There are only three ways to increase your business revenue…

  1. Increase the volume of leads coming into your business
  2. Increase your conversion rate – how you turn those leads of those interested raised hands into paying for business,
  3. Increase the value per customer – this is where you get every customer you have to spend more money with you.

In today’s article, I focus specifically on increasing the value per customer and I’m going to share five ways you can do this. Once you start to adopt these strategies regularly into your business, you’ll find that you’re going to increase the value of every single customer, and what that means is you can make more money with less customers.

Acquiring customers is expensive – you have to pay for lead generation, and you have to pay for sales conversion, even if it’s just commission to a team. But, if every customer is spending more money with you, that means more revenue, and ideally profit for the business overall, makes sense? Right. Let’s talk about the five ways.


Five Ways to Increase the Value Per Customer

  1. Add an Upsell

“Would you like fries with that?” It’s the old classic from McDonald’s – to add an upsell. I know you’ve heard this before, I know you’re looking at me going “Bernadette that’s hardly groundbreaking.” Okay, fair enough, but are you doing this with every single transaction that happens in your business? Both you and I know you’re not. I even know sitting here, that we don’t do this with every single transaction in my business.

However, this isn’t a contest about who is doing it more, it’s about recognising the opportunities to grow. Get into the habit of every single time a transaction takes place in your business, of having an upsell. If you’re selling products online, this means that on the order form you have a bump offer – you offer people something extra. Or it could be that after people check-out, when they’ve already handed you their credit card for the first transaction, you offer them something else.

In an online business, you can have something called a one-click upsell, this is where a customer can add the upsell offer to their purchase without having to input their credit card details again. Those two things have made a huge difference to my business. There was one year as I was growing my online business where I focussed less on lead generation, and more on this method of increasing the value of the customers I already had. – I tripled my business by focussing in that area.

  1. Create and Offer Product Bundles or Bucket Offers

The next thing you can do is something called bundling. Bundling is where, if people have bought one particular product or service from you, that you can bundle them up with related products and services. We call this a bucket offer. We used to have a situation where we would sell people a masterclass, and that could be something that was like $47 or $97, and then as people were purchasing, we would show them all the other related masterclasses, and offer them the special discount if they bought all at once.

This was a win-win, because our customers were getting more related content at an incredible discount, and for us, as the business, we’ve just massively increased the value of that transaction, and so that sale has immediately become more valuable to us. Bundling is a fantastic way to go.

  1. Raise Your Prices

Now, this is a very obvious one, but it’s amazing how people resist this. This is simply to raise your prices. Now, I’m not saying “Hey, just up your price,” for no good reason. But you definitely want to look at your prices, and I would say if you were in a service business, if you’re someone who is currently selling your time, in most cases I’ve come across, I would say most people are either undercharging, which is they’re not charging enough to even cover their costs of being in business and make a decent profit, or there’s an opportunity that they could charge more.

I could do an entire series just on this topic – in fact, I did (shameless plug) – I have something called the Pricing for Profit Bootcamp, which would really help if this is resonating for you. When you raise your prices, you need to do more than just add a zero at the end, you need to get better at explaining the value.

A lot of people attempt to use low price as a selling tool. They’re like “Well, if my price is less than my competition …” Or “maybe people would just see the value and I’m not going to have to take the time to spell out why my product or service is so amazing.”

But you’re missing tonnes of opportunities. If you can get better at explaining the value of what you do, and really helping people to see the value, and that is a skill, but it’s a skill you can learn, just like you learned to walk, to talk. You know how to do that stuff, you can learn, you can master this skill. It’s one worth investing in, because it will help you raise your prices and make more money.

  1. Turn a one-time sale into a repeat transaction

Now, the next area to look at is how can you turn a one-time sale into a repeat transaction. This is where instead of making a one-off sale, the sale becomes a continuity purchase. You will see these offers in infomercials all the time. Maybe you go and you buy a certain type of face cream, and then they let you know that every month now they’ll be sending you an automatic repeat of that order. It happens a lot in the supplement business, as well.

You might say “but Bernadette, I’m not selling face cream, or vitamins.” But think, if someone has come to you to buy one thing, is there a way that you can give them more of that same thing? Because they’re likely going to have that need again.

For example, let’s say you’re selling a motivational seminar. People are going to come, and they’re going to get excited, and they’re going to get new ideas. Why not sign them up to a club where they could get access to that seminar month after month? It could even be online, it might not be where you have to physically deliver it in a room, but they’re still getting that same energy, they’re getting those same great ideas. It could be a tactic that you send out to your customers every single month.

There’s definitely a way to apply this in your business, and I really encourage you to look about how you can get that continuity. Because having that continuity revenue is the difference between being in business and just having something that makes you money.

  1. Create a High Value Offering

The final way that I want to talk about in this article, is to create a higher value offering. Let’s say the average transaction, when people come to you – let’s say you’re a coach, and you sell a $2,000 package. There is a percentage of the people who are currently buying your $2,000 package who would buy a higher value package if it was on offer, you just haven’t offered that to them yet.

When you create a higher value offering, what trips people up with this is you think “yeah, but my customers wouldn’t pay that, they couldn’t afford it.” That’s the whole point of having a higher value premium product, it’s not for everybody, it’s not for your entire customer list, it’s for those people who want more, they want something special, they want the premium offer, they want to be the VIP, and they’ve got the money to do that.

It’s like … say you’re Virgin Atlantic, you’re not selling your upper-class tickets to the entire plane, that would miss the point entirely. There is economy, there is premium economy, and then there is upper class. It’s having the offerings that will suit the different range of customers that you have.

But you might only have to sell one of those high value packages to equal five of your lower value package. A $10,000 offer versus a $2,000 offer. What that does overall is it increases your value per customer. That’s why we do it.

So, these are five things that you can do to increase your value per customer. The question is which are you going to do first? Where are you going to start? How can you turn this from an idea into an action, into something that’s going to bring money into your business ASAP?

I’d love to see your comments below on how are you going to do that, and if you want to get more training on the other strategies for increasing your revenue, then subscribe to my video training on Bernadette TV.