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Brad shares 4 simple strategies to get your customers giving you more money. Each strategy is easy, fast and cheap to implement and doing all 4 at the same time could put you into a higher tax bracket.
DISCLAIMER. Brad is not responsible for your excess tax burden from paying taxes on all those profits.
Have you noticed the trend recently… Business owners are always looking to make more money, more profits, more revenue. I don't totally understand it. But today I'll go ahead and give you four simple ways to increase your profits at 30% or more in 30 days or less.
Today our topic is going to be how to increase your profits by 30% or more in 30 days or less.
Now, I realized that that may sound like a tall order to fill. But I think by the time you hear all 4 of these strategies, you'll have at least an epiphany or two you may be doing some of these in your business, but maybe not as well as you could.
But every single business owner, whether you are selling products or services, or individual consulting can absolutely use every one of these.
They say the lifeblood of any business is its ability to attract and convert new customers. And that is true. If you can't bring new people in the door, then you will soon be out of business.
However, the majority of the profits oftentimes come from your existing customer base. And I heard it said that today's technology, social media, the internet, the availability of information has made it so that it's never been harder to convince somebody to buy from you the first time.
But it's never been easier to convince a current customer to buy from you time and time again, from the ability to develop relationships with them through multiple types of media, whether it's social media, email, direct mail, telephone, it doesn't really matter.
Today's consumers are much more skeptical.
However, once you get them over that buying hump, it becomes much easier to improve your profits by focusing on your current customers.
So let's jump into the four methods right now.
The first one is the immediate upsell.
The easiest person obviously, is to sell an existing customer. But the best time to sell them is that the time that they're buying from you the point of sale, because you've just convinced them that you your product or service is valuable. And they've paid they've submitted their credit card or their order, they've given you money. And there is this moment where they've overcome this huge obstacle of trusting whether or not your product or service will deliver on its promise. And they've said, “Yes, I believe in you.”
At that moment, they are most likely to purchase more. So now is the time to offer them the opportunity to buy even more of what you've got. And either an attractive discount or with much more value.
So let's go through some examples. Let's say you sell an information product, a how to course or a home study course, you can easily upsell a done for you service a software or anything that can accelerate the results that they're looking for, you think what is the most natural extension of what they just purchased speed done for you implementation, or what if you sell physical products, you can reverse it, you could sell information products that make it even more valuable, how to get the most out of your physical product, you could sell software as well, you can think of anything that really complements and adds value to what you're offering.
And honestly, it doesn't even have to be yours will cover this in just a second.
But you may be a one trick pony, you may have one single product, but there are people out there who would love to get access to your customers, eyeballs as well.
So oftentimes, you can make deals with other people to provide bonuses and things that allow you to charge more, because it's a benefit to the customer is a benefit to you. And it's a benefit to the person who's integrating their offering with yours.
It doesn't matter if you do this online, where it can be very easy. there's a there's a concept called the one click upsell. If you're not familiar with that somebody purchases a product on your online shopping cart. And immediately they presented with a discount or a great value for something else, they simply click the add to the order button, and they don't have to pull their credit card back out. They can purchase it right then and there. You've probably seen this in business as well. And that's because it's highly effective.
And you can do this on the phone. If you have sales reps who are taking calls, they, you know, allow them to take the call and place the order for the original purchase without adding anything else to it. And once they're done, ask them you know, by the way, we also have something else that may be of interest to you, would you like us to add this to your order they've already ordered from you, you may as well give them the opportunity to buy more. Oftentimes, people will buy more if they believe that there is something else to buy. If they say no, that's fine, they still get the first product they purchased.
And you can do this before the sale, you don't have to offer it as a after the sale upsell, you can simply add something to it right before they purchase. Would you like this add on for just an additional price, they've almost made the decision to buy.
The only problem with that is occasionally it can cause them to rethink their first purchase. And if that first purchase is designed to just get them in the door and get them spending money with you, then you may not want to take a chance on messing the opportunity up.
So what can you upsell as I said anything from information products like mp3, CDs, DVDs, home study courses, a monthly newsletter software, VIP support coaching, extended warranties, you can upsell physical products, if somebody purchases an information product offer something physical that they can get for a discount versus the normal retail price.
