Many web hosting service providers spend most of their time and money on just contemplating how to survive in this fiercely-competitive hosting industry. Very few of them actually look ahead and try to come up with ideas that could help escalate their sales slowly and through the roofs eventually. During earlier days, getting your web hosting firm recognized was easier compared to the current scenario where the number of websites on the Internet has multiplied manifolds and so have the number of web hosting service providers.

In such a scenario, getting your website ranked higher on directories and search engines is becoming more and more difficult. Some of the new players in the game are very ignorant and still believe that by submitting their website’s URL to different search engines will help them in improving their sales.

The fact is that such methods have turned so obsolete in today’s world that it is almost impossible to generate even a single sale with such approaches. Of course, some innovative social media marketing tactics can help the cause, but following are seven handy ideas that can help you push your web hosting sales higher –

Offering Value Added Services

Offering more for less works for every industry and it is no different for web hosting as well. Value added products for little or no additional cost can always make your web hosting package more enticing. Something like 20 email accounts when competitors are offering just 10 can give you an edge or offering $100 or even $200 worth of advertising credits for platforms like Google and Facebook can give you a big edge over your rivals.

Pushing Add-Ons to Existing Customers

Many industry experts have time and again paid special focus to how web hosting providers should pay equal attention to customer retention as getting new customers. Offering sub-par products and services to present customers and ignoring them can be catastrophic for any web hosting provider. You should always formulate plans and strategies for not only retaining your existing customers, but also pushing out add-ons like domains, SSLs, cloud back-ups, managed hosting etc. However, you’d be able to sell the add-ons only when the customers are happy with the quality of service. And, even if a few customers don’t renew due to substandard service offered by your support team, then you have no one else to blame, and it’ll certainly hit your bottom-line hard in the long run. In such cases, retaining the customer itself will become a challenge, let alone the possibility of pushing out any add-ons.

Try to Target Worldwide Markets

Don’t keep your marketing strategies limited to only U.S. customers. Web hosting business has no boundaries, and you may easily target different world markets and find out which regions are offering costlier packages than yours and accordingly market your packages sensibly for those local markets, and boost your sales.

Leverage Free Publicity

Press releases are something you can’t afford to miss out on. There is probably no better form of free publicity than press releases. Come up with news releases for your web hosting business every now and then, and get them published on popular press release directories. This will alone boost your sales by at least 5-10% if done in an effective manner, because visibility is everything on the web!

Create Enticing Sales Pitches and Custom Landing Pages for All Your Web Hosting Plans

Make sure you describe your hosting packages, network infrastructure and all reseller options in detail. Take a look at all competitor websites that are successful in the market, study how they explain their plans in detail yet in a subtle way. Make use of those concepts on your website with a bit of personalization.

Flash Sale and Limited-Time Offers 

When you really want to get dozens of customers instantly, there’s no better way than running a flash sale. Just about every web hosting customer waits for the $1 flash sale from HostGator or those $1 domain sales from GoDaddy during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So, you can also run such timely offers to grab more market-share. However, such flash sales and promotional discounts won’t boost your bottom-line immediately.

Finding the Right Advertising Space

Don’t blatantly keep paying for high advertising spaces on the web and search engines. Many web hosting companies always thoughtlessly stop advertising because they don’t know how to make the best of their advertising campaigns. Grab the opportunity and find some best deals on advertising spaces where you get good exposure for minimal cost.

Heavy Discounts

This is a traditional and most commonly used method of increasing sales, but the fact is that it almost works all the time without any second thoughts. Of course, it is important to put some thought into the discounts that you’re planning to offer. Most of the big guns run flash sales during the festive times like Black Friday, Halloween, Christmas etc. With such offers, you can easily hope to end your year on a high note in terms of sales volumes, and acquire a lot of new customers. However, such discounts never boost the bottom-line, and need to be run after a lot of consideration.

Combo Offers

This is another effective strategy to increase the sales of your web hosting packages. Selling standalone hosting packages may only attract few customers but when you club your package with a free domain, professional emails, and a lot of freebies, and still price it at an enticing point, then that becomes a lot more appealing. This is the reason why you see most successful web hosting companies offering various hosting packages, and not the regular hosting services that you always come across. Moreover, each host has created its own USP in the market. For instance, when you think about domains, GoDaddy is the obvious name that comes to your first automatically. Likewise, InMotion Hosting Inc. provides up to $300 of free advertising Google Adwords, Twitter, and other marketing credits, even for a basic launch plan, which is worth less than $100 a year. HostGator is famous for their $0.01 trial package.

Referral and Affiliate Programs

Promoting your brand and increasing the sales of your hosting business through your existing customers or affiliates can always yield amazing results. Encourage your present customers to promote your business within their circle and give them reduced renewal prices, and freebies/small gifts for referring new customers to your business. Similarly, start your own affiliate program and encourage people on the Internet to sign up for your referral program and promote your business through their own channels and offer them a commission in return, whenever a sale occurs.

Freebies

Now, that’s a no-brainer – after all, who doesn’t like freebies? Well, the fact is everyone does! So, start offering freebies with your web hosting packages; looking at the popularity of social media, you may want to offer some FB and Twitter marketing credits with each package. $100 Google AdWords marketing credits is one of the popular choices that web hosting companies have been offering for quite some time. People who host their website on your servers would always use these marketing credits for advertising their business on social media channels and search engines. So, if you also have add-on packages like SEO, web design, social media marketing, then it can give you additional opportunities to generate revenues

Public Event Sponsorship

Sponsoring a public event can always garner a lot of branding exposure to your hosting business. When you sponsor a developers’ conference, or an open source meet, you tend to create a lot of good connections in the industry, and eventually you may enjoy a lot of long-term benefits, though it’d be tough to measure the ROI immediately. However, it’d always be a good idea to sponsor an event where you may expect at least a few signups, if not dozens of them.

 

 So, paying enough attention to all these facts, and constantly ensuring high levels of customer satisfaction will certainly help in pushing up your web hosting sales.

 About the author: Nicholas H. Parker is a business coach and marketing manager with a huge experience. He writes articles for those who want to buy essays to develop their knowledge. He is highly interested in the web design sphere.