Have a Plan for Your Backend Sales

by Tiffany Dow

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.

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, MySpace, or bookmarking sites.

After they’ve begun seeing success, your backend sales could focus on more paid methods of marketing, such as AdWords. You progress your offers with your audience like stepping stones, moving from the first logical starting point to a more advanced stage.

Plop your offers right into your autoresponder system and it’ll automatically cater to 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 costing 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 backend offers that add value to their needs and which are of top quality, they’ll continue buying from you. If you promote anything and everything just for the sake of cashing in, they’ll lose trust in you.

Your backend sales strategy isn’t all done just through your autoresponders. You can put links to backend products on your “thank you” pages. And don’t forget that each product can act as a backend item for another one. So you might start with an eBook about MySpace 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.