Using Backend Products to Create Lifetime Customers
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Coming up with new products and services is a lot of work. But it provides you with a great return on your investment; besides, if you don't create new products and services for your customers, your competition will. This article will help you see what new items you can offer your customers, and show you how to get the most mileage out of your new creations.
Why Bother?
There are a lot of people who wonder why they should go to the effort of creating new products. Why should you bother to go through the process of creating more products for your web site, more features for your customers to come and use, more packages for them to take advantage of? If you do decide to go through the work of developing and promoting new products, how will you know which ones will succeed and which ones will be a waste of your time (man hours) and hence your money? And finally (and one of may favorites), how will you market your new products and services to one off subscribers who do not come regularly to your site?
The Reason
Manufacturers call it brand management. They spend millions of dollars on developing new products, and another few million on customer research. They do this because they know that new products mean new sales, unless you create a product that competes with your own original product (think Coke and Diet Coke). Online, you create new products and services at a minuscule cost, and still enjoy the benefits of increased sales. Your sales may not double overnight, but you will notice increased activity as your users check out your new products and services.
Is it Only for Sales Sites?
Is it only ecommerce sites that can offer back end products? Well, for an ecommerce site, more activity translates to more sales and reflects on the cash flow and the profit margin. All websites offer products and services, however, and all web sites need lifetime customers, whether they "sell" products or not. Nowadays every web site runs some form of advertising or the other, and more traffic is good because it can increase your rates for text links/banner ads, and translate to more clickthroughs on any other form of advertising.
If you constantly introduce new products and features to your web site, activity on your site (translate activity to sales) will jump thirty to fifty percent. Take a look at The Developer Shed network (we will look at loads of other illustrations as we go on). Imagine you are a fan of open source programming, and hence subscribe to Dev Shed. As you happily surf the Dev Shed site, you inevitably notice the ASP Free web site, and the Dev Archives and the Scripts sites. And your latent desire to know more about "other" programming languages will find expression. If other such back end products did not exist, and all that Developer Shed focused on was Open Source, you would have to leave the site and go somewhere else (Microsoft Developer Network website perhaps) else to get information on Windows programming.
So not only can you increase activity by offering new services, but you actually avoid losing potential customers who leave your site to seek out other sites that offer services related to yours. That's right, if you do not offer new services, you can lose customers!
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