If you’re looking methods on how to sell your services online, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’re going to show you a step by step guide on how to sell services online. Also, we’ll explore several ways you can make your service business highlight without spending a dime.
Sell services online with an online presence
While this may sound obvious, you cannot sell services online with an online presence. It doesn’t necessarily has to be a website. A lot of successful businesses don’t have a website and use social media as their main channel of acquisition. You can use tools like Facebook or Instagram to create an online social media profile to start promoting your services. Of course, keep in mind there is a sea of profiles and websites, so creating a website or social media alone, won’t get you customers.
If you are using a website, consider checking out SEO strategies to try to bring visitors to your website. Also, don’t be afraid to use tools like Google Adwords that allows you to bring highly targeted traffic to your website advertising it. Also, most social network have advertising options that can get you interactions and followers. You may have to set-up a business profile to do this.
At the end, what you’re looking with this type of social media and web actions, is to let people know about your service. You won’t be able to sell services online only doing this.
Let them pay for your services online
This is another point. Did you know that last year, 80% of younger shoppers made impulse purchases online? The old way of selling services is getting obsolete. Millenials hate to wait for a quote from a business, and will probably choose another option where they can buy instantly. This specially affects people that sell services online, because most services are usually requested and not self selling.
Imagine going into a supermarket, where there are no price tags. You probably wouldn’t go right? It’s the same for services. A great thing software companies do (like us) that you can do too, is to have a preset list of prices. For example, if you are a social media agency, you can have plans with X amount of posts for $Y. These plans may increase price by the number of posts, so the client can choose one that fits their needs.
The result of this, is that the customer will choose what service the want to hire from you, according to their needs and budget. Show this publicly, so they will not need to wait for a quote from you to buy your services. Also, don’t be afraid of competition. If competition sees your pricing (and trust me, they probably already know it), the worst they can do is to lower their prices. And when prices are to low, services tend to look like they’re of lower quality.
Also, let them pay for your service at the moment. Encourage impulse purchases by making online-only offers. You can embed a checkout form made in PayForm to your website to make them pay instantly. You will receive a notification about the payment received so you can start with the service.
Finally, showing your prices publicly will deter non-shoppers and bargainers. Your leads will be of higher quality, willing to start paying for your services.
Keep as a customer with this simple tip
What’s the difference between going to the movies or having Netflix? While the cinema charges you once for one movie, Netflix is constantly billing your credit card. And chances are, if you add up, you’ve paid Netflix in a year more than you’ve spent in going to the cinema for 3 years or even more.
This time of billing is called a subscription, or recurring payments. It means, that in a set period of time, their customers’ credit cards are billed automatically. They don’t need to do anything, so Netflix keeps on charging until they leave.
Technically, this is something hard to achieve. It involves setting a recurring engine, connecting to payment APIs and more things that you’d probably have to hire an engineer to do. Still, we have a small tip that can help you achieve this in your service. PayForm has a recurring payment engine that doesn’t need code to be implemented.
How do recurring payments help you sell services online
Your customers will be billed automatically, just like Netflix. They will also have full control of their subscription, so you won’t have to do anything (except provide the service, of course). Start by offering a small discount when they enter a recurring payments agreement with you. For example, 10 posts for $50, or 10 posts/mo for $40. Or ditch the one time fee altogether and focus just in subscriptions.
In PayForm also, you can add more features to your recurring payment forms. Add trial periods to make your customers try your services before they are committed to buy. Or change the recurrence to a yearly one to receive a big lump sum before they renew.
Final words
We know that selling services online can be something overwhelming at first. While we’ve gathered a lot of things that we’ve seen that historically work for business selling services online, there is no silver bullet. Still, it’s never too late to start. Take advantage of these tools and tips and happy selling!
PayForm is a tool that can help you sell services online creating checkout forms that can accept regular payments and also recurring subscriptions. We offer a 7 days free trial, and several features that can help your small business succeed.
