Many professionals are so happy to make one sale, they don’t realize they could be making more money and serving their clients better if hey done one simple thing: offer more products to their new customers.

The process of asking for additional orders is called “upselling” and it is a process that many thought leaders, authors and speakers have not heard of. This article will explain how to upsell and ask for the order.

In fact, you probably have heard about selling every time you hear, “Would you like fries with that?” Upselling is a basic part of sales and marketing. It is a great way to increase the size of the order and to satisfy the customer’s needs. Professionals who run online businesses might not realize that what works at restaurants could work for them as well.

It is important for small businesses and entrepreneurs to realize that the sale is just the beginning of the relationship. If you have more products and services to offer your new clients, and you don’t tell your new clients about these additional products then you are doing a dis-service to them and to yourself.

Examples of upselling

Here’s how an upsell would work.

Let’s say you are a travel company. You sell someone a plane ticket. Now you can offer them a discount on a hotel or a rental car.

If you sell restaurant coupons, you might make one sale for one restaurant and then upsell people to more coupons at other restaurants.

If you sell coaching services, you might upsell people on books or training products you’ve created.

If you sell books, you might offer other books in the category by other authors. Or you might suggest readers to buy your coaching services.

If you sell shirts or shoes, you could upsell people to additional clothing items or accessories.

If you sell software, you might upsell clients to buy a service contract.

As you can see, the list of possibilities is limited only by your imagination. You can upsell customers on your products or products that were created by others that you can resell.

Software Solutions to Help You Sell More Effectively

Not every shopping cart can help you upsell. In fact, most shopping carts don’t have this feature at all – even though it is an essential tool that can help you make more money and provide more services to your clients.

One shopping cart marketing system that includes an upsell component to manage this process for you is available from www.MyEasyOnlineStore.com

This program can manage the entire upsell process for you, no matter how big or small your company. This software can automatically display sales messages you write to people who just bought your product or service. People can read about the new offer and decide to order directly via the shopping cart.  For maximum flexibility, it can also display multiple offers to each customer based on what they bought.

You have complete control over the system. That means you can set the prices for each product and the product offerings. For example, you might bundle a set of services of products for one price and another set of services for another price. The customer can then decide which package to purchase.

The software will track all sales so you can see which offers are working and which ones are not.  This step is essential to make more sales and spend less time and money to make those sales. By monitoring your sales conversions, you will be able to find which sales packages and which sales messages work best, so you can continually modify your messages to get the most sales at the highest prices.

To learn more about the shopping cart and upselling, go to www.MyEasyOnlineStore.com

Dan Janal is an entrepreneur and marketing coach who helps clients with issues related to publicity, marketing, Internet marketing and e-commerce and sales. For more information, go to www.prleadsplus.com

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1. Customers expect it. Customers are very used to ordering online and using their credit cards. If you don’t have a shopping cart, you will lose sales as people might not pick up the phone to call you to order.

2. Get orders from customers 24 hours a day. The Internet is a world-wide service and you could have people wanting to buy your product when you and your staff are asleep. With a cart, your online store is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It is ready, willing and able to take orders for you when your customer is ready to buy  — even if they are halfway around the world.

3. Fraud protection. Each credit card order is verified by a certified company. You will know instantly if the card is valid. This service will protect you from fraudulent charges.

4. Security. Most shopping cart services operate under the highest level of security the Internet can offer. When customers see the code “https:’’ in the URL, they know that your website shopping cart is secure.

5. Sales reports. At the flick of a button, you can create sales reports that show how many of each product were sold on each day, week or month. It’s like having a super assistant!

6. Tracking codes. Higher end shopping carts provide unique tracking codes so you can measure the effectiveness of any advertisement, promotion, article or any other inbound marketing tool. No longer will you wonder where your leads and sales come from. You’ll know the source of your sales so you can spend your marketing dollars effectively and you won’t waste any more advertising dollars.

7. Coupons and discounts. These handy tools can help increase sales. Not every cart has these tools, so be sure to ask. You has complete control over these features so you can determine how large the discount is and for how long the offer lasts.

8. Newsletters and ezines. Some carts let you send newsletters and ezines to your members and subscribers. This service can save you a lot of money because you won’t have to buy another service to send out your newsletters. Again, not all shopping carts have this feature, so if you use one that does.

9. Autoresponders. You might not know the term, but you’ve probably seen this handy tool in action. An autoresponder is a pre-written message that is sent if a condition is met. To put this in plain English, here are a few examples. You buy a product from a company and you immediately find a confirmation message in your mail box. You sign up for a webinar and the codes are sent to you via email. You subscribe to a home study course and each lesson appears in your mailbox. Each of those examples is powered by an autoresponder service. Autoresponders can save you time by sending messages. These powerful tools save you lots of time by delivering your products, supplying customer service or just staying in touch with the customer on a regular basis. You create the messages and you decide when the messages go out. This tool could be the most important feature of a shopping cart. Make sure your cart has it because it will save you time by reducing tasks that you repeat frequently.

