How To BOOST Your Profits With FREE Support

By Steve Shaw
Posted Monday, November 29, 2004

In my unfortunate experience, many internet business owners offer a very poor level of post-sale customer support. This article shows you how pulling out all the stops to help your customer AFTER the sale can easily boost your profit levels. In my unfortunate experience, many internet business owners, even well-known 'names', offer a very poor level of post-sale customer support.

Not just unfortunate for me. Unfortunate for them. They are washing potential profits straight down the drain.

It's often a case of 'Now I've got the money, why bother with the follow up?'.

In this article I'll show you how pulling out all the stops to help your customer AFTER the sale can easily boost your profit levels.

That is, it really pays YOU to go above and beyond what your customers would normally expect from post-sale support, even when that support is free.

Here are just some of the advantages:

1. Follow-up Sales

Through one-to-one support, people get to know you on a personal level, and by personalizing their experience, your credibility and their loyalty to you increases immeasurably. As a consequence you'll find past customers are much more willing to purchase other products off you and follow your recommendations.

Of course, your products have to be top quality too, and you have to constantly work hard to maintain their trust and your own credibility.

2. Referrals

If you WOW them with your personal support and level of help you freely provide to them, they'll positively RECOMMEND you to their own lists and others about the incredible service you provide. This again means more sales for you.

3. Testimonials

Thirdly, by standing out from the crowd with the levels of support you offer, people will be so astonished by what you doing for them for free, that they'll write you emails to tell you so, many of which can be used as testimonials to help bring you even more sales.

4. Boot the Competition

Finally, you get the cutting edge on your competition - most vendors, once they've got the sale, think that's the only important thing, 'cash in the bank', and they won't really care what happens to the customer after that.

Some will only resentfully help their customers out, which just leaves a bad taste in the mouth for those customers, who are obviously not going to go near these vendors again (and probably tell others likewise).

Offering free support to your customers is an instance of where karma really works online - what you give freely, will come back to you multiplied, so treat your customers with the respect they deserve, go above and beyond their expectations, and this will be to your distinct competitive advantage.

Let me give you one quick example of how this works for me. I regularly go the 'extra mile' with my customers - it's what they deserve after all, customers are the lifeblood of any business, mine included.

I then find them coming back to me asking how they can promote a particular product to their list of opt-ins, JUST BECAUSE of the customer service they have received, and BECAUSE it makes my business stand out from the crowd - apart from the general principle of good business, this type of free promotion, and word of mouth recommendation, makes it well and truly worth it.

In this way, over the long term, running your business on sound principles such as the provision of top of the range customer service can repay dividends for your business.

About the Author
Technical e-marketer Steve Shaw reveals the technology behind e-marketing, the stuff the techies don't tell you. Find out more information at (http://takanomi.com/newsletter)