When you are involved with any business the first thing you must do is overcome objections. Buyers will look for reasons NOT to buy from you. Any good sales person will tell you this. However to help improve sales conversion you need to overcome these objections. If you are a newly formed company you may experience trepidation from your potential buyers. Mainly because you will not have many customers, testimonials or even much of a track record. Even if you are an established business there are still a few simple things you can do to improve sales conversions.

Guarantees
Do you offer money back guarantees? Exchange or Credit polices around returns? Perhaps you have a “risk free” guarantee that is common in infomercials to put potential buyers at ease that if they want to return the product they can. If you have a new product that no one has ever heard of, this may be the route to go to establish early sales and absorb any risks your customers have of buying from you.

Low Price Guarantees are also popular to compete against other retailers. Meaning that if you find a similar item that is offered for less a retailer will usually price match or give you an extra 10-20% off the listed price.

Try before you buy (aka the Free Trial)
Services including online services are a great product to offer free trials before customers sign any contracts or agree to subscribe for a monthly or annual contract. Netflix comes to mind with a no risk, free trial of their video service. If you don’t cancel before your trial expires you will automatically be enrolled in their monthly subscription.

Extras
So assuming your buyer has found something they want to buy, but is not happy about the process. Perhaps they believe the shipping cost is too high, which is why Amazon has had free shipping over a certain order amount for many years. You will notice that smaller retailers have started copying this tactic albeit at higher order totals. If you are a jeweler you may offer a free ring resize if you are not satisfied with the way your ring fits on your finger.

Extras could also include throwing in something extra such as a free product, which is one tactic infomercials use. For example “if you call right now” we will also include a free item.

Image Credit: vectorportal (via Flickr)

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Using coupons can be very effective in a down economy. Remember an earlier post titled,  Coupons can be used to accelerate sales in down economy and in fact it is one of our most popular posts too.

But how often have you printed a bunch of coupons for your promotion and been left with extras when the promotion was about to start? Or worse when the promotion has ended?
Did you print too many? More likely you did not have a way to distribute the coupons for maximum effectiveness.

In today’s post I wanted to describe a few ideas around how to get your coupons to go viral.

• Display coupon offers in other Locations
  If you have multiple locations is the promotion you are running going to be for all stores, or only specific stores on certain days.
• Talk to local merchants on your street or block about promoting you
  Another way to get word of mouth marketing is to distribute coupons to other vendors. This week I was buying take out Chinese food at our local restaurant, and while I was waiting I noticed a coupon sitting on the counter for free bowling. The coupon was certainly inviting since I was just waiting around for the food order to be ready. And two I had not hear of the new bowling location in my area.
• Re-purpose the same offer on your website, or in your email newsletter
  Get the word out online or by email, with a forward to a friend option could help. Make it easy to forward the email version of the coupon to others, meaning that you may not want to personalize each coupon code for instance.
• Twitter or Facebook
  A lot of companies are encouraging sign ups by promoting incentives. For example, this offer is only available to our fans or followers.
  
• Encourage sharing to get the word out
  Bring a friend with you when you redeem this coupon and you eat free. That type of thing. Or require a certain level of participants such as a group or 3 or more.
• When giving out the coupons give out several to the same people
  Having extra coupons people will try to share the discount or offer with their friends. On several occasions this has happened to me while waiting in line and the person in front of me used up the maximum coupons they could. And gave the extras to the guy standing behind him.
• Send an SMS to mobile phones of your customers
  Perhaps this strategy is newer and not everyone is trying it yet. But hey there is opportunity there then right.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Missing Guarantees that could hurt Sales Conversions
• Defining Advertising Objectives for Small Business
• Consider Timing as part of your Marketing
• HubSpot Study: Small Businesses That Blog Get 55% More Website Visitors
• Scarcity Selling Works