How Offering A Premium Support Service Can Increase Your Profits And Margins

You’ve probably bought electronics before and been offered the purchase an additional warranty. Or maybe you’ve purchased furniture before and been offered a white glove service to deliver and setup your new couch.

These are all examples of premium support services that can have very large profit margins, so even if only a smaller percentage of customers take you up on them, they can add a lot to your bottom line.

Some of these premium support services can be at little to no cost to you. For instance, one business we’ve seen had a warranty offer where you could get free replacement charger cables forever on your phone, if they ever fail, for a small one time extra fee as long as you just cover the small shipping and handling fee. However, these cables have such huge margins anyway that the small S&H fee literally covered the cost of the cables and the shipping. The “warranty” that was sold was essentially 100% pure profit, despite how it would appear to be an awesome deal for the buyers (paying $5 for S&H instead of $29 for a new cable sounds like, and is, a pretty good deal).

You can even sell access to one on one help, a Facebook group page for extra (and faster) help, etc. Some of these offers you can literally put together in a few minutes, yet some people will naturally buy them just because they think they might have a use for it one day.

Another example would be offering faster support, faster shipping, faster service, etc. All of these can have huge margins for little to no extra work!

So brainstorm at least a couple of extra premium support services that you can offer your buyers (like extra warranties, faster support, faster service, etc.) that come with huge margins despite not really increasing your costs much, if at all.

To find out more tweaks that could drastically change and increase your business, check out our business analyzing tool here BizFire's Free Business Analyzer and Growth Tool.

How to Use What Your Competitor is Doing Well to Improve Your Business

It’s time to check out the competition!! In school it may have been called cheating, but in the business world it’s just good old-fashioned market research!
Find out where your competitors are advertising, spy on their sales funnels, and see how you can replicate any of their good ideas that appear to be working well. There are many online tools to find out what ads and keywords your competitors are using. There’s also a couple of basic ways to see what your competitors are up to - follow them on social media and subscribe to their blogs and newsletters. If they have smaller priced items, you may choose to purchase one of their items to see what their purchase process is like, whether they offer upsells, what those are and what their follow up process is to a sale. See what they are doing really well and look for how you can replicate it or adapt it to your business.

For example, if you sign up to a competitor’s newsletter, you can see how they nurture a lead and turn it onto a sale. Is there anything you see in this process that is working well that you can adopt for your business?
Or you may purchase a small item from them and find they are offering a great upsell - is that something you could do?

A simple trick you can do to spy on other offers is to check ads on other sites or on social media like Facebook and just see how many views, comments, likes, etc. they’re getting. If there’s a ton of comments, for instance, it’s likely something you want to look at and see what you could replicate or do better. You don’t have to always start from scratch or re-invent the wheel.

In fact, several of our businesses we originally got the idea from after seeing other ads with lots of views and comments on them, and then checking out exactly what they sold, what their upsells were, where else they advertised, etc.. And then we’d research to try to find out if there were other similar offers and what they looked like.

Often times we would find ways of offering a better front-end product (they wouldn’t even have to be the same type – just something in the same niche or appealing to the same crowds), more or better upsells, better ad copy, different ad sources, etc..

Sure, we’ve also started new offerings not based on anything else other than a random idea we had, but those always seemed to be more risky and more likely to fail from the start. Starting off with a model that seems to at least be working in one way or another is always a good idea! That’s not to say that you have to copy everything exactly as is, but by spying on what others are successfully doing and seeing what you can learn or mimic from them, you set yourself up to succeed far more easily.

So find out where and how your competitors are advertising and what their sales funnels are. Then look at what they are doing well and see how you can replicate this for your business.

