How To Get Customers To Buy Again: Successful Business Owners Secrets Revealed

Your products have a key role that must fit into your interaction with the customer and be what customers want. You need to have the products your customers want to buy, and expand your product range in the right direction.

How much choice of products should you offer?

The more choice you offer wouldn’t necessarily get you more sales. Offering too much choice can actually prevent sales.  The psychology behind this finding is that people get caught like a deer in the headlights. Fear of making substandard decisions prevents them from making any choice at all.

If you look at Apple or Samsung and their successful products, you’ll see they’re usually offered in only two or three variations each. This seems to be the commonplace between too few options and the brain overload that is caused by too many options.

Along these lines, a price strategy that works very well is offering “standard” and “premium” variation of a product or service. The premium version is priced at about 50% above the standard but offers twice or more value than the standard version.

Think carefully about what should be in your range, and where you should add depth. If you sell tea, should you also sell teapots? How many flavors is the right number of flavors?

You should also have products for them to graduate onto.  This might be:

• A good, better, best comparison.
• Matching or complementary items.

When using this strategy, it’s important to make sure that you’re offering much more value with the premium than you are with the standard. This strategy works well in cases where the incremental cost of delivering the premium is relatively low, because the price differential ends up as pure profit on your bottom line.

Marketing That Turns First Time Buyers Into Repeat Buyers

There are marketing methods you should use to encourage the second purchase, and get it to happen faster.

Use direct communication campaigns such as email, SMS, and post. Everything that’s addressed directly to customers and lands in their inbox (phone, email, or doormat) should be considered part of your direct communication campaign.

Since leads and customers have given you the right to contact them, regular communications should go out to them. Your communications should be focused on getting a sale and building more trust – this is the key to getting them to buy the second time.

The first purchase was to test you out, so now it increases your chances of getting a second and bigger order now that you’ve given them a reason to trust you.

What this means is that you need to follow up fast to get them to order again. The Post Buying Sequence should start after receiving the first order – this is the point at which they get confirmation that they were right to trust you in the first place.

The Post Buying Sequence is all about telling them to order again. It may or may not be encouraged with an offer or discount. Begin your second offer without an incentive, then test with one and see what happens. If you offer an incentive at this Stage, it should:

• Have a limited time – “Order by xx_xx_xxx and receive 20% discount.”  The time span will vary from business to business.
• Be worth it to you – make sure you’re still profitable after a customer accepts the incentive by ordering.
• Encourage the right behavior – make sure you’re using the incentive that will encourage customers to do what you want them to do at the lowest cost to you as possible.

This is why having a discounting pricing strategy needs to be used with extreme caution, because it can end up putting heavy pressure on your margins, profit and more importantly how you’re positioned in the market.

Unless you have a very specific loss leader strategy, try to avoid discounting at all costs. When you have a loss leader strategy, your objective in to entice a customer based on price and then upsell or cross sell other higher margin products or services.

A better option than discounting would be to increase the value of your offering. Bundling in bonuses, increasing quantities or adding peripheral services can be of genuine value to your customer but cost you very little to do.

Make price setting a central part of your overall marketing strategy.

Another very powerful technique you can and should add to your follow-up sequence would be the “try before you buy.” Sometimes also known as a free trial.

It’s one of the most powerful ways to win more business and it’s based on the magic of “try before you buy.” Using this technique can dramatically boost your sales. First, it breaks down resistance, making the customer feel less like their committing to something irreversible.

Second, it puts the responsibility on the buyer to reverse the sale which puts his or her unresponsiveness back on your side. Lastly, a genuine customer is highly not likely to return a good product that is meeting their needs. Implement this type of offer in your business and you’ll see dramatically better conversion results.

You don’t need to make the sequences complicated or long, since most of the messages you send will form part of your regular email broadcast plans.

As you build your Post Buying Sequence, remember to use the data you already gathered about those repeat order windows of opportunity. Some products will deserve post-buying support. So, make sure you continue to prove that you care and provide useful information to customers.

Depending on the repeat buying behavior of your customers, it may be worth it to set up specific sequences to get the next purchase.

Regardless which strategies you implement, it’s important to continually test and measure.  Consumers buy on emotion and are driven purely by rational motivations.