Prepaid Card Co's: Drive Card Sales By Avoiding Underselling

This is the first in a series of articles focused on Driving Sales Results for Prepaid Card Companies.  You can follow the series by clicking here .

So how does a prepaid card company undersell its products?

It’s not about whether you’re selling hard enough.  Pounding them over the head with strong promotional language isn’t a great trust builder and shows a lack of confidence in your products.  Underselling takes place when prospects don’t get the most valuable information for their decision about your products. Different segments have different needs for your card products and lot of it is based upon their past experiences with the products that yours replaces.

Here are a couple of examples:

If a potential cardholder is a frequent international traveler, then the focus of their value from your products is around exchange rates, security and sending money abroad.    Whats the value of telling them about how you help people with poor credit get back on their feet?  They want to know how you’ll improve their exchange rates and allow them to get cash or shop more easily.

Similarly, a struggling unemployed worker isn’t going to be connected to your products by a pitch about cheaper exchange rates and instant money transfer.   They want to know about how its easy to get the card and how you can help them get back on their feet.

So what is the right approach to avoid this form of underselling?

Our experience has shown that for most companies, there are two fundamental hurdles to selling more product:

• Making sure you know enough about your customers
• Making your customers know enough about your products and company

Knowing enough about your (prospective) cardholders:

• segmenting your prospects
• identifying their real reasons for needing a prepaid card
• Defining the problems that they are focused on right now that you can solve
• Understanding their way of looking at value in your prepaid card range
• Knowing what can you tell them to make them understand the solutions your cards bring to their problems

Your (prospective) card holders knowing enough about your company:

• make sure each customer segment gets specifically what they need to know about your products
• its not about a longer or more detailed sales pitch about the benefits of your cards
• its about connecting your sales pitch to what you learned / concluded in step 1 above
• talk to your different customer segments differently
• give them a higher level of content relevancy (which aspects of your card products are most important to them

We push our clients to focus on a focused sales experience for key customer groups.  That means analyzing your customer segments and delivering different content to them on your website — based upon their key pain areas or what their demographic situation is.

Extensive experience has shown that customers perceive the highest value in a product when they receive information which is highly relevant to their current needs.     Figuring out and targeting the specific areas that they need help in a sure way to achieve higher sales.

So how should your Prepaid Card website be setup to deliver achieve a full powered sales pitch?

First, do the analysis of your top customer segments?  Do they have particular area of their lives in which they use your cards?  Do they fall into a particular income bracket or lifestyle bracket (such as heavy travellers)?

Second, create an interactive website experience in which the first step is to allow visitors to self select their primary areas of focus or their demographic group.   Based on that, you can take them to dedicated sections of your website which focus on specific applications, user groups or pain areas that may apply more closely to them.

Your most precious resource in any marketing situation is customer attention.   A prospect will only give you a limited amount of time to deliver enough information to convince them your offering is valuable to them and that they can trust you to deliver as promised.   Don’t undersell by giving a generic sales pitch on prepaid card products to every website visitor.

The Web Strategy Company will continue to publish this ongoing series of articles about how Prepaid Card companies can achieve a higher level of sales results.   Stay tuned for more articles in the series.