To help you make this choice, check out my free report, “7 Ways to Make More Money and Save More Time with Autoresponders” click here

10. Sales tax and shipping calculations. A good shopping cart will have up-to-date information on all the different tax rates that are charged. This feature can save you a lot of time and prevent a lot of headaches — plus it will keep you on the right side of the law when it comes to collecting and paying taxes!

When that anecdote is repeated at marketing seminars, people usually laugh.

But I wondered, are they were laughing at Wannamaker or with him?

After all, you don’t see any Wannamaker department stores anywhere on the face of the earth, do you?

I don’t know if Wannamaker ever figured out which part of his advertising worked. Seems to me if he did, he’d still be in business. After all, he’d stop advertising in the media that didn’t work, and he’d abandon ad campaigns that didn’t work. He’d be left with the ads that worked. Oh well.

Maybe back in the 1800’s people didn’t have tools to do the math needed to figure out what worked and what didn’t, so we can excuse poor old Wannamaker.

But now we do have tools to track just about everything, so you don’t have any excuse for failure!

All the tracking, measuring and reporting tools I need to run my business are easily contained in my shopping cart, MyEasyOnlineStore, a part of the 1ShoppingCart network. For one easily affordable monthly fee of less than $100, I can track any number of factors and it is all included in the price of the regular shopping cart service. Yet, many people are unaware of these services and their benefits. In this article, you’ll see how these tools can make you more money and save you from wasting your ad dollars, so you don’t become another Wannamaker.

Five Ways to Make More Sales with MyEasyOnlineStore.com

1. A/B Split Testing. This is the benchmark of any marketing campaign. The idea is simple. You run two tests to see which one gets a better response. You might test one price against another. Or one headline against another. Or an ad with one picture vs. another picture. The list is endless. You see the test results and you know the winner. Now test another part of the ad. You keep doing this and all the time you are making more money as you run ads that are more and more effective. The shopping cart has this feature.
2. Shopping cart abandonment. If life were perfect, everyone who goes to your order page would order. But life isn’t perfect and upwards of 90 percent of people will abandon your shopping cart. My EasyOnlineStore.com will show you the numbers and percentages of people who drop out from your order page. Armed with this information you can test different sales offers and wording on the order page so you can increase the orders. I did this with great success. I had a 20 percent success rate with a generic “buy” page. Then I did a split test on the order form. I had a long testimonial from a happy client with his picture. Now 49.5 percent of the people who saw that order form ordered! That was a huge difference. Next, I tested a short testimonial from that same client. The results were pretty much the same: 50 percent compared to 49.5 percent.
3. Sales reports. Every wonder which days of the week produce the most sales? MyEasyOnlineStore.com will tell you. There are a dozen other reports you can find easily, like sales reports by day, week, or month. Sales reports by products. Sales reports by affiliates. All data can be exported to a spreadsheet for further exploration and analysis so you can infinite flexibility and resources.
4. Tracking codes. To answer the age old question of “which of my ads work,” the shopping cart can provide an answer. You can put a tracking code, which is a line of code generated by the shopping cart onto any ad you place. Let’s say you are running the same ad on five different websites. Because each ad is linked to a different line of code, the shopping cart can easily show you which ads are selling and which ones are not.

If old man Wannamaker used MyEasyOnlineStore.com, he might be in business today!

Should you buy a stand-alone autoresponder and email marketing system or should you buy an autoresponder that is part of a sophisticated shopping cart?

There are good reasons for either action. I prefer the autoresponder that comes with a shopping cart system, but I want to give you a good idea of both sides of the story so you can make up your own mind.

Reasons for Buying a Stand-Alone Autoresponder and Email Marketing System

When you buy a stand-alone autoresponder from one of the leading autoresponder and email marketing companies, you are getting a very good product. Since this is the only thing they do, you can be assured that the product is best-of-class. You can also be assured that they will constantly add features and services to make it stand out from any competitor.

After all, they have nothing else to fall back on. They have to make this a success. Plus, since this is the only thing they do, they have their ear to the market and they know what services their customers need. They will also charge a competitive price for their service because there are competitors. You get a very fair deal.

What Are the Downsides of Using a Stand-Alone Autoresponder Service?

