Closing the Sale, Part 3 of Writing an Affective Online Promotion

So you brushed up on writing an affective headline or subject line for your online advertisement. You believe you have a really good one that will `hook` your customers, or in this case, your potential customers.

You then went on and fine tuned your online promotion writing skills. You know exactly what to write, where to place it in the promotion, where to place the photo, picture or image that you are going to use to really make it stand out and grab the readers attention, and you now have that wonderful online promotion.

What next? Simply the hardest of all online promotions. That is called closing the sale. Being in the business I can tell you that the one question I get all the time, is, "Bruce, what is the hardest part of getting a customer online?" My answer is always knowing how to close the sale.

Closing the sale is the area where you give your potential customer a reason to click that Buy Now or Check Out button on your promotional ad. It is the final piece of the puzzle that really gets the person anxious to a state of, "I can`t wait to buy it."

So how do you get to that point? Well you already started them off with a subject line that made them click in the first place, so they are already interested. If you wrote a good promotion, which I am sure you did, then they are ready to close. What you want to do is give them some incentive for not hemming and hawing over whether or not they should purchase your product or hire your service.

For instance, lets say you run a travel agency and the trips you normally sell are fairly expensive. For the sake of this article will say $500 or more. Now you have a customer in front of your online promotion that really wants to take that trip, but may not have the available cash flow at this particular time to make the purchase. For the sake of argument lets just assume they don`t want to put all $500 on their credit card right now for financial reasons.

With that said, its time to think outside the box, and close the deal. A creative option here would be to allow your customer to put 10% down and then bill the remaining amount out at $50 per month until is paid off. Of course a lot of factors will go into what kind of monthly payments can be made, given the time frame, cost of the trip etc. But it is this kind of offer that will close the deal for a customer who may be on the fence.

Other good deal closers are offering a significant percentage off the purchase price if they act right now and so on. You will need to tailor your closing information toward your business. One business I know of where the owner seals driveways, offered a free driveway sealant and crack fill to a customer who brought on just two more neighbors of the sealant service. From what I understand he did about 15 houses in two days. It worked out really well.

Before I finish the article, I don`t want to forget to say that remember to put into your promotion a means by which a customer can get in touch with you. You`d be surprised how business owners run promotions, and then the customer can not get in touch with them.

By: Bruce A. Tucker