Your House File
Don’t ignore the people who have proven that they like you and want to give you their credit card number. These are people who have already bought from you and should be on your House File.
Keep coming back to your House File with reminders of your products and services. Come up with new offers, run specials, figure out a way to make it easy for them to reorder. Cultivate their interest and loyalty.
Customer Retention Path
An important aspect of maximizing your use of your House File is to develop a sales funnel of back-end products or services that you can market to them. I call this a Customer Retention Path. It’s a sales sequence for each customer.
There are many possibilities here. You may have a series of backend products that go with your original product. When customers buy they enter a “Sales Funnel/ Customer Retention Path” where they receive regular mailings sell¬ing the backend products.
For example, I have a number of different clients who sell introductory courses that teach how to use a particular investment technique. The backend usually consists of some kind of continued subscription to a website or newsletter that provides the information needed to implement the program. Then there might be various video programs, advanced course modules, advisory services, coaching, or even live seminars that are available for purchase.
I’ve studied sales funnels/customer retention paths for years and there is a science to them. They all involve a lot of testing and take time to implement, but once they are fine-tuned, they create HUGE customer lifetime value.
But How?
In order to be successful at them, you need to know what products to offer, what order to offer them in, and what price points to use. It takes dedicated trial and error to obtain this knowledge, but it is well worth the effort. A well-designed sales funnel can completely transform the nature of your business.
I’ve developed three simple steps to put together a sales funnel.
- What is the first item that most people will buy from you? This is your lead product.
- What product or service you offer that will complement that product? Outline the next 3 or, 4 or 5 products or services that are congruent with the initial product your customer buys from you.
- Try mailing a sales piece out for each product or service. You’ll want to mail them a week to 10 days apart.
This will give you your initial sales funnel. Once you implement it, it will take time to read the results and determine what areas of the sales funnel are working well and what areas are not. It could take up to 6 months to track this (depending on the volume of orders you have coming in).
If you see that the 1st offer and 4th offer are working well, then keep mailing them. If you see that the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th offers are not performing, try replacing them with something else or try moving them to a different order in the sequence.
This is the best way to set up and test your first sales funnel/customer retention path.
Keep approaching your House File with a series of backend offers. Your Direct Mail program is a living thing, and the success of your business depends on how well it does. Keep it healthy and growing and you will enjoy a flood of orders for years to come.