What is immense value anymore? Is it your remarkable content? Is it your low prices? Is it the sheer volume of content?  The value you provide to your customers is an obvious aspect to gain loyalty but are you really adding immense value? I want to know how you feel your online business is providing immense value to your readers, customers, clients, or maybe even your employees. If you’re a large corporation, I believe you’re employees are your customers.

Here is where I ask myself why I started to think about these questions.  Today is the first day of the week for many Americans. Twitter was quiet yesterday due to the July 4th long weekend.  With a bit more buzz on Twitter today, some subjects caught my attention.  The discussion around e-book pricing, pricing as access, and tumblr as a portfolio helped spark this article.

Pseudo Value – The Constant Product Push

I get the feeling many online small business owners go about adding value through consistent product launches. This is what I see in the information product arena, the internet marketing arena, and possibly blogging in general.  These entrepreneurs are in a constant state of releasing new ‘stuff’ for their customer to purchase and keep getting that awesome value.

What we probably see is the old sales funnel.  Get out a cheap product or service is step one in the formula.  Your next step is to offer a higher priced product or service.  I usually see something like Coaching or Consulting.  Makes sense, right? I guess.  We all need to earn a living.  Then final step seems to be creating the all important membership course that adds the most value for customers.  Does it provide value for all of your customers or just the customers that join? Good question.

The way I see it, adding immense value doesn’t have to be a new product in your business sales funnel.  Joseph Jaffe knows that customer experience via a flipped funnel is the way to go about business today.  I believe that we need to provide our customers with inspiration.  Through customer experience and continuous creative thinking, you’re online business can add immense value!

Adding immense value becomes the way you inspire your customers to keep going; inspiring to keep them doing what they love to do! Now, I know I talk about WooThemes a lot around the internet, but the talk is for good reason.   One day I hope to get into a discussion with Adii about their business for Rewomb, but I need to figure out a way that’s different and not the same old interview around today.  Sorry for the little aside there.

Immense Value – Inspiring Customers

In my eyes, to add immense value, an entrepreneur or online business needs to continually inspire it’s customers.  New products do fall into that mix but they should be strong proof of the cause the company stands for today.   The products need to provide new ways to that move the cause forward.  Continually inspiring customers goes beyond continually manipulating them.  By manipulating, I see the massive affiliate marketing bonus offers as strongly manipulative.  The $5700 bonus offer is not adding any real value, nor is it adding any true inspiration.

Even though WooThemes has a 3-for-1 permanent structure for their WordPress Themes, I still see their company as inspiring instead of manipulative. The 3-for-1 special is a constant.  WooThemes does offer promotions from time to time but 95% of the time, they link their promotions to actions that promote their inspirational nature.  Prove it? They’ve run massive campaigns for Breast Cancer Awareness, I believe they are partly behind Kill the Spill, and the holiday promotions relate to their fun and celebrate nature.  I don’t know if WooThemes has touched on this before, but I see them as a company that believes in the ability to design your own life and experience. I used the term “DESIGN”  because I know they believe design matters. It comes across in their themes and I’ve seen it in the way they organically design the company.  Again, I don’t know if they’ve come out and said this or if they would agree with me.  I believe in what I said, and that’s why I have become so aligned with their company.  If anyone asks me about what WordPress theme to use, the immediate answer (without thinking) is WooThemes.

Inspiration will provide immense value!

Today the wonderful WooThemes added immense value to their customers (for me).  They’ve added awesome value recently and I’ll be talking more about it on Bitwomb soon too. The point I want to bring up here is the inspiration I received today because of their desire to provide a remarkable customer experience.

WooThemes offers more than just premium WordPress themes.  They also create some pretty awesome Tumblr Themes – and you can easily see them in the new WooTumblr Area on their website.  As something I can only explain via synchronicity, I went to Tumblr today and looked at premium themes in their garden.  I know, an internet garden of themes – how cool.  I saw a new one called “TumFolio” by Woothemes.   I had been trying to figure out how to add a portfolio to Bitwomb (for Design) and Nuwomb (for Photography) and I had been wondering if Tumblr would be a smart way to go about it.  Tumblr is so easy to use and connects with me because it is an incubator for amazing work and it’s FUN! I love companies that are creative and have a whimsical nature!

I wondered if TumFolio could work as the missing link for my portfolios. I thought about it and came to the conclusion with a resounding YES.  I considered that I could spend hours, days or months trying to find and code a nice slideshow page or I could integrate with the Tumblr community in a fun way and have the ability to increase exposure.  $49 for a Tumblr Theme didn’t seem so bad after comparing other possible costs.  I was inspired to rock it out in the near future, but then the universe sealed the deal.

In my twitter stream sat a retweet by Adii saying WooThemes subscribers could get their Tumblr themes now for only $9.  I am a developer subscriber because Bitwomb will launch your blog on wordpress with a premium theme from WooThemes.  I sat up and realized that I could save $40 on this new Tumblr theme! This is a remarkable experience to the max.

I was already convinced that TumFolio would be great for displaying a portfolio at $49. Saving $40 was outstanding.   WooThemes struck an understanding with Tumblr to be able to offer WooThemes customers more value.

The added value was the understanding that WooThemes subscribers can benefit financially and creatively from this deal.  Forget the new product/theme that I loved for a moment.  The product is cool, but that’s not where I saw the value. The immense value came from rewarding their loyal customers within their subscription memberships with something special.  I am certain there are some people holding off on Tumblr simply because of a silly theme cost. $9 is a steal for the work put into the themes.  Behind the scenes, WooThemes struck a connection to improve the services and benefits to existing customers.  I didn’t have to spend another $150 to get this benefit.  I don’t have to buy another package in their sales funnel.  They didn’t say to buy the Thesis Theme and they’ll give me all of their Themes for free! (LOL).  This is the 3rd value add that really stuck out to me in the last few weeks.

The $5700 bonus offer is not adding any real value, nor is it adding any true inspiration.

WooThemes lowered the barrier for me to continue to push my own creativity out into the world.  This helps me move forward to help others move forward.

In your online small business, think about ways to continually add value to those that have already purchased from you.  Think outside of the idea that you always need to release a new product or service.  Can you utilize current products to provide an amazing experience for the people that use them or want to use them?  Can you update a previous product that integrates into something new? What can you do to improve your customer experience? Inspire your customers in anyway you can!

Always ask: Is this from a place of inspiration or manipulation?

Inspiration will provide immense value!

Question for you:

Where have you seen immense value added recently? What are you doing to add great value on a regular basis (besides the bland response of – great content)? I’d love for you to share a story in the comments or contact us if you’re not a comment type!

*I am a WooThemes affiliate, but I would still say the same thing here today if they did not have an affiliate program.  If you’re interested in getting a subscription to WooThemes you can go through my affiliate link or not.  Using the affiliate link will help support Embryo and the websites it runs! *

photo credit: Cassidy Curtis

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