Do you make it easy to buy from you?
April 21st, 2010 by Ingrid Cliff
Most businesses have a great range of products or services … and yet most of their clients don’t know the full range on offer. It is one of those truisms that it is harder to get a new client than a repeat one, so why not educate your clients about your full range of offerings. This can be as simple as the sliver of cookie in front of a cake shop, or as complex as direct mail pieces.
For example, a natural health clinic I know runs regular workshops and seminars that look at a wide variety of health issues … and happen to include mention of different treatments and exposure to the full range of their services at the workshop. Another online business sends out regular newsletters promoting one different product a month combined with useful tips and ideas on how to use their products.
The trick here is to give enough of a taste to whet the appetite, and not enough to fill people up. I mean, how many cookies would be sold in a bakery if the baker let people eat as many as they needed?
The other thing is if you do happen to offer a great product or service, make it easy for people to find it and access it. The anti-example is Australia Post. You can buy postpaks from their post offices – all clearly labeled with signs Padded Bag 1 etc. But I defy you to find out how to calculate postage for their products. You are left measuring in both mm and cm (different calculators use different measures) and fumbling around. If you are like me, after an hour of frustration, you end up just sticking a King’s ransom of stamps on the thing, crossing your fingers and hoping. Make calculators obvious and linked to your products.
Make it clear where people can sign up to your newsletter – buried on page 40 of your website is not helpful. It should be on your front page as well as many other pages on your website.
Finally, make it easy to get in touch with you. Today I spent another fruitless half hour trying to find a phone number to contact a business from their website – it didn’t exist as the person prefers to communicate via email. I communicated that they had unfortunately lost our business.
What do you think? Any good examples of businesses making it easy to buy from them?
Ingrid Cliff
We put your business into words
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Marketing Tips for Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
