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How To Get Your Clients To Send You Gifts
I have really great clients. Not content with happily paying me thousands of dollars for my products, seminars and other services, they also send me gifts of wine, books and dvds.
Here's how to get your clients to do the same.
There are some events which are a pearl beyond price. One of them is when the local supermarket truck arrives unexpectedly and delivers three cases of wine or the mailman comes with a very large parcel to sign. Far beyond the intrinsic value of the gifts themselves is the warm buzz you get from this most sincere and unsolicited form of feedback from your clients. At last, proof positive you're doing something right!
If you are still working your way up to that level of approbation, here's some ideas to help you.
When you have a web site, you will have customers and prospective customers at various stages of development. Your objective is to nurture your visitors and turn as many as possible of them into the sort of happy customers who will cheerfully pay you thousands of dollars and (hopefully) ship you the odd case of wine!
You do this by first being aware of the staircase to success you need all your customers to climb. Like all staircases, it needs to be constructed with care and have a definite purpose in mind. It should consist of good solid free information at the bottom -- even if your products are not information products. This, in turn, leads to low priced, entry level products, and gradually up the staircase to more advanced and higher priced products.
Visitors who arrive at your web site for the very first time are at different stages of development into customers. The stage they are at depends on two factors:
How they have found your site:
If they have clicked on an advertisement -- perhaps a Google AdWord -- they will know nothing about you and will have maximum suspicion of the unknown quantity your site represents.
If they have come via an organic search engine entry, they will be slightly better disposed towards you.
Best of all is if they have come as a result of seeing an article or received a recommendation from a friend or other webmaster. This means they have already got a vague idea of what you are about.
What sort of people they are:
People come in all shapes and sizes and the speed at which they make a decision is almost as variable. Certainly, you will get a tiny minority who will make a decision to buy or not to buy right away. However, you cannot base a business on this tiny, but decisive, group. You need to rely on the more cautious majority, who need at least seven contacts with you to turn them into buyers.
Step One: Turning a visitor to a prospect:
You need to cater for "the slowest wagon in the train" and structure your web site to cater for the majority, who take some convincing you are the "real deal". So, in order to gradually turn them from a suspicious visitor into a prospective customer you need to offer them something to allow you to keep in contact with them. This allows you to build up a relationship with them, by demonstrating you really are what they are looking for and they should do business with you. You do this by offering a newsletter, e-mail course or sample chapters of a book -- or all three, in exchange for their name and e-mail address. Once they have accepted this they have climbed onto the first step on your stairway to success and are now prospects.
Your job is now to provide your prospects with sufficient information and inducements so that a large percentage will make their first purchase. Obviously, the lower the price the more conversions to customers you should have. However, there is a danger that something very cheap will be considered not worth buying, because I can't possibloy be any good. So a good solution is to offer an established product at a substantial one off discount.
Step Two: Turning a prospect into a trainee customer:
Once your prospect has been turned into a customer you must get them to subscribe to a new "trainee customer" list. You do this by having them return from giving their credit card details to a page with a name capture form.Once they have inputted their name and e-mail to confirm their purchase, they are immediately taken to the page where they can either download their digital purchase or receive details of their purchase delivery arrangements.
Step Three: Turning a trainee customer into a VIP customer:
This is the reason why you want your trainee customers on a separate list from prospects: you are going to treat them like very important persons! Once the spell has been broken and your prospect parts with cash, and so becomes a customer, they are far more likely to buy from you again, so you must treat them accordingly. Bear in mind it now costs you nothing to get that customer. Give them plenty of freebies and offer them a really good deal when you want them to buy again. Once they have, move them to a fresh list of buyers.
Step Four: From VIP customer to evangelist:evangelist:
VIP customers, who have made two or more purchases, will then be up to ten times more likely to buy from you again. Better yet, they will become an evangelist for you and your business, because as well as buying pretty much all you have to sell, they will bring you new visitors by telling others about you. And you remember, we said earlier, how much more valuable visitors are, who come via a recommendation?
Step Five: Creating five star customers:
Once you get some of your customers to this stage they will not only be recommending you like crazy and buying every one of your products, as soon as you offer it, they will also attend your seminars and become personal friends. More than thay, they will bring new customer to attend your seminars, purely on their recoomendation . . . and, of course, some will send you gifts! Finally, you will really know there are some things money simply cannot buy!
© Copyright 2006 Paul Hooper-Kelly and InternetMarketingMagician.com
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KEYWORDS: feedback from your clients, staircase to success,good solid free information, entry level products, Google AdWord ad, organic search engine entry, article, webmaster, buy right away, turning a visitor into a prospect, turning a prospect into a trainee cusomer, tirning a customer into a vip customer, seminars
WORDS: 1060
SUMMARY: I have really great clients. Not content with happily paying me thousands of dollars for my products, seminars and other services, they also send me gifts of wine, books and dvds. Here's how to get your clients to do the same.