1. Price. They aren’t very expensive, but they aren’t cheap. In fact, the price of the world class leading autoresponder is just about the price of a sophisticated shopping cart with an autoresponder built in. You could save a few dollars by just using the autoresponder, but not as much as you might think because shopping carts cost just a handful of dollars more.
2. You might be paying for services you won’t use. If you need a lot of high-end features, this is the way to go. If you need only a basic function, then why pay more for services you won’t use?
3. It won’t complete the sales process. It can promote your service, but when people want to buy, they need to go to a shopping cart. Autoresponders can’t process credit cards or collect money. You’ll need to buy a shopping cart to do that.
4. It can amass a large database of prospects, but it is hard or impossible to export the database into a shopping cart. That’s because most shopping carts won’t import large databases of email addresses on the fly because they are afraid of helping spammers. The best shopping cart services will allow you to do this after you affirm the names are double-opt in. And they will charge you when their technicians import the name for you. If you start with the shopping cart that has an autoresponder, the names and email addresses will be part of the shopping cart from the get-go so you will be building one database.

On balance, stand-alone autoresponder services seem like a good deal. So why would you want to get one that’s bundled with a shopping cart?

How I Use My Autoresponder and Online Shopping Cart System

The autoresponder in the shopping cart I have is perfect for my needs. For example, the autoresponder in my shopping cart gets prospects to signup for free reports so I can build my sales funnel.

The autoresponder automatically follows up with the people who order the free reports. Each autoresponder has a link to an order page that sells my products and services. This is tied in to my cart so I can collect money automatically. This is the beauty of having an integrated program that can do your marketing and your sales automatically.

Once people buy my products and services, I have an autoresponder series that provides customer service and educates clients on other products or services that they should be buying. This way I increase the lifetime value of each client. You can’t do this with a stand-alone autoresponder system.

So, not only do I save money since the price of my ecommerce cart is only a few dollars more than the autoresponder – but I’m also making more money off it! The all-in-one autoresponder, cart and email marketing system I use does everything I need as a coach, consultant and digital information marketer. A standalone autoresponder might offer a few higher end features, but I don’t need them. Chances are you don’t either. Compare the two and see if you need the extras. If you do, then make the correct choice.

To help you make this choice, check out my free report, “7 Ways to Make More Money and Save More Time with Autoresponders”

Publicity thought leader Dan Janal offers a variety of coaching, consulting and other publicity services and tools through PR LEADS. He runs several businesses using MyEasyOnlineStore.com and its autoresponder system. See how you can run your business more effectively with a free report, “7 Ways to Make More Money and Save More Time with Autoresponders”

I thought not.

So why wouldn’t you think that your buyers don’t experience the same sense of fear, uncertainty and doubt that accompanies almost every buying decision?

Fortunately, there is a way to help reduce that fear. And the best news is that you can set up the procedure once and then run this tactic on autopilot forever so you can build customer loyalty.

Here’s how.

You can improve customer retention and reduce returns when you send a thank-you note to your customers as soon as they purchase a product or service from you.

Eight Benefits of Sending Thank-you Notes

1. You can immediately get on their good side by sending a thank-you note.
2. It shows them that you care.
3. It lets them know the order was received.
4. It provides contact information if they have questions about how to use the product or service.
5. It provides simple instructions for obtaining help if they didn’t receive the product or had trouble opening it.
6. It can uncover problems before the customer gets frustrated and cancels the service or returns the product.
7. This will improve customer loyalty.
8. This will reduce returns from people who couldn’t figure out how to use the product or didn’t receive the product.

You might think this is a lot of work, but it really isn’t — if you use an “autoresponder” which is an automated tool that sends pre-written messages to people. Messages can be personalized to include the customer’s name, company, city, state, product bought and other variables. Using this tool can make your message sound warm, personable and friendly.

Sample Thank-You Note

Imagine getting message like this:

Dear Susan,

Thank you for ordering Our Product. We hope it helps you improve your sales.

You should have received a copy of the product via our download page. If you have not, you can easily retrieve it by going to this link:

If you have any problems installing the product or using it, please contact our customer support staff. Here is their email address. Here is their phone number.

We look forward to helping you achieve your goals.

Sincerely yours, Your name

Of course, you can put your own personality and spin into this sample. It’s just meant to illustrate how simple this can be.

Where Can You Get an Autoresponder?

You are probably wondering where to get an autoresponder. Many shopping carts have them, but not all do. So check to see if you already have access to one. Some companies also sell autoresponders without a shopping cart. I prefer to have the autoresponder as part of the shopping cart since the cart can automatically send the thank you note when the order is placed. That saves you a step.

To help you make this choice, check out my free report, “7 Ways to Make More Money and Save More Time with Autoresponders”

Publicity thought leader Dan Janal offers a variety of coaching, consulting and other publicity services and tools through PR LEADS. He runs several businesses using MyEasyOnlineStore.com and its autoresponder system. See how you can run your business more effectively with a free report, “7 Ways to Make More Money and Save More Time with Autoresponders”