Think of your favorite brand. Got it? Good. Now, grab a pen and paper and write it down.
Now, list your 3 favorite products from that brand.
How easy was it to list more than one thing?
Did you top 3 immediately spring to mind? Did you have so many favorites that it was hard to nail it down to just 3?
Or….did you struggle to name 3….or even 2?
The goal of any business owner is to get more buyers…but what’s even more important is to keep those customers coming back to buy more.
The place where many businesses miss the mark is that they live and die selling their core offer, without thinking of ways to keep those buyers spending money….
…and those are the businesses that will struggle.
Part of having a successful Customer Value Journey is creating ways for customers to not only buy your core product, but also purchase additional offers and ascend to the place of being a repeat customer.
And to accomplish that so you can make sure your business is not one of the ones that struggles, you need to create a return path.
Knowing how to get more customers with a return path will not only get your customers buying more, but will transform your business in the process.
What A Return Path Is & Why It Matters
According to legendary marketer Jay Abraham, there are only 3 ways to grow a business. They are:
1) Increase the number of customers.
2) Increase the average transaction value per customer
3) Increase the number of transactions per customer
Getting more customers is great…but just having more buyers alone isn’t going to help you grow. You need to get your customers buying more, more often.
Enter the return path.
The goal of the return path is to have frequent, strategic communication with your customers to continue bringing them back to your website so they will engage with you and make even more purchases.
It all goes back to the Subscribe stage in the Customer Value Journey, where you gave away a lead magnet in exchange for your customers’ contact information.
Because they gave you permission to reach out to them, you can now continue to target them with new lead magnets, tripwire offers and additional products.
This could include sending out coupons via email, informing them of special subscriber-only sales or contacting your list about newly announced products.
This is why it’s so important to offer more than one product or service. The goal of the Customer Value Journey is to take total strangers and turn them into evangelists for your business.
And it’s pretty hard to become an evangelist of a company that only sells 1 thing.
When you put additional offers into play and keep giving buyers chances to come back for new purchases, you put the second and third of Abraham’s law of business growth…
You increase the amount the customer spends on each transaction AND you increase their number of overall transactions.
So how do you put a return path into place and learn how to get customers to buy more? We’ve got a few ideas.
4 Return Path Tools To Keep Customers Coming Back
Retargeting
Retargeting is when you strategically target people who have taken previous actions with your website.
It works throughout all phases of the Customer Value Journey, but in the Ascend stage, it can help you continually keep your business in the forefront of your customer’s mind.
The key to retargeting is to have a pixel installed on your website—a line of code that captures your visitors’ information and how they interacted with your site.
When a visitor takes an action, the pixel fires off, and you now have the ability to reach out to these people again with more ads.
Ever feel like you’re being followed on the Internet by products you looked at, but never bought? You’ve been retargeted.
You can use ads to both remind users of actions they didn’t take as well as promote new offers, all of which create a return path back to your site and open the door for more purchases.
Membership Programs
Once you’ve proven the value of your product or service through the purchase of your tripwire and core offer, membership programs are a great way to delight your loyal customers and keep them coming back.
First, they get the benefit of being rewarded for purchasing. Many companies, such as beauty companies like Ulta and Sephora, have membership programs where customers can earn points for every purchase to reach different levels of discounts or free products.
This type of program works well for ecommerce or brick and mortar businesses alike—any business that offers a physical product can create brand evangelists by helping customers save money.
When they can actually save more money by buying more, you have an opportunity to advance the transformation the Customer Value Journey creates.
If you run a service that lends itself to regular purchases, create a punch card where they pay a flat fee each month to get that service performed.
Flash Sales
Special sales that are just for your subscribers obviously give your customers the chance to save money and continue building excitement.
But there’s another benefit that comes along with them. And that’s exclusivity.
People like to be a part of something important and special. And receiving discounts and coupons that are just for members feeds into that.
This works regardless of whether you have an ecommerce store or service. Email your list with special offers that give them an experience only members get to have.
Upsells & Down Sells
One surefire way to increase the average order value of each customer is by giving customers the chance to purchase additional products at checkout.
Once customers enter their payment information for their initial item, you present an upsell—a more expensive item that complements their purchase and includes a discount valid only for that purchase.
If they decline the upsell, you can offer a less expensive item.
This allows them to add extra items on impulse, and also plays into urgency and exclusivity by offering a one-time chance to save on these additional products.
How To Get Started
So if you want to put any of these tools into practice or just want to learn more about how to get people to buy more with a return path, how do you make it happen?
Are you ready to map your Customer Value Journey so you can build a bigger adventure?
Schedule a complimentary Double Your Sales Review marketing consultation to learn 73 ways to grow your business and find out which you need to put into practice so you can win.
You can also check out our services to learn more about Cirius Marketing and what we do. We want to double the size of 1,000 small businesses and you can be our next success story.