As we all rightly know, ‘Without Sales, there is no future for a Business’ but at the same time it is also imperative to increase Profits. This can be done by understanding how to balance the need to boost both sales and revenue that can help you market efficiently and optimize your profits. Hence, today we will discuss about different aspects to increase online sales for your business in order to boost overall business growth.
Increasing sales and revenues are related and should complement each other to take your organization to the next level. Only by implementing new marketing campaigns and increasing top of funnel activities will not hike sales revenue.
You also need to align this 4 key areas of your organization to increase online revenue:
1. Strategy
Building a strong strategy is a key to growing revenue. This can be achieved by evaluating your surroundings, customer base and market dynamics to understand the opportunities available and which ones are revenue generating from them.
2. Structure
After having the strategy in place, a structure should be refined as that holds up strategy. Structure determines you have the right pieces in the right place. It includes sales operations and sales enablement for strategy to take flight.
3. People
People are the core to execution. They are the most vital element and its highly necessary to make sure you have the right people in the right roles. People are unpredictable and hence keeping them motivated is the only key to success.
4. Process
It is very important to have an effort-killer process that would align with the strategy and structure as well as empower the people. Implementation of functional and effective processes can make your ultimate goal reach its level.
If you find your organization is not delivering as estimated then it means any one of the above areas would be facing critical issues. It could be that the strategy is not sound or the structure does not support the strategy or either there are wrong people in wrong roles or the right processes are not in place. So look towards improvising the affected area to resolve the issue.
Let us go a step ahead now and discuss about the different strategies that can help increase sales and boost business revenue. But before you decide to implement any of these strategies, the below factors should be taken into account:
- Compatibility of Strategy with Products
- Understanding Buyers’ Motives during purchase
- Company’s Capability to effectively Implement the Strategy
- Competitors Copying your Company’s Strategy
- Effects of Future Economy on your business
Once you have considered these above factors wherever they get fitted well, you can decide which techniques should be implemented to achieve overall business growth.
For example, an online store selling durable stand-up paddle boards should consider watersport-centric content for its marketing strategy. Implementing this strategy blends a unique selling proposition while incorporating competitor strategies that remain “trendy” in the industry.
7 Ways You Can Increase Online Sales to Boost Overall Business Growth
Following the below 7 practices can help you reach your target.
1. Expand Geographic Area & Production Centres
This refers to augmenting your current base by setting up Production Centers in different parts of the country. Always try to diversify and spread over larger geographical area. In online business you should always have your support centers established at different places for efficient support.
Along with having your presence in different parts, it is imperative to hold a local office since people will trust you more this way and will remain stress free by knowing that the support will be provided immediately when required.
Example– If you have a SEO company, then it become easier to cater to the needs of US and UK clientele if you have an office in the same areas.
2. Refine Pricing Strategy
This strategy looks at modifying the way you price your products.
Following are some tested ways to do so:
A. Market research is a must before deciding to price your product. This data will help you to evaluate whether to add more features to the product and raise its pricing or produce the same quality product and price it lower.
B. ‘Quality is determined by its Pricing’ is a deeply-rooted notion of people. Therefore if your pricing is high, customers will expect high quality of goods/services. So be prepared to deliver what your customer expects to get if you intent to hike the price.
C. Always make your products look superior to that of your competitors in order to increase the pricing of your products. This is because price of a product is considered to be directly proportional to ‘perceived value’.
D. You should have a brand value attached to your products or services since its considered that price is proportional to its ‘perceived brand value’. This will make people readily pay a higher price for your products or service.
To Know More on Pricing, Click Here.
Apart from the above strategies, introduction of the basic change is also helpful which includes the following:
a. Bundling Your Products – Products which are used for the same task or are used in combination should be sold as a package.
b. Refinement of Shipping & Handling Charges – Consider reducing or completely removing the shipping charges for a specific period of time to stimulate sales.
c. Offer Special Discounts – This actually creates a wish in the consumer’s minds to buy the product and can spur them to take an action.
d. Offer a Rebate – This refers to issuing the deferred discount to the customer upon purchase that includes a small percentage of the price in cash after goods are purchased.
e. Participate in Coupon Programs – Distributing coupons to customers helps company not only to publicize their products but also increase sales.
3. Stimulate Sales Channel
It is highly important to keep the excitement in the customers going for buying your products. Therefore to generate enthusiasm and a reason to buy, you can look at some of the tips as below:
1. Sales collateral reflects your company. Therefore the sales material used to promote the products to the customers should be vibrant and convey to the right message to them.
2. Provide incentives to sales partners as they act as your sales force. Therefore revise your commission structure to entice your sales partners which leads to boost in revenues. You can also try putting up a sales contest to compete for a cash prize or hampers etc if they reach their assigned sales targets.
