Tighten Up Your Backend
What Is The Backend Of Your Business?
The backend of your business is just as important as the front end and, in fact, maybe more so. After all, the better you delight your customers, the higher your sales will be without having to chase down new customers. Not only that, turning your customers into brand advocates as you thrill and delight them will send your business into the next stratosphere.
Your Backend is Out of Sight
The back end of your business consists of the things that are done out of sight from your customers. Functionality such as marketing and promotions, accounting and finance, human resources, technology, partnerships, and more all run without your customers really being aware of it. It’s all the stuff that keeps your business going. Your autoresponder, your payment methods, your landing page technology, and so forth all run behind the scenes and create a very powerful transformative experience. It’s also your marketing funnel and your plans for implementation.
It Cost More to Get a New Customer
It costs a lot more money to attract new customers than it cost for you to start marketing to the customers you’ve already drawn. Because of this, using your back-end technology to set up autoresponders promoting the next product or new products is an excellent way to boost your income with less work and spending less money.
It’s Harder to Make the First Sale
One of the reasons it costs more to get a new customer is that you have to guide them through the entire buying journey using content marketing to inform, educate, and engage with them over a long period of time. They say that it takes at least eight touchpoints for any business to transform a lead, to a prospect, and finally convert them into a customer. Once someone is a customer, they already have most of their protection mechanisms lowered and will be much more likely to take your offers fast.
Focus on Both
The truth is you need to focus on your front end and your back end. When a customer arrives at your sales page and buys your front-facing offer and gets on your list now, it’s up to you to focus on the back end, making repeat sales, making new offers, asking for and using feedback to improve your relationship build brand advocacy and increase the lifetime value of your customers.
Now it’s time to think about what you can do to increase engagement, sales, and advocacy after you make the first sale. After your customers become customers, it’s time to work on retention, delight, and advocacy, and you can do all of that using your autoresponder along with some fantastic offers, whether your own products or affiliate products that you know they need.
What Bump Offers & One Time Offers Can Do For Your Income
As you work on improving your back end, one way to do that is to add more bump offers (order bumps) and one-time offers. Not only will these types of offers help you build a longer-lasting relationship with your customers, but it will also improve your income exponentially. Most marketers selling information products, content, and so forth tend to make more money on the back end than they do on the initial sale.
Want Fries with That?
You know how if you go to the hamburger joint, you’ll be offered other things to go with whatever you order. The reason they do this is that studies show making an additional offer right at the time of the sale is more likely to be answered in the affirmative, which will increase your overall price for every checkout. This type of offer is only made at the point of sale and not after the purchase has been finished.
Do You Fear Missing Out?
Another sales tactic that works is using human nature to encourage more sales. Marketers call this ‘FOMO’ which means, ‘The fear of missing out.’ Using your back-end technology as well as the products and services you already offer, you can always add an OTO to every single product you sell at the point of check out or right after they check out. By doing so, you’ll increase your check-out average sales, and of course, that means you’ll make even more money.
Order Bumps or Bump Offers
One way to accomplish using your back end to boost sales is to set up order bumps for every single front-facing product you sell on a sales page. You can use the technology you use for downloading products and delivering them to make it automatic.
You can set it up so that when your customer clicks a product they want to buy, adding it to their cart, the system pops up and recommends adding products to the cart that somehow relate to the product they ordered. For example, if you sell baking supplies and your customer orders flour, you can recommend additions like vanilla extract or baking soda.
One Time Offers (OTO)
This type of offer you’re likely familiar with. The way it works is that your customer orders something from you from a sales page that you marketed to them. Perhaps it’s an information product PDF download, and you have three checklists, spreadsheets, or cheat sheets that would help the buyer implement the information product easier, to offer them.
You can use the shopping cart technology to either give them the option right there via a popup, or you can email them the offer after they’ve completed their purchase based on the investment. Make it time-limited and really do stick to offering it only one time for that original purchase.
As you brainstorm ideas, remember to look for easy to create products. For example, you can easily create checklists, cheat sheets, and spreadsheets from private label rights content to add as a bump offer or an OTO. Likewise, the products you use for these offers can also be products you’ve created yourself. You can even make a total affiliate offer this way if you have the right technology. Figure out how you can do it with what you have right now. Experiment with adding easy PDF downloadable products that add value to your existing products and services as bump offers and as OTOs. Monitor your success to find out if it works for you to improve your income.
You Do Have A Follow-Up Autoresponder, Right?
When it comes to keeping customers happy, one of the best ways to do so is to stay in touch with them regularly. The best way to do that is via email. Email marketing is still the most effective form of marketing that has ever existed, with most marketers reporting more than $40 earnings on every dollar spent.
