People can take a long time to trust you, but only an instant to lose that trust. As we’ve mentioned before, building trust is the key to a good sales funnel. Without it, you won’t engage buying behavior. However, even after you’ve converted visitors to customers, you want to continue to maintain your integrity and trustworthiness. For that, you want to make sure you don’t engage in behavior that will cause you to lose your customer’s trust, like spamming.

Spamming is the act of sending unsolicited emails or offers. It can also be setting up entire pages with nothing of value to the visitor, instead it looks like a greedy grab for their money. This comes across clearly when the pages are nothing more than links to affiliates, as many link farms online can prove. Even within your own products, always seek to create offers skillfully and engage the buyer with their permission. Anything less than that could be harmful to your business model.

Let’s face it, it’s a great idea to keep up with all your subscribers to market them by periodically contacting them through email. But, no one wants to have to do that individually and manually. It’s just too much work. Well, autoresponders fill that need by allowing you to set up various email addresses that will automatically send emails to people when they are contacted. If you sell electronic products, you can even use autoresponders to help people go to the right area to download.

Autoresponders are not difficult to set up, but require that you understand your sales funnel well. You don’t want to be sending out products to newcomers that should only be presented at a later stage. You want to make sure your autoresponders are orderly and make sense when they are read. You want them to also add value to the buyer who will stop reading them if they are just straight advertisements.

If you have a social networking site, or even just a discussion forum on your site, you can ask for the sale during member registration. The new members will already be trusting you somewhat in order to divulge personal information like their email address or name. So, you can use that familiarity to help promote some additional products at that time.

One version of this is to have check boxes that they need to uncheck it if they don’t want a product. That can be a little sneaky and the best bet is to be as honest and straightforward as possible. Maybe they don’t want to buy the current special, but want to sign up to your newsletter. Don’t forget to include that option in your list of check boxes. In some cases, you can check the newsletter automatically and leave the paid offers unchecked, and that will be seen as having some integrity.

Maybe your customers can’t make up their minds and get to the order form to see your cross sell and up sell opportunities. These types of people need a little more guidance and you will want to offer them a comparison of your products with a list of benefits to help them make their decision. You can offer various formats and complexities of the same product to help motivate them to cross that barrier from visitor to buyer.

The resistance to buy is the biggest hurdle for an online marketer. It is easier to sell things after a decision to buy has been made. However, that doesn’t mean you should pay attention to how your sales opportunities are presented at the time of an order to help you convert non-buyers into fans.

Did you just create a killer set of workshop videos? Did you promote your website and other offerings within it? Why not? It’s one of the best places to put more offers, as long as you do it sparingly. Electronic media is very good for doing cross sell and up sell offers because you can simply add another link to the product to direct people to your sales page. If it is something that complements or enhances the original product, it makes perfect sense to include it within the content of your original product. In that sense, it can come off as a helpful gesture, rather than very clever marketing.

Even audio downloads can have you saying the URL of your website, so you don’t lose the opportunity to gain more traffic. Text based products are ideal because the link can carry them straight from the copy to the website page where the offer resides. Even physical products can be engraved or labeled with your website URL to create more sales opportunities later.

Most online order forms don’t bother to list other offers on them – a big mistake! This is the perfect place to add items to the check out, before the sale is finalized. It is the best place to offer complementary cross sell products. It can also be used to up sell a customer with upgrades on the product they are currently thinking of purchasing. Don’t let the opportunity pass by to get a bigger sale just because you think the sale is a done deal. In many cases, what has just happened is a decision to buy was made, but the customer is still pretty much open to suggestions on what to buy.

Creative copy in the order form can help you increase the backend sales that will make you highly successful as an online marketer. People will even feel as if you’re pretty smart to know what products to recommend to them at just the right moment so they don’t make a mistake buying the wrong product! That’s the power of a good sales offer on the order form.

So, you’ve made a sale! Congratulations, but it’s not time to rest on your laurels yet. You can still use the thank you page to alert your customer to other offers in your line up and cultivate a potential sale in the future, if not immediately. Many marketers skip the thank you page as a potential area to add copy to help your customers see more of the products and services available to them, but it is actually a very good spot for that.

They will have already spent some money and may be in a buying mood. They may see that the offer on the thank you page perfectly complements what they just bought and will be tempted to buy it. Or, they may simply become better informed about the products and services you offer. Either way, you have use that area to the fullest advantage for future sales opportunities.

Luxury vendors have long since dedicated their sales to higher priced products. What happens in a down economy though when buyers can no longer afford such luxuries. Their sales falls and business lags. That’s why many luxury vendors these days don’t just sell one type of item, they sell many items from purses to jewelry and perfume. You can do the same online and make good money selling either more inexpensive products or single larger ticket item products.

Your online inventory can have many different options for your buyers. In fact, offering a simpler, less expensive, version of a higher priced product can help you to convert visitors to customers and grease the way for the future sale of the higher priced item. So, don’t be someone that considers their market only luxury, and instead opt for a variety of choices for your online customers.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in online sales is to not ask for the sale. You don’t just want to display your products in a shopping cart and hope that is enough to entice your buyers. You should have copy that enthuses your buyer and asks for the sale through making a creative offer to the visitor. This way, you can create offers that are too good to refuse, one-time offers, up sell, and cross sell opportunities.

You shouldn’t be afraid to ask for the sale at various times too! Imagine if you walked into a fast food joint that didn’t ask you if you wanted the combo or additional items? Would you think them up on your own? Probably not. Ask for the sale the right way, and your customers will actually feel grateful that you helped guide their buying decision and made it easier for them.

When you are in a retail store, you know that some people come in to browse and others to buy. The same is true online, except that you can’t watch them as they visit your site and distinguish from their body language which are which. Online, you have to get the buyers to actually identify themselves before you can start to market them through your sales funnel.

One way to do this is to have an entry level product that anyone would buy because it is such a good deal. Those people that buy something, no matter how small, have identified themselves as buyers. Another way is to offer a free product bonus for signing up to your newsletter. This can tend to be harder because it can attract freeloaders, but it is also a viable option.

The sales funnel isn’t automatic, but it is as close to automatic as you can get online. You set up the system that guides your buyers to help them make buying decisions that can help them solve their problems. However, if you never ask for the sale, the odds are the buyer may not take the action on their own initiative. That’s why your sales funnel should always have as its primary motive to lead the buyer to a call to action.

A call to action online is a bit different than in direct mailing. It can be the call to action to sign up to your mailing list. It can be clicking a button that takes them to your sales page. It can even be participating in your website’s forums. Eventually, though, the call to action you want to remember most is to ask for the sale.

The sales funnel map follows a very time-tested path. You first get your potential buyers to identify themselves. Next, you get them to buy something from you, no matter how small. You then put them full force into the sales funnel where they are marketed with other offers at various times, both during the sales process and afterwards.

During the sales process, your sales funnel will include one time offers, cross sell, and up sell opportunities. These can be recommended right on the sales page, the order form, or the thank you page.

After the sale, you can continue to market your sales prospects by putting them into a list of autoresponders that will send out notices to them at specific intervals, including newsletters and hot tips. These emails will include links to your other offers too.