Thinking About Starting Automatic Payments? Here are 3 Ways to Get Started

It’s no secret that recurring payments can help you get paid faster. Plus, they’re automatic so that means less work on your plate when it comes to invoicing and following up.

One of the biggest downsides of freelancing or having a business is the idea that you may have to chase after payments or deal with non-payment.

When you start getting automatic payments, it reduces that risk and can help improve your cash flow and profitability. What great is that it’s not hard to make the switch. Here are 3 ways to start getting automatic payments more often.

Accept Recurring Payments via Automatic Invoices

This is one of the easiest ways to start getting automatic payments. If you have retainer clients that you work with regularly and tend to bill the same amount each month, set up a recurring invoice.

Depending on the invoicing software you’re using to collect payments, this should only take a few minutes and you won’t have to keep sending invoices each month.

Sometimes, I actually forget to send my manual invoices or I do it late if I’m busy. Setting up recurring invoices just eliminates that extra work and stress so you can start getting automatic payments more often.

Accept Recurring Payments by Offering a Subscription Service

If your business doesn’t offer a subscription service, you could be missing out. Selling products and services is obviously a profitable solution, but you can also offer an ongoing service which will lead to more automatic payments.

Whether your business is solely online or brick and mortar, you can charge a monthly subscription fee for some of your most valuable services. That way, you can get more automatic recurring income.

For example, if you’re an online business owner with a few smaller digital products, consider selling those a la carte but also offer a subscription component. Include some of your core products as a paid resource library product. Then, be open to adding more resources monthly or occasionally to persuade more people to opt in to making regular payments.

Set Up a Marketing Funnel

This is another great way to ensure you start getting automatic payments more often. Don’t underestimate the power of email marketing. The people who opt in to your list already want to hear more from you so consider setting up a sales funnel.

You can offer a freebie or low-ticket offering when people sign up. Then, provide a series of value-packed emails to help them solve a problem. Somewhere in that email series, you can make sales pitches for products and solutions you can offer.

Here’s an example of a basic sales funnel.

Free e-book offer to get on email list –>

Informational/helpful email –>

Free webinar offer –>

Post-webinar product pitch email –>

Helpful/motivational email to help people overcome objections –>

Testimonials email from people who have been helped by your product –>

Did I mention all of this can be automatic? It’s easy to set up automatic email sequences when you have email service providers like ConvertKit, Drip, and Aweber.

Once you set up your funnel, you just need to market it and tweak it over time. When it starts working, you’ll receive more automatic payments as the people in your funnel convert and buy some of your offers.

Summary

Everyone can probably agree that it feels great to get paid. Receiving automatic payments feels even better because you don’t have to actively invoice and seek out payments.

Aim to structure your business and sales process to accommodate some of these automatic payment strategies.

Republished by permission. Original here

Image: Due.com

This article, "Thinking About Starting Automatic Payments? Here are 3 Ways to Get Started" was first published on Small Business Trends