This is such an effective strategy that oftentimes 20 to 40% of your customers will take your upsell. Now, if the upsell is dramatically higher than the initial price, you're increasing the customer value substantially simply by offering them more of what you've got.
And the bottom line is, if you're not offering upsells after the sale, sometimes before the sale, you're probably missing out on at least 20 to 30% increase profits just by doing.
So let's get to the next technique: Price testing.
Now that's sounds insanely Elementary, everybody should price test. But so few companies do it. They establish a price, sometimes it's arbitrary. Sometimes they just decide how much profit they make they want to make, and oftentimes they price it based on competitive products out there. And if you're not testing your price, and trying to find that optimal price for your product or service, you could be missing out on a tremendous amount of increased profit.
This is very easy to do online. There is software called split testing software, maybe you've heard of it a be split test, where if you have 1000 visitors to your website, 500 of them are shown price a 500 of them are shown price be and you decide which one has the highest revenue collected or the highest conversion rate. And it's very easy to determine your optimal price that way.
So here's a real fun test that I did in my business. And I invite you to do the same.
I had a product that I was selling for approximately $80 a few years ago. And I wanted to know what would happen if I doubled my price to 116?
Well, what do you think happened? My conversions went through the floor, fewer people bought, and I made less money. So I immediately went back to my price of approximately $80. And then I thought, well, what if I still doubled it, but made it available in two payments of $80. And amazingly, it worked.
Here's what happened, the number of customers who purchased from me went down. But the amount of money that I made went up by about 30 to 35%. And that's after cancellations of the second payment and refunds.
What if you sell a commodity or something with very little price elasticity, lot of competition, everybody's selling the same widget or item at the exact same price, and you can't go any lower.
Well, that brings us to our next third strategy: bundling and unbundling.
So instead of dropping your price, especially if you've hit a product floor, maybe you can add value better service more products. This is similar to the upsell. But instead of offering to sell them something extra when they buy give them something extra when they buy give them something your competition isn't giving them whether it's another product, whether it's an information product, which the beautiful part about information products is that the the profit on those is really infinite because it costs very little to create.
It could be a downloadable mp3 on a web page that you send people to it didn't cost you anything to create that, if it's highly valuable, doesn't cost you anything to distribute. But it adds value over what other competition is offering. And there's a lot of different ways to bundle your product or service together, whether it's with product and services that you offer, or bringing in other people like I talked about earlier, to help bundle their products and services together with yours.
Whether you contact somebody and ask them to give you something to give away and in return, they'll get your customer eyeballs on their product. Whether it's a sample or a slice of their product or free trial, it can dramatically help them at very, very little cost. Or you can license somebody else's product; whether it's an information product or a physical one, you can pay them for the right to give your product away whenever you sell your initial product that makes it more valuable.
And the reason behind making it more valuable is to get more customers to purchase it.
I've literally seen profits increased by 30 to 40% both in my own business and that of my clients by doing this alone.
So that is bundling. unbundling is the exact opposite.
Sometimes folks don't want everything you have to offer. They're not quite convinced they been on your prospect list for a very long time.
A very effective strategy is to strip away anything that's not absolutely necessary. Some of the bells and whistles and offer them a stripped down version that they can try at a much lower price or at a favorable terms. And you can get people in the door. By the way, you can always upsell them after they buy on the piece that you stripped away anyway, whether you decide to upsell them immediately or down the road. But bundling and unbundling is a strategy that I see so few business owners using. And it's to their detriment, because it can increase profits dramatically.
Now if you're on bundling a product or offering a discount or anything of that nature, it's always a very good strategy to have a reason why you're doing it. Whether it is a promotion you're doing around a holiday, whether it is a another reason and unforeseen business expense. If it's a physical product, you can tell people, you have excess inventory. And you just want to give people a taste of this. Or if it's a software, you can easily just say, “Listen, I'm so convinced that you're going to love this and want to have it you know, in what you know, whatever it does that I've taken away XY and Z. And I'm giving you just a taste of this.”
But you're giving them reason why that you unbundled it. And oftentimes you'll get people to snap up your product when before they were just kind of sitting on the sidelines. I know it works for me, I seen promotions all the time. And when people offer stripped down versions, I jumped right on them.
