INCREASE INTERNET SALES WITH FREE TRIALSWritten by Patrick OBrien
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If you're selling a service on Internet, you can offer your potential customers a free trial as well. For example, if you offer a search engine submission service, you can provide your customers with a limited free submission to search engines. To entice your customers to purchase your full service you can, not only submit their site to your full list of search engines, but you can create doorway pages, insure their pages are optimized for search engines and provide a resubmission service every month for a year. In addition, provide your clients with a free report of each submission process. Prior to doing your customers last submission, contact them and inform them that their submission contract will soon be expiring. Tell them how they can renew their submission process and offer another enticing freebie such as, "If you renew your submission contract before (date) we will also submit your site to over 1000 Free For All Sites." This type of free trial will not only increase your current sales but it will promote future sales as well. In summary free trials build customers confidence and desire for fully paid up version. The possibilities are endless. By offering your potential customers something of value for free, providing instant gratification, and an easy ordering process, you can dramatically increase your sales.
Patrick OBrien is a Webmaster at Sirius Java Productions. He has been building and promoiting websites for the past 3 years with a strong bias towards Java Applets. He has used the above technique to great effect and many free trial applets are available at, http://www.net800.co.uk/netstart/sirius/index.html Careful though, you may get hooked and end up buying
| | Increase Your Follow On SalesWritten by Tony L. Callahan
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In unique content of this "private" area you have opportunity to do some follow on selling. 4. Consider gathering more information on your customers, such as mailing address, date of birth and telephone number. You will need to decide if providing this information is mandatory or optional. There is potential that some customer will not want to provide such information. Making it required information may cost you some sales. Guard information you collect carefully and use it only for purposes defined in you privacy statement. Send a thank you letter for purchases, send your customers a birthday card and follow up with them via telephone to be sure that they are satisfied with product. These are all opportunities for follow on selling. 5. On your order form, ask customers if they want to be notified of new products, updates and upgrades. Maintain a separate mailing list for those customers who indicate their willingness to receive this information. You could also offer option of allowing customer to be notified via postal mail. As mentioned before, follow on sale is not easy to master. It is a delicate balance between salesmanship and becoming a nuisance. As with most powerful tools, these techniques hold promise of great success or spectacular failure. Take time to test and refine your methods before attempting widespread application with real customers. With practice and careful application, these techniques will contribute greatly to your profits. And as always, that is real bottom line.
Tony L. Callahan is president of his own Internet marketing company, Link-Promote < http://www.link-promote.com >. He also publishes Web-Links Monthly, a newsletter full of tips, tricks, tools and techniques for successful web site promotions. To subscribe, send e-mail to: < Web-Links-subscribe@topica.com >.
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