Expand Your Selling Options and Increase Your Sales

You can sell more software by giving your customers upselling, cross- selling, and after-selling choices. This article explains the basics of how to increase your sales by adding these tools to your website.

Lessons from Amazon

If you've ever bought products on amazon.com, then you've experienced just about every kind of additional selling program known to humankind. From the time you put your virtual hands on a book that you want to learn more about, they tell you the names of other books that prior buyers have bought when they purchased the book that you selected, they suggest a two-book bundle, they suggest other titles in the same category, and they tell you that your book qualifies for discounted shipping if you purchase additional books. When you close the transaction, they offer you a discount to ship additional gift-copies of your books to your friends. And, in my opinion, they do all of this without confusing or offending the buyer.

You can use some of these techniques to sell more software, too. Used improperly, these techniques can annoy prospects, and drive them to visit your competitors' sites. But if you implement these ideas with care, you can watch your sales go up.

If you're selling a single application

Many developers feel that they don't have upselling options because they offer only a single application. Other mISVs avoid upselling and cross- selling because they don't want the overhead of implementing a shopping cart. Truth is, there are a number of options that are available to you:

• (1) You can coax customers to upgrade from a single-user license to a family license, entitling them to use your software on all of their home computers plus one computer at work.
• (2) If you're offering home entertainment or game software, you can suggest that they give a gift to a friend.
• (3) Offering a gift certificate, or shipping a physical CDROM, with or without a gift card, can generate additional sales.
• (4) If you're selling business or education software, you should make a major effort to sell multi-user and site licenses at discounted prices.

If you're offering two programs

You can still avoid using a shopping cart if you're selling two products to your customers. Simply create bundles and combinations, and sell these combos as single products.

• (1) You can offer program-1, program-2, or both (probably offering a discount for the two-application bundle).
• (2) Some developers have found success by offering a family of products.

A two-program family might consist of a Standard and a Pro version. When somebody purchases the Standard version, you can attempt to upsell them on the benefits of the Professional version. Similarly, you can try to get them to move from Light to Standard to Gold to Platinum. When naming your family members, there are two terms that you should avoid: "Special Edition" reminds a lot of potential customers of the deficient versions of commercial software that come bundled with computer hardware. In addition, the misspelled word "Lite" is a term that turns a lot of people off.

Shopping carts for 3+ programs

If you use your website to sell more than two programs, you might want to create a shopping cart. Without a shopping cart, customers have to go through the buying process more than once. In addition to being annoying, multiple purchases create concerns with bank and eCommerce processors. And a month later, when your customer sees multiple purchases from the same vendor, they may get confused and challenge the purchase with their bank.

• (1) Shopping carts make it easy for customers to buy multiple products.
• (2) Abandoned shopping carts, however, continue to be a significant problem. Many shopping carts are non-intuitive and annoying. While software developers might think it's logical to remove an item from their shopping cart by changing its quantity to zero, this is much less logical to many end users.
• (3) If you're selling, say, a collection of games, all at similar prices, you can avoid using a shopping cart by offering 2-game packs and 3-game packs.

Sales guidelines

When you're considering ideas for additional sales, there are some principles to keep in mind:

• (1) Don't jeopardize your original sale by confusing or offending your prospects with your upsell offer. If you're offering additional applications on your website, make sure your prospects are clear about what they're buying.
• (2) Clarity is important, too, when you're upselling at the time that they add an application to their shopping cart. Acknowledge that they've added a particular program to their cart, and ask them if, in addition, they'd like to add another specific program, and tell them the exact price.
• (3) If you're upselling after they've filled their shopping cart, and after they've clicked on the "check out and pay" link, then be careful about what you say. You're dealing with a committed buyer, and you don't want to lose the sale by confusing them.
• (4) If you're attempting to cross-sell your customer after the sale, for example on your "thank you for your order page", you can be a little more daring in your sales presentation. They've already bought your software, so there's no risk of them abandoning their shopping cart. If you give them a deeply-discounted offer, they might go back to your product pages and make an additional purchase. Or perhaps offer them a coupon that they can redeem at a later time.
• (5) If you're after-selling your customers, using the email that you send them - the email with the registration code or the URL where they can download the full version of your app - you should offer these customers discounts on future purchases. Or you could recommend that they purchase other developers' applications that you offer on an affiliate basis.
• (6) Newsletters are another great after-sales tool. For software developers, newsletters are at the heart of permission marketing. Tell your customers the advantages of signing up for your free email newsletter so that they'll get tips and tricks on how to use your software more effectively. Mention that they'll receive notifications about new releases of the program that they purchased, as well as discounts on other fine software from your company. Assure them that you'll never use their name or email address for anything except sending them your newsletter.

The bottom line

It's much easier to sell additional software to a satisfied customer than to find new prospects and convince them to purchase. Be careful not to overload your customers with sales messages. But don't miss opportunities to upsell, cross-sell, and after-sell your software. These additional sales can build your income stream and strengthen your relationship with your customers.

© 2010 DP Directory, Inc.