3. Develop a marketing strategy wherein you communicate with old customers and prospects about new products and services to build in strong relation with them. You can also ask them for referrals or references and show them that their valuable input does create a lot of difference to the business.
4. Implementing Content Marketing
Content marketing is intended to target prospective customers rather than showcasing your product and services to uninterested masses. It refers to creation of valuable and relevant content on web that attracts and acquires customers to take a profitable action.
Content marketing leads to higher conversion rates and customer satisfaction which in turn lowers the customer acquisition rates.You can get many pre-qualified leads and this can help you reduce the marketing costs to a great extent.
Best examples of content marketing are Rolex (a brand that focuses on image marketing) and Denny’s (a brand that produces entertaining content). Let us look at how both these brands have used content marketing effectively.
Rolex – It’s earlier marketing campaign looked at showing the brand in a classic way as shown below:
There was a need to innovate this old-fashioned image and produce something new and fresh. They reconciled their old images and produced beautiful product images for social media using unique content marketing strategy as shown below:
On the other hand, Denny’s brand attracts prospects through hilarious content display. The below image shows how they use content marketing strategy to entertain and lure customers:
5. Efficient Affiliate Marketing
Your aim should be proper communication with your dealers and giving them good commissions thereby building a strong and lasting relationship with them. This will drive them to improve sales and push your products more because it is always the rewards that motivates affiliates.
6. Testing Locally & Deploying Internationally
This implies releasing your products locally, testing it and evaluating the response. You should select your local market in a place where there is demand for the product that is being launched. This is called as internal launch.
If you cannot see enough sales happening with this launch, there is no chance of massive sales on international platform. Therefore you will require tweaking and improving your products to best suit the local requirements. This will help improve sales locally as well as internationally.
7. Reinvest Into Business
This strategy looks into reinvesting what you get from your business into the business rather than spending it on trivial things. A good product will lead to good sales and to produce a good product you require a lot of research.
Therefore you require to invest in research and development. This is where you can reinvest your profits to in turn increase sales by fueling the R&D process.
Moving ahead now with something different which I thought would be quite helpful to the readers. There was a unique idea put up by Conversio to find out from different experts what was that one most important factor that drove their online store’s revenue.
Below is what these experts had to say:
1. Andrew Youderian, Owner of Right Channel Radios
”The #1 thing I would do to increase my store’s online revenue is to figure out who my core customer was and where they hung out.”
2. Tucker Schreiber, Owner of Bewdly Coffee Company
”I found that email receipts, and abandoned cart recovery emails worked best for increasing an online store’s revenue. Why? Because these emails start a conversation between you and a customer.”
3. Richard Lazzazera, Owner of Finch Goods Co.
”My number one strategy for growing revenues is to really zero in on your perfect product/market fit. Channels like Facebook and Instagram can be a goldmine for customer acquisition but you really need to make sure you are targeting the right buyer persona or you’ll just be burning cash.”
4. Drew Sanocki, Ecommerce Consultant at DrewSanocki.com
”There are only three ways to grow a company: #1 increase the AOV, #2 increase the frequency of purchase, or #3 increase the number of customers. As far as what works best, I find the highest ROI activities involve working with what we already have: #1 and #2. This will make your entire funnel more efficient.”
5. Paul Cunningham, Owner of Leather Head Sports
”I’ve always been a big believer in the power of great photography to enable sales in an e-commerce environment.”
6. Ryan Barr, Owner of Whipping Post
”I think the #1 thing I would do when increasing a store’s revenue is to have a price increase. If you are offering a quality product and great service, people will be happy to pay a reasonable increase. Conversions didn’t slip at all for me and revenue obviously went up.”
7. Michael Belasco, President and CEO Inflow and ConversionIQ
”The #1 thing I would recommend to increase an online store’s revenue would probably be to work on improving site speed.”
Apart from the above mentioned 7 strategies, there are different plugins that are used to serve the purpose of effectively boosting the business growth, out of which two of them are: The Abandoned Cart Pro for WooCommerce plugin and Order Delivery Date plugin. These have proved to be highly successful since both of them help in increasing conversion rates.
Abandoned Cart Pro plugin helps to curb cart abandonment whereas Order Delivery Date plugin helps in increasing customer satisfaction, thereby resulting in repeat customers and leading to overall business growth.
The free version of Abandoned Cart plugin – WooCommerce Abandoned Cart – Lite and free version of Order Delivery Date plugin – Order Delivery Date for WooCommerce – Lite are so popular that they already have 15k customers using it presently.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, having a sound sales strategy, structure, people and processes in tact drives you on the path to increased business revenue. You should concentrate on activities like knowing your customer base, the products marketed, sales strategies and processes involved in this to meet a constantly changing paradigm.
All of the above mentioned strategies are powerful sales generators but these have to be optimally chosen by the organization to serve different purposes to achieve a single goal – Business Revenue!