Now let's get to the fourth and final strategy that you can use to increase your profits by 30% or more.
And it is back to pricing.
Offering different price levels and something called decoy pricing. Some people don't need everything but they're willing to pay for a portion we've already covered that in the unbundling and bundling section. But what if you offered two or three, maybe four. But I really wouldn't go to four different versions of your product or services.
You've seen this before. bronze, silver and gold packages or silver, gold and platinum, however you want to call it it can be very powerful when you give people options because they may not want everything. But they will buy if they think they can get in there. Try it. They don't need all the advanced features. But they see that those advanced features are available for a higher price.
Now, there is a cool little trick to doing this effectively. And you'll want to test this.
Instead of offering bronze, silver and gold packages, you may want to offer gold, silver and bronze packages.
What's the difference the differences in the order in which you present them. So if you present the most expensive offer first, that's the very first thing they see.
Let's say it's $1,000. Well, that may be out of the price range of all but your best customers. But more importantly, what it does is it sets a anchor in the prospects mind that that is what the product is worth. And then when they see the lower priced versions, they look 10 times cheaper. If you ever go to a car dealership or other stores. oftentimes they'll show you the most expensive version of whatever it is you're looking for up front.
That way. Everything else they show you seems amazingly cheap compared to that first product.
So let's say you're selling a software, you could sell software with coaching and everything else for $1,000. And then you just sell the software for $500 without the coaching. And then on the very, very bottom, and you just sell the a stripped down version of the software or a 30 day version for $100. And it can be like that, but it makes the other ones look much cheaper. Now there is something called decoy pricing that I read about first in a book called Predictably Irrational, and I believe the author's name was Dan Ariely.
There's a popular example that I've seen used. And I've used myself, let's say, you've got a home study course that you're selling, for instance, is a very easy example to use. You've got three levels. Well, in this case, you may want to go the cheapest to the most expensive is it doing exactly the opposite of what I just told you. But up front, you see that you can get the digital version of the home study course, all available online, nothing shipped to you in the mail for $97.
And you can get the next package which is the physical version for $197.
Well, the gold package, the most expensive one is you get the physical version and the digital version, you get both.
And instead of making it for 297, you actually get it for 197 for a limited time. So the way it looks is digital, only 97 physical only 197 digital and physical. I would usually if I if I'm doing this on the website, I would do $297 crossed out and put a 197 for a limited time on there. So what that causes you to do is look at now like wow, that's an incredible value, I can get both of these for the same price as the middle one. oftentimes you'll see that bump your conversions by 30 to 40%, I seen it done I've done it and it is extremely effective no matter what you are selling.
And that's called decly pricing.
So the easiest way to increase your profits by 30% or more in 30 days or less, is to get every single customer buying more from you.
And when you do all of these things, it's a highly predictable, repeatable process, whether you upsell them something else at the point of purchase, or find the ideal price point and test it to make sure that you've got it just right, or you bundle your or other people's products in with what you're selling or unbundle and strip away unnecessary parts of your product or service in order to get more people in the door.
Or you use decoy pricing and pricing strategies that cause more people to jump on what you're doing. Each one of these could increase your profits 20 to 30% without adding any new customers. You know what's funny is I'm willing to bet that many of the business owners who are listening to this right now have heard of all of these strategies, either all of them are some of them and hopefully you're slapping yourself for not deploying all of them.
But I get it. As a business owner, you have a lot of responsibilities you are putting out fires, you responding to things the bigger you get, the more problems you have. And if you're like most entrepreneurs and business owners, you got into business because you liked growing it, you like starting something and and you're most passionate when you're working on revenue generating activities, I get it I'm like that too.
And sometimes it's just hard to see all the opportunities that are available to you. And sometimes it's even harder to implement them all. However, I do believe that all four of these can be implemented with very little trouble in 30 days or less and you see a dramatic increase in your profits.
Now if you're are having trouble or you want a second opinion on this I am happy to help out those of you who think that these strategies can be deployed for yourself if you send an email to askBrad@baconwrappedbusiness.com and let me know what your biggest challenges are or how you think that these could be applied in your own business and you'd like second set of eyeballs on them.