One of the most useful technologies you have in your back end is your autoresponder. An autoresponder is your email marketing software. Autoresponders enable you to schedule follow up emails to send to your list members and customers based on how you segment the members of your list, which is based on their behavior.
For every single product, service, and freebie that you offer, you need to send a follow-up email series that you load into your autoresponder to be delivered to the right people at the right time. When you set the email series up, it’ll be delivered the moment they pay for the product or download the freebie. This is how you will nurture your customer or list member to engage with you, join you on social media, buy from you again, and even become a brand advocate. It all depends on what you want to accomplish.
When someone buys or downloads something from you and is now on your email list, you need to immediately deliver a series of follow up messages to them in the form of several emails sent out about one per day. Base the series on the exact audience member that you want to nurture based on what they bought or downloaded.
Create a series of follow up email messages that:
Nurture the Leads You Get from Your Freebie
Nurture the Lead You Gained from a Random Website Visitor
Nurture the Leads Generated from a Specific Guest Post
Nurture the Customer Who Purchased Product A
Encourage Buyers of Product A to Convert to Buyers of Product B
Encourage Specific Members of Your List to Engage with You on A Social Platform
Send an Onboarding Sequence
Offer Supportive Information to Shopping Cart Abandons to Encourage Finishing Purchase
Create Follow Up Sequences for Everything
Create Renewal Sequences if Your Product is Renewable
Set Up Educational Sequences When You Want to Teach Something New
To make any email sequence truly perform at its best, you must differentiate between transactional follow-up messages and the rest of the messages. Transactional messages are sent directly after the customer buys from you, or the lead downloads a freebie and gets added to your email list. These are the messages that are most likely to be opened because your customer needs the information so they can access their purchase or the freebie they wanted.
Make the most of the transactional emails you send because you can use it to explain how to get their purchase, but you can also tell them what to expect from you regarding email messages. Make it worth their while to want to open them by telling them about the unannounced offers you send in email, the educational benefit of opening your emails, and more. Set them up from the first email for success, and you won’t regret it. You only need about 7 to 12 follow up messages in each sequence that you create, but it will make all the difference. Your systems and processes will make sales for you and transform your audience into brand advocates in a hands-off way once you set it up. Nothing could be better than that.
Not Everything In Your Backend Has To Be Your Own Products
One thing is clear about selling information products and other types of content as a business – not only can no one get enough; you can never have enough products or services to satisfy everyone. After all, you’re just one person (or two at the most if you work with partners).
When it comes to filling up your back end with upsells, one time offers, order bumps, and so forth, one thing that will help you is to realize that you don’t have to use only your own products you can promote someone else’s product as an affiliate.
While it’s great for you to have more products to sell, adding other people’s products to your product catalog is very lucrative too. In fact, some people never create their own products. They only promote other people.
What Is an Affiliate?
An affiliate is a salesperson for a brand or product. They earn commission on each sale that they make and often work as an affiliate for a variety of brands and products. When you are an affiliate marketer, you will search for and locate products and services that your ideal audience will love to use. You will tell them about it when they make a purchase. You get a small percentage of sales. The commission that you earn can range from as little as a few percent to even 100 percent.
Find the Right Affiliate Products to Promote
The biggest job you have as an affiliate marketer is to find the right products that your audience needs to promote. You’ll want to consider how much commission you receive for each sale, what type of customer care the creator offers buyers and other information that ensures you that your customers will be well cared for, after all, once you send them to someone else they become that person’s customer too.
Try the Products First
With few exceptions, you should buy and try the product before you recommend it to someone else. You will discover a lot more about the product creator by doing it this way. You’ll see how their check out process works; you’ll know what the product looks like when you download it. You’ll see the nitty-gritty details that only a buyer will understand. This means it’ll be easier to create bonus offers and also to know where this product fits in with your buyers and your business.
Be Creative About Promoting Affiliate Offers
When you do use affiliate products to promote to your customers and list members on the back end, be creative about how you promote these products. You can work an affiliate offer into a one-time offer, a bump offer, an upsell, an add-on, and a bonus offer depending on your relationship with the creator as well as the technology you employ. Sometimes the easiest way to offer the product is via an email marketing sequence or via a transactional email or download page. Adding affiliate products as part of any follow-up sequence is also a no-brainer.
By finding well-made products to promote that other people created and that you will earn a commission from is honestly the best of both worlds. You can fill in the gaps of information you offer with affiliate offers and then create more products that sort of build off each other, whether they’re someone else’s products or yours.