For more insights on how to nurture leads and improve your sales funnel, check out this tool here: BizFire's Free Funnel Maker & Analyzer

How to Increase Your Prices and Boost Your Business’s Profits

People often overlook this very simple, very easy way to increase their business’s profits: increase your prices. Most people tend to undercharge for their services, so try increasing your prices, as a test, and see what happens. Funnily enough, most people perceive something that is higher priced as being of higher quality, which can encourage people to buy your product or service. As you increase your prices, you’re also receiving more per sale, increasing your profit margin. Take this strategy a step further and target higher value clients.

For example, if you run a business coaching company, and you currently charge $200 an hour for your time, increase your rates to $1000. With the perceived higher quality and value in your coaching, target businesses that make a lot of money vs. those that are barely getting by. In this example, one client would be worth 5 of your clients in the past. Not only have you raised your hourly rate, but you’ve decreased the amount of work you need to do to earn the same amount of money.

An interesting example we’ve had before is when we’ve sold courses or software for $7 vs. $497 vs. $997+. Although the $7 price gets the most conversions, the $997 price would almost always make tons more money. You just have to make sure you do a good job of showing the value!

So test out this simple tip and try increasing your prices and targeting customers who have more money to spend on your product/service.

For more easy ways to grow your profits and increase your sales check out this book: 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!.

How to Create Repeat Customers Using Future-Use Coupons

How can you encourage customers to make their second, third, and fourth purchase with you? How can you entice them to keep coming back and buying from you, changing them from a once off customer to a regular? Future-use coupons are one great strategy to employ to incentivize customers to make that next buy.

So how do future-use coupons work? When customers make a purchase, you give them a coupon for a dollar value or percentage off their next purchase. This is called a “future-use” coupon. It encourages your customers to come back and purchase from you again, and keeps you in their mind. You can even make receiving the coupon dependent on spending a certain amount, to encourage customers to spend more per sale.

For example, if you have tennis shop, you could have an offer where if they spend over $100 today they get $25 off their next purchase of $100 or more. Not only does this give an incentive for your customers to spend $100 now, it also gets you an additional $100 sale next time they come in wanting to use their coupon.

So encourage customers to come back to you with “future-use” coupons, where, if they spend a certain amount with you today, they get a percentage or dollar discount next time they make a purchase with you.

Want more great tips on customer retention and turning your clients into repeat purchasers? Check out this book 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!

The Trick to Keep Your Customers Continuously Purchasing From You: The Benefits of A Loyalty Program

It’s often way more effort and expense to find new customers than to sell again to your current customers. So how can you persuade your current customers to continuously purchase from you? One way is to put in place a loyalty program that keeps them coming back for more.

A loyalty program is a great way to encourage customers to keep purchasing from you, make them feel special and reward and thank them for their continued business. Most loyalty programs involve rewarding customers when they buy regularly from you or have purchased a certain amount from you, whether it’s in free products or discounted future purchases.

For example, think of your local coffee place. Many local coffee shops have a simple punch-card loyalty program, where you purchase 5 coffees and receive your 6th coffee free. The reward, of the free 6th coffee, encourages people to keep coming back to the same coffee place to indulge in their caffeine kick.

Think about how you can encourage and reward your customers for their loyalty. Implement a loyalty program that rewards customers, through free products/services or discounts for future purchases, when they regularly purchase from you.

Want more tips on retaining customers and other money making marketing strategies? Check out this book here 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!

How to Increase Your Profits by Offering A Range of Different Upsells

Looking for a way to capitalize on the value each customer is worth to you? An easy way to do this is by offering different upsells. Upselling is offering a complimentary or upgraded version of a product/service that a customer is currently purchasing. One of the most well known upsells can be heard when you head into your local fast food joint: “Would you like fries with that?” Even not so great upsells can add a quick 33% or more to your revenue stream.  Some really good upsells or funnels can even double your initial sales or more! An upsell is a great way to increase the total value of a sale.

For example, if you run a dance school, and each class is $15, you could provide a number of upsells. You could offer 3 different upsells, of varying amounts:
Upsell 1 - 4 week course for $50
Upsell 2 - Gold Membership where for $120 a month you can attend as many classes as you like.
Upsell 3 - Pro dance package for $200 a month, which allows you to attend unlimited classes and receive 2 private classes a month.

