Every good marketer knows how important it is to increase the
lifetime value of the customer. It’s much cheaper to make a sale
to a previous customer than it is to get a new one onboard. The
cost of acquiring new customers can be high, but getting more money
out of existing customers won’t cost you a penny.
Building a backend to your business isn’t hard… but without one,
you’re limiting your financial potential. A backend is how you
continue selling to an existing customer. Let’s say you sell an
eBook on how to make money blogging, for example.
Your eBook could discuss what a blog is, how to set one up, and how
to make money from it. Your backend sales could come from
affiliate items (if you don’t feel like taking the product creation
route again) or a new eBook, membership site, or video/audio
package you sell.
Whenever you first start selling online, always think of
complementary topics you can tack on as a backend. For our example,
your backend sales could be about social networking on other web
2.0 sites like Squidoo, Facebook, or bookmarking sites.
After you’ve begun seeing success with those, your backend sales
could continue by focusing on more paid methods of marketing, such
as AdWords. You set up your offers with your audience like
stepping stones, moving from the first logical starting point to a
more advanced stage.
Insert your offers right into your autoresponder system and it will
automatically serve the needs of your subscribers the longer they
stay on your list.
Another common way to add a backend onto a product is to offer
personal coaching.
Personal coaching can be expensive, sometimes even costing up to
thousands of dollars per month. A lot of marketers offer this as a
backend strategy, giving them the potential to significantly
increase the return on their investment (ROI) of acquiring the
prospect.
If you take care to create top quality backend offers that add
value to their needs, they’ll continue buying from you. If you
promote anything and everything just for the sake of cashing in,
they’ll eventually lose trust in you.
Your backend sales strategy isn’t limited to just your
autoresponder. You can put links to backend products on your “thank
you” pages as well. And don’t forget that each product can act as
a backend item for another one. So you might start with an ebook
about social marketing and then use a blogging ebook as your
backend item for the customer.
Just make sure you don’t set yourself up for limited profits by
using a single product without implementing a backend strategy that
will work to increase your ROI over and over again. You’re building
a business, not dabbling in a few hit or miss sales.
