No Secrets, Just A Great Backend…

If you want to know the two secrets of being successful on the internet then they are as follows:

1. There are no real secrets.
2. You need to have an effective backend.

Alright, I realize that that was a bit oxymoranic, but I am being totally serious. Just to explain, having an effective backend means that even after your customer has made the ‘purchase’ there are possibilities to increase the profit that you make from him.

Let me just clarify (Clarify With Ben, geddit?) when I say ‘purchase’, the reason that I have it in inverted commas is because I don’t necessarily mean buying something. What I mean is doing the action that you want them to do.

Take the Butterfly Marketing script for example…

As a recap, the original idea of the Butterfly Marketing (BM) Script was that someone came to your site and signed up for free information. Once they had done this, they then had the opportunity to purchase something else. This may be an extreme example, but without a backend in this particular case, you wouldn’t have made any revenue at all from this potential customer.

One of the best examples of an effective backend is McDonalds. One of their taglines (and also the name of a docufilm) is “Can I Supersize That?”. For a small extra charge, you can increase your mealsize. Because of the low cost of increasing the size of your meal, McDonalds make a huge increased profit by doing this. When teaching marketing, this is always the classic example that I give of an upsell.

Mike Filsaime made the idea of the One Time Only Offer (OTO) famous amongst the internet marketing community. The idea of the OTO is that once someboady has purchased from you, they then have the opportunity to purchase an OTO at a much reduced price. The effectiveness of OTOs are increased if:

1. The purchaser realizes that they will never see this offer again and therefore they will miss out if they don’t take advantage of it right now.
2. The offer which is being presented is so irresistible that the purchaser would be mad if they did not take advantage of it right now.
3. There is a scarcity factor built in.

I often have OTOs that convert between 30% and 50%. My answer to people who are saying that they are overused and therefore becoming less effective is that that is just not true.

So that is the Upsell and the OTO. In my opinion, if you are not using both OTOs and Upsells then you are leaving money on the table. If you have not yet built them in to your marketing funnel, then I would strongly advise that you do that right now.

In the next couple of days I will be covering some other tactics which you should be using on the backend which in many situations will bring you many times more profits than you will ever get on the front end.

Please comment below whether you enjoyed this article and also any tactics which you are using to increase your backend revenue.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 8:13 am and is filed under Emails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments and pings are closed.