Closing The Sale: Articles as a Follow-Up

When you're selling larger-ticket items – distance education, for instance – you might have a tougher time with the sell. Anyone will invest $20 in something; it's much harder to get someone to plunk down $1,000, no matter how useful the purchase will prove to be.

In person, a hard-sell approach might work. Online, hard sells are a bad idea. Your customer's not looking you in the eye; instead, he's a thousand miles away or more, and you probably don't know who he really is. All he has to do is leave your site. You can email him; he can delete you.

But soft sells don't work very well either, for most of the same reasons; you can just be ignored.

What can you do to close a sale?

1. Build up a relationship. Most people don't want to buy large-ticket items from a faceless online entity. Don't be one. Instead, be personal, be frank, and be professional. Develop great online content showing that you are the ideal person to deliver what your customer wants, either because you have the proper credentials, you have the product he or she needs, or because you have the expertise required for what they need.

For instance, suppose you're running a distance education website for child therapists. You've gotten the credentials and recognition from professional organizations to award CEUs, and this is clearly noted on your website. You have the education and experience to deliver a quality class online. But you need to be able to show your potential students that you are eminently qualified.

Set up a section on your website for your articles. Have them rotate around the classes you're trying to sell, perhaps addressing mini-issues that you would like to teach but that don't fit into the classes for some reason. Create a blog and post to it regularly so that your site visitors can get to know you. If you can create a sense of intimacy and trust, you've set the right atmosphere to make your sale.

2. Create a free tutorial. Online, the best way to get people to buy your product is to give away information. Since the hypothetical service offered here is a distance education program offering CEUs, a free tutorial is perfect for displaying your abilities.

For other services and products, tutorials may not be so obvious a method for building trust. But they are. What about a beginners tutorial in developing a complete model train layout, from planning the track to cutting the wood, papier mache to final touches? This sort of tutorial would make it eminently clear that you know what you're selling. The care you take with the details in your tutorial will make it clear that you love your product enough to not sell sub-par products.

If you're selling firearms, free tutorials in safety, as well as articles on legality and getting yourself trained, would be a good choice. For saltwater fish tanks, a thorough tutorial in caring for the fish and the tank would be ideal.

Another benefit of tutorials like this – you can use them to clarify the reason behind the high price of your products. Frequently people don't want to pay lots of money for things because they don't understand why they are so expensive. With saltwater fish tanks, descriptions of the complexities involved in perfect conditions, properly balanced water, and fish health may help your customers understand.

3. Develop special offers for your favorite clients. When you think you have someone interested enough in an item to purchase it, you might start emailing them articles you keep in reserve for just this sort of closing. The best approach is generally a fairly casual email along the lines of "thought you'd be interested in this," with an attached article. You can use the same articles with every sale, but you don't have to let them know that you're using stock articles. What you're doing is building a rapport, expert-to-expert (or obsessed-person to obsessed-person, in the case of many niche markets!) to build their confidence in you – and in themselves. If you treat them like the expert they may become, they will come to think they deserve the item they're considering purchasing.

Each niche market is a special case, of course, and you'll develop your own art to closing sales for your customers. But the basics will remain the same:

* Establish a relationship and a rapport

* Allow the customer to know you

* Allow the customer to see your expertise (in a non-flashy way, of course)

* Finally, invite the customer into the "expert" club with you

For such a distant and technological medium of communication, the Internet is surprisingly personal. Take advantage of that fact, and watch your sales grow, your business flourish, and make your best customers into your friends and colleagues along the way. This article is free for republishing
Source: http://www.articlealley.com/article_38332_3.html