A good upsell path, often referred to as a funnel, can make or break a business. One model that we’ve used over the years is to offer a crazy deal on the front-end (a low priced, deeply discounted offer or a free plus shipping and handling offer) while having several upsells ranging from continuity offers to high end offers. The money is made in the upsells – not on the front-end – in this case. We’ve started multiple seven figure businesses this way over the years, and the model is easily repeatable in almost any niche, but it wouldn’t be possible without a great upsell path.

But it’s important to note that you don’t have to build a business around an upsell path like we did (although that certainly can work). Just adding one or two upsells to your existing offer can greatly increase your earnings with minimal effort.

For instance, we helped another business owner once with a new offer that he was about to launch. We encouraged him to add at least one upsell to it, but since he was behind on his launch schedule, he was very hesitant and didn’t feel he had enough time to do so. So we said to just create a simple offer based on something he already sells, shoot a quick video on his iPhone, and throw it up on a page to see what happened.

The quality of his video sucked, he looked like he was on zero sleep (or high…), yet when he launched his new offer, the upsell made quite a few sales! In fact, the upsell actually MADE MORE MONEY than the front-end offer itself. It was responsible for about two-thirds of the total money made. That means that if he didn’t follow our advice, his launch would’ve been a third the size that it was (costing him tens of thousands of dollars just in those few days).

Upsells don’t have to be perfect, but you need to have them!

So consider offering a range of differently priced upsells to your customers to increase the total of each sale. Your upsell could be a complimentary or additional option on the offer your customer is already purchasing. Remember, include at least one upsell!

For more great upsell ideas and strategies to grow your business through improving your sales funnel, check out his awesome tool: BizFire's Free Funnel Maker & Analyzer

How To Position Your Offer To Increase Sales

In many cases it can be a wise idea to offer multiple similar packages when selling something. However, instead of offering drastically different offerings, which might make your prospects hesitate more due to not being sure which option to get, you can offer similar options where the “value buy” seems like an amazing deal.

For example, let’s say that you’re selling an SEO service to help websites rank better. If your main offer is a done for you package for $997 where you fix up their site and offer some basic consultations for them too, that can normally seem like a lot of money to some people and can make them hesitate more on if they should buy or not. However, you could offer three options where the “basic” package is for $897 and only includes a report where you identify the issues but don’t fix it for them, the “most popular” package is for $997 and includes identifying and fixing all the issues on top of three free consultation calls, and the “elite” package is for $1,997 and includes everything in the most popular package but also includes unlimited consultation calls for a month.

What this does is that almost everyone thinks that the middle, “most popular” package is the best deal. It’s only a little more than the basic package, but it includes a TON of extra value. Whereas the “elite” package is twice the price but only has some extra consultation calls that most people think they’ll never use. All of a sudden people perceive the $997 option as being cheap and a great deal! The other options aren’t meant to necessarily get sales. They’re simply meant to help make your main offer stand out more.

And by literally writing something like Basic Package, Most Popular, and Elite Package next to the options, you can help them differentiate between them even more and gravitate towards the Most Popular one.

You just have to be crystal clear with them (in bold colors and / or graphics) what the best or most popular options are, and really make it seem like it’d be dumb not to go with the offer you want them to take.

This also has the added benefit of making your “most popular” or “best” option seem cheap when it’s only a bit more than your basic package. If you didn’t have your basic package, they might think that your offer is expensive, but when they see it as being only a tinge more than the basic, their mindset changes from “that’s too expensive!” to “that’s only a bit more than this basic offering here … what a deal!”

So consider offering multiple packages like a Basic, Most Popular, and Elite Package where the value of the Most Popular one seems huge in order to make more people gravitate towards it and see it as a crazy good deal.

For more great marketing and positioning tips to increase your sales, check out this book: 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!.