Most companies focus on customer acquisition, because it determines the viability of a campaign, but it’s the back-end of a successful campaign that truly determines your bottom line.  Optimizing the back-end can be the single most important aspect to increase a company’s profitability.  The back-end is broken into two parts.  The first consists of the upsells (to the TV product) offered during the IVR/web order.  The customer is calling because he/she is excited about the TV offer, therefore, sell her more of what she wants.  Deluxe versions typically work best and offer additionals at a discount with free shipping.  Other upsells should be tightly connected to the TV offer.

The target RPO (Revenue Per Order) from a $10 TV offer should be about $60, much higher than that will likely cause significant problems with credit card charge back and returns.  Each upsell takes away from the response of future upsell offers as the customer’s attention span wanes; too many upsells causes the IVR length to lengthen unacceptably.  I have listened to IVRs that can run 18 minutes.  This causes significant frustrations for the customer and can easily lead to customer input errors that again lead to increased charge backs and returns.  It is important to A/B test upsell position order as well as price points to optimize your upsell stream.

The second portion of back-end optimization concerns fulfillment which I will address in a future post.