You are now running an online business; your website is receiving orders and delivering the orders as promised. And you’re making a decent profit from the transactions. But should everything stop here? The answer is of course no, because you should do more to maximise your profits.

Extra profits before your visitor leaves your website

You have gained a person’s trust when he starts to buy things from you. This is also the perfect opportunity to sell more quality products or service to him.

Picture the typical scenario when you order the food at McDonalds:

“Two burgers, two apple pies, one ice cream, one Chicken McNuggets and two Coca Cola.”

“Is that all, sir?” the salesperson asks.

“Yes,” you reply

“Do you want fries with it?”

“Sure.”

This technique of asking if we wanted fries with our order is called an up-sell.

This up-sell technique is practised to perfection by McDonalds. Before a payment is made, McDonalds suggest something more. As you can see, the suggestion does not require any additional promotion, money or much effort. They just need to ask. (Incidentally, McDonalds make hundreds of millions by asking this simple question!)

You can apply this up-sell concept to your online business. A customer is interested in buying slimming tablets from your website which specializes in weight loss. The product costs RM100. Before the customer fills in his/her credit card details, there is a note:

This slimming tablet is best taken with our special Slimming Tea. A box of Slimming Tea is only $20. Would you like to try it?

“Hmm, why not, it’s only $20.”

So here you have managed to sell an extra item to your customer. Remember that you did this without any additional costs. All you did was add a note and you sold an extra item of a different product!

Profits after visitors leave your website

In the example above, the customer has left your website after making a purchase of $120. An extra $20 gained from the initial deal. That is good. But do you think you should stop here? Of course not!

As mentioned earlier, when a customer buys a product or service from you, he has already built a trust in you. When he discover that the slimming tablets and the slimming tea both brought the desired results, he is very likely to use more of your other products and services in the future. However, you should encourage him to do so by making the next step.

A few days after the purchase, you may want to send the customer an e-mail (which can be done automatically by auto-responder) asking him how he is getting along with the slimming tablets and the slimming tea. Here, you could also ask him if he has any inquiries on your products and services.

In your e-mail, you could also mention about your other products or services. This process is known as the back-end product. However, the product or service that you offer must be related to the initial purchase. In this example, the products could be a beauty cream that you offer at $50 and a softening hair shampoo at $30.

In the buying and selling process, an existing customer is more comfortable to buy a product from you than from any new sellers. So you should not waste this opportunity. Eventually your customer will purchase both additional products at $80.

So here you have increased your sales by 100%! Even though you promoted a product at $100 on your website, you have actually made sales at $200. That is excellent marketing!

What you need to do now is to think of a back-end product or service that you can sell to your existing customers because you could make extra profits with minimum effort, cost and promotion. Other than making more profit, the cost of selling a product to an existing customer is also much lower than selling to a new customer. To sell a product to a new customer is more costly than to sell one to an existing customer.

But what if you have only one product and don’t have a back-end product or service to sell? Don’t worry; you can get a back-end product by being an affiliate partner to another Internet business that is related to your product.

For example, one of my businesses is selling a service at US$150. However, by using this up-sell technique, I can make sales of US$500 just by offering some back-end products to my existing customers.

But remember that whatever products or service you sell, offer the ones with the best quality. Once a customer finds out that your product is not to his expectation, it could ruin your business reputation!