How to sell more stuff to your existing customers


If you have been selling software for a while, you have probably built a considerable customer database. But to what extend are you taking advantage of that important asset?

How can you sell more stuff to your existing customers?

But before we move on to the HOW, let me first give you 3 reasons WHY you should sell more to your existing customers and some ideas on WHAT you could sell to them.

(this is a reworked and updated version of my presentation at the European Software Conference in London, November 2011)
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Speaking at ESWC 2011: How to sell more stuff to your existing customers

I will be speaking at the ESWC 2011, held on November 19/20 in London.
This time my talk won’t be about A/B testing, traffic or conversion.
Instead, I will be speaking about something that has become more and important for Collectorz.com. And which IMO should just as important for any software company that has been around for a while:

How to sell more stuff to your existing customers

Abstract:

Attracting and converting new visitors is very important, we all know that. But don’t ignore your existing customers. There’s good money to be made selling more stuff to people who already purchased from you before.
This session will focus on cross- and up-selling to existing customers, using email campaigns, newsletters, auto-responders, Facebook, Twitter, etc…

See you in London!

CD Delivery and Priority Support – Opt-in or Opt-out?

Delivery on CD and Priority Support options, do you offer those up-sells “opt-in” or “opt-out”? In other words, when users click your Buy button, do you put these extras in their shopping cart automatically?

CD delivery companies (we have worked with SwiftCD and CustomCD) are always pushing us to have “Delivery on CD” pre-checked. Understandably, because this is bound to sell more CDs and thus bring them more business. And automatically adding a $10 Priority Support subscription is sure to result in more subscriptions to that service.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Making more money on each sale, who can say no to that?
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Upgrade week

Music Collector logoIt’s been over a month since I emailed all Music Collector 8.x users about our “Vee Nine” upgrade. So time to try and pull in some more upgrade sales. This time I am doing an “Upgrade week”, during which we have a reduced upgrade fee for the rest of the week (valid through Sunday May 9). We have done upgrade weeks before and the urgency of the nearby end-date really helps to generate a lot of upgrades. Continue reading

New Collectorz.com shop page

newshopHere’s something from a project I have been working on off-and-on for the past few months: Rewriting the entire shopping-cart system of the Collectorz.com site.

From the shop, via the upsell interstitial page and the name/address page, to the payment details page and finally the order confirmation page. I have written some new back-end PHP classes and am now rewriting all website pages based on those classes, making the pages more consistent, and more importantly, easier to maintain. Easy maintenance is essential, because I am tweaking these pages quite often.

I have already posted about my upsell interstitial page a while ago, which was the first page I based on the new back-end classes. This long Easter weekend I have completely rewritten the first page of the check-out, the shop page. Continue reading

Web-applications : first thoughts

connectTwo months ago I posted about the launch of our first web application and our reasons for diving into online apps. Last week we launched our second web-app for cataloging books, so I figured I’d let you know my first thoughts about doing online software.
Tip: For the full story, attend my Web-Apps presentation at the ESWC conference in Berlin. Continue reading

Cross selling and up-selling

If your site offers multiple products, add-ons and extra services, then cross selling and up-selling are important ways to maximize your profits.

At Collectorz.com, we sell seven software products (each available in two editions), five iPhone apps, two different barcode scanners, plus we offer CD delivery and a paid support option called “Priority Support”.

The software products are all related and targeted at the same type of customers, so cross-selling has always been important for us. And with the introduction of the barcode scanners we added some great stuff to up-sell to new and existing customers.

Before telling your about our current solution, let’s look at the various methods for cross selling and up-selling we tried since we added our second program.

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