Many people who sell on eBay completely neglect the
follow-up process. They post an auction. Someone wins.
They send an automated message to the winner. They ship
the item. End of story. End of buyer-seller relationship.
. . .end of customer's total worth to the business
--and this is why so many people who sell on eBay
fail or make negligible profits: they have no idea
that the real money is actually in back-end and
follow-up sales.
In this article, I am going to go over one of the
tools you can use to make follow-up sales on
Ebay: autoresponders.
Autoresponders will allow you to automate the
follow-up and upselling process. You can subscribe
to an autoresponding service through a number of
different companies. Most will give you a free
trial that limits your abilities, but lasts indefinitely.
Getresponse (getresponse.com) is one of these
companies. It has a user-friendly control panel,
excellent customer service, and offers a free trial
version that will give you access to everything
you need for early upselling and follow-up.
You can use your autoresponder a number of different
ways to make follow-up sales, but you must start by
collecting names to load into your autoresponder.
You can do this by asking customers (after you've done it
made a sale) if they would like to join your mailing
list and receive special offers, discounts, and the
chance to buy items before they go on auction. Load
the names and email addresses of the people who respond
positively into your autoresponder.
Getresponse will send them a confirmation message.
The rest is up to you.
Come up with special offers, discounts, and
contests and send them out via broadcast to your
subscribers on a regular basis, but not too often.
Your customers have already a) purchased from you
and b) agreed to receive special offers. From here,
it should not be too hard to get follow-up sales.
They are already hooked - just give them a good offer.
For instance, you could send out special offers for
complementary products at certain intervals. You could
target people who purchased digital cameras and offer
them sticks of memory at a discounted price, but only
if they buy within a certain amount of days after the
close of the auction. You could do the same thing with
camera bags - and also set a specific date.
If you sell jewelry, you could offer customers a matching
set of earrings for a necklace at a discount. Or cleaning
tools. Or a jewelry box.
There are a number of different ways in which you can
structure your eBay post-sales follow-up with your
autoresponder. There are only two real rules you
should follow:
1) Do not, under any circumstances, add people to your
list who did not specifically ask to be added to it.
It is illegal and unethical, and it could land you
in jail; and
2) Make sure you are targeting the right people with
the right follow-up pitch. If you're trying to sell
discount plastic dinosaurs to someone who just
bought a case of motor oil, you probably wont get
the response you want.
. . .other than that, it is completely up to you.
Come up with some creative ideas; put them to work;
and you can easily double or triple the lifetime
worth of each customer who shops at your eBay store.
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