How To Make Customers Want More
It’s been a hot minute since I reached into my vault and shared one of the gems lying around in there, so this morning I decided to do exactly that.
There’s a problem plaguing most business builders out there…
No matter how long they’ve been in business, it feels like they are constantly chasing new customers and clients and never really making “good money”.
That really bothers me because I feel it’s my role to step in and correct their path so they fix it. And it bothers them because they stay broke and their business implodes.
What I’ve noticed is there’s a huge difference between people who are able to go the distance and those who burn out fast.
When I started my first business there were some people who started at the same time.
Just three years after that, 90% of them were out of business. Why?
There are a lot of reasons why, but the one that stands out the most is what I’m going to share with you today, and then how to fix it.
So, there’s this attitude most business builders have, especially when they’re just getting started, that makes them chase new clients constantly.
And you need new clients, sure…
But so many people chase new clients to the point of forgetting about the clients they already have.
If you’ve ever bought something from a person like this, from the customer’s perspective it feels like they take your money and disappear.
I’ve been putting the finishing touches on the $10k Club™ book, just recorded the audiobook, and working on the course and community now. That will be available soon so I’m opening up the waitlist and there are already names of people who reached out to me on that list.
And one of the things we talk about in there is how to make customers want more.
You see, every successful business has customers that buy repeatedly.
New customers are great, but existing customers are gold. New customers aren’t what make your business grow. It’s old customers. And logically you have to have new customers before you can ever have old customers.
So with the businesses that burn out fast, they are always on a rollercoaster trying to find the next new customer and then forgetting about them.
And the main cause for this is post-purchase dissonance (a.k.a. buyer’s remorse).
Every time you buy something it triggers a psychological process whereby you weight what you’ve gained against what you’ve lost.
By definition, buying anything means you have lost something. You paid for it. That means you gave up some amount of money in order to get it, which is a loss.
And because we know our customers will experience this, we have to design our process to reduce the feeling of loss as much as possible and expand the feeling of gain.
When the person buys from you, there are questions in their mind that they never ask you, and you have to answer those questions without being asked.
I won’t write all those questions here right now, but they’re in the book and there are strategies for answering and overcoming each one of them.
So they buy and they get that feeling that they’ve just lost something, and they immediately make a comparison of what they’ve lost and what they’ve gained.
If the loss outweighs the gain, then they will think your product or service isn’t good. And this happens regardless of what is actually inside the product or service. It happens before they even experience what you’re giving them.
It’s their first impression and it determines a lot of their perception of the value of what they’ve purchased.
For example, if they buy from you, and you give them a link to access their purchase, and that link doesn’t work… that’s going to create a lot more post-purchase dissonance.
So you want to tip the scales in your favor and give the impression that their gain outweighs their loss even before they get inside the product or service.
And the way you do that is through expectations.
When they buy they have expectations about how they think it’s supposed to work, what they are supposed to get, what it’s supposed to look like, etc.
Most of the expectations they have after they buy are formed as a reaction to what you’ve told them before they made the purchase.
So their entire impression of gain vs. loss will be influenced by their expectation of how they think they will gain and how they think they will lose.
This is where you can create an advantage because you give them the impression that they’ve already gained something immediately after buying, and that will offset a lot of the post-purchase dissonance they would otherwise experience.
One way to do this is by surprising them with something they didn’t expect.
If the expectation was that they pay $10,000 to get A, B, and C, and then after they pay they immediately get D and E too, they are surprised.
It doesn’t meet their expectations… in a good way.
Now you’ve shifted their expectations because there are more variables to weigh and they have something that just got added to the gain side of the equation.
And that creates the impression that they are getting back more than they put in.
You’ve reinforced the behavior of purchasing because purchasing comes with additional unseen benefits. The possibility of even more hidden benefits appears. And future purchases could also include hidden benefits.
This destroys post-purchase dissonance because if you weren’t going to give them what you promised, then why would you give them more than what you promised?
See how that works?
The perspective shifts from weighing what they lost against what they gained to weighing what they originally expected against the additional gain they just got.
And the possibility of gaining even more becomes more likely because you’ve already exceeded their expectations.
Now that they have new expectations around how purchasing from you will work in the future, they are primed to make more purchases.
The best part is that all of this can take place before they’ve even used the original product or service that you’ve sold them.
Because you’ve transformed their expectations of what it will be before they’ve experienced the thing itself, they are more likely to see value in what they’ve bought, which means they are also more likely to buy again in the future.
This is how you keep customers and get them to want to buy more from you.
Now go use this and come back to me to share your results.
Send me an email if this blog post was useful and you want to see more like this, and leave a comment if you’ve got questions.
To your success,
P.S. I’m going to try to share more of these gems more regularly, but what really motivates me to do it is seeing the questions people ask in the emails they send me. When you send that energy my way, I receive it and give it back. So when I see that happening, I tend to publish more stuff like this.