating products that will sell well. But that’s not the only big benefit of promoting your offers to your customer list first. Yes, it’s nice to feel confident about your new offer before you start promoting it, but there are two more great reasons for starting with your customers.
Curious what those two reasons are? The first is that it gives you a chance to work out your sales process and test your copy with a group of people who like you and are more willing to forgive you if there are some little bugs like part of a download not working. You can get those worked out and then focus on split testing and optimizing your sales copy, so you know it converts well when you start approaching affiliates or paying for traffic.
Having conversion rates can be a huge plus when you’re convincing others to mail for your new product, and it can be a huge help when you’re trying to figure out how much you can afford to spend on advertising. Make sure you have good tracking in place, and then use your customer list to start sending traffic to the new offer.
The second and probably the biggest reason why I like to promote new offers to my customers first is because it makes them feel special. They get first dibs and often a special deal or an extra bonus. Your relationship with your loyal customer base is important. I can’t stress that enough. You want to take every opportunity to make them feel special and valued. Each product launch is a perfect opportunity to do just that. It helps you deepen that relationship and continue to grow goodwill with your loyal fans.
They in return will reward you with amazing testimonials and priceless word-of-mouth advertising by talking about you and recommending you and what you have to offer to their circle of influence. They will share the results they are getting. They will share your social media posts. They will post a link to your latest video or blog post on Facebook. In short, they will become an important part of your overall business growth. That’s why I make it a point to ALWAYS launch a new product exclusively to my list of customers first.
DAY FIVE
The Benefit Of Making Affiliate Offers To Your Customers
You put a lot of time and effort into growing your customer list. Why would you use it to promote other people’s products? I get it. We can feel pretty protective of our hard won buyers, and we should be. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t promote other people’s products and profit from it. Let me explain.
Think back on a time when you got into a new hobby, or when you first started building your online business. You didn’t learn from just one person, did you? You didn’t buy just one book on woodworking, or classic car restoration. You didn’t subscribe to just one magazine or YouTube channel. Instead, you bought a bunch of stuff. You bookmarked a ton of great sites, blogs, and forums. You subscribed to various newsletters and magazines.
In short, you tried to learn as much as you could from as many different people or sources as possible. We all do this, including our customers.
Why not help your people find what they need and benefit from it financially? Done right, it’s a good thing for all involved.
It Benefits Your Customers
Making affiliate offers to your list can be beneficial to your customers, provided you do your job to research the products, make sure they are high quality, and pay attention to your audiences’ need.
Think of it as vetting or screening the products and services they are considering already anyway, and providing them with the best options.
You can even take it a step further by adding special bonuses or “how-to” instructions as a bonus when they buy through your affiliate link.
Another fun option is to approach the product creators to see if they are willing to set up a special coupon for your customers.
It Benefits You
This one is pretty obvious.
You are going to make more money. Think about it this way. Your customers are going to buy from other people anyway. You may as well take a cut in the form of an affiliate commission. Think about how it benefits the people who buy through your link if you’re feeling weird about taking money for a product you didn’t create.
You’ll quickly get over those thoughts when you start to see the affiliate commissions coming in.
It Benefits The People You Promote
The nice thing about mailing out for a product of another online marketer like yourself is that you’re helping this person out. If you have an affiliate program yourself, you know how nice it is when those surprise sales start coming in. It helps them grow their reach and gets the word out about the work they do. Ideally, it will complement yours, making this a win-win situation.
Since you’re helping these fellow online business owners out by promoting them, they are more likely to recommend you and your products and services to their audience. That in turn benefits you again. Don’t you love how that works out?
DAY SIX
The Two Emails You Should Send To Every Customer
As an online marketer, you spend a lot of time and effort writing emails. You email your list, you email your customers, you email affiliates, you email potential JV partners, the list goes on and on. In short, a big part of your online marketing efforts is writing emails. It’s always been that way, and it will continue to work that way.
Today I want to take a minute to briefly go over two different types of emails that I always send to my customers, and I think you should too. Let’s see if you agree with me by the end of this blog post.
Email #1 – Request Feedback & Testimonials
I like to check in with my customers after a few days to make sure they were able to download the product ok and to see if they have any questions. From there, it’s easy to transition into another follow-up email about feedback and finally requesting a testimonial. I find that my customers are more than happy to provide feedback and suggest future improvements. Sometimes that results in an updated product, but more often than not it gives me ideas for additional products to launch in the future.
Now let’s talk about testimonials. You know this type of social proof is important and good testimonials can greatly improve your sales conversions. It took me a while to learn this, but you can’t wait for people to just send you a testimonial out of the blue. You have to ask for it. The best way to do this is face to face. The next best way is to ask for it via email. Write up that email and send it out to your customers. The responses you get back will make your day.
Email #2 – Invitation To Promote
A few days after asking my customers for feedback and testimonials, I like to invite them to my affiliate program. Depending on your niche, you may want to tweak the wording on this, but particularly in the business to business niche, it’s a no-brainer to try to turn your customers into affiliates. This can work even if you don’t have an affiliate program.
Simply ask your loyal customers to help you spread the word. In this age of social media, everyone has an online presence and the ability to send free traffic your way. Why not tap into that? Of course, this works even better with an affiliate program set up, so you can pay your audience when they send new customers your way.
Do you agree with me?
Are these emails you’re already sending?
If not, I hope it’s something you consider adding to the mix.
Here’s a quick pro-tip. You can create a simple little autoresponder series that goes out as soon as someone purchases your product. You probably already have an email going out that delivers the product. Why not add these two emails? It automates the whole process, and you only need to write these emails once, but will benefit from them for months and years to come.
DAY SEVEN
Make Cross Sales And Consider Higher Priced Products
The hardest part of selling online is finding customers and getting them to make that first purchase with you. It takes the most time, effort, and nurturing. You have to work hard to build a relationship with these people, so they start to like, know, and trust you. Once that’s done, and they buy the product, the hard part is over. Provided your products are good, they’ll be happy to buy from you again and again. Yet, so many of us are solely focused on marketing to new potential customers, when we could be increasing our profit margins greatly by making offers to existing customers.
Of course, this is hard when you are first starting out. If you only have one product, you can’t really get your customers to buy something else from you. That’s ok. We all have to start somewhere. I do however encourage you to set aside a little time each week to work on developing a related product. Think about what your customers need next, or what else they could use to help them reach their ultimate goal. Keep adding new related products to the mix while also focusing on bringing in new customers on a regular basis. That’s where steady growth and income happens.
As you launch each new product, you will make more and more cross sales. At least a portion of people who bought product A will also buy product B. Then as you start to market product B outside your current customer list, new people will join the mix, and they may be interested in product A. The end result is more sales and more sales per customer with each product you launch.
But that’s not the only thing you can do. If you’re ready to really step up your income, consider adding some high ticket products. One of the easiest ones to put together is a bundle. Once you have a handful of products launched, bundle them together and offer that as your first higher-priced product. Even people who’ve bought one or two of them will jump on the bundle sale when you price it right, and especially if you include a couple of exclusive bonuses.
Another great option is to offer coaching or training. This works particularly well for “how-to” products. The initial offer is the ebook or training course. The high ticket product is time with you where you answer questions and guide them through consuming the information. This can be in the form of emails or instant messages, phone calls, or video conferences. You can set it up as a group coaching where you work with a handful of people at the same time, or individual coaching.
Last, but not least, you may want to consider “done for you” services. If your info product is about installing a particular software, for example, you can offer an upsell or high-ticket service of installing and customizing it for them. The idea is that your customers go into it with the idea of doing it themselves and once they read your info, they realize they’d rather pay someone to do it for them.
Think about this today and come up with at least one high-ticked priced idea that you can implement over the coming month. Then get it up for sale and start profiting big from your customer list.
