Why is increasing sales important
Besides earning greater profits, an increase in sales builds customer loyalty, spreads brand awareness, and brings repeat business. thus bring about customers chasing your business. Plus, you get to get new buyers who will feel more confident about purchasing from a business with a good number of sales and a satisfied customer base.
‘Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.’
Jeff Bezos, the Founder of Amazon said that to emphasize the importance of branding.
Build a solid sales strategyA sales strategy acts as a roadmap for securing reliable, long-term revenue through retaining existing customers and attracting leads. Your sales strategy must focus on their needs and highlight distinct goals, budgets, and time frames for your campaigns.
When creating a sales strategy to increase sales, keep the five Ps in mind:
- Product. Analyze your product and identify what it does for your target buyer persona, how it differs from the competition, and how you can improve it.
- Price. The price you offer plays a significant role when it comes to enticing an audience. Evaluate the market and adjust your pricing to stay competitive.
- Place. Finding the right place to sell your product is crucial. Do some research about where your target audience is most likely to shop. This is also how you determine the best distribution channels to reach them.
- Promotion. Having a great product is only valuable if people know it exists. Choosing the correct promotion medium results in effective word-of-mouth (WOM) referrals and advertising about your business.
- People. This element is all about your customers and sales reps. Researching your audience's needs is crucial, but investing in the right people is equally important for success.
No matter what you do, create value for your customers. There are some ways to offer them something valuable through digital marketing. You’ve probably heard about modern marketing trends such as Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing. These stand for value!
Define Your Customers & Identify The Right Search Criteria
Get to know your customers better by asking for their:
- age
- interests
- education level
- location
- income level etc.
If you ask these specific questions, you can cater to them properly and prevent the probability of your services going to waste. Target your audience, believe us, it’s essential.
Example image of audience targeting.
If you’ve already had a customer base, you may simply ask what their interests are and learn about their intentions. This will allow you to build a powerful structure for your digital marketing campaigns and get better results in terms of sales conversions.
You can also use Facebook Ads to find the data you need and target audiences with similar interests. Try the Facebook Ads Manager to explore much more about your target audience.
Find the right recipient
Before getting down to a sales pitch, put together a list of your prospects. Then, find the right contacts.
A lot of newbies repeat the same mistake. They write to the only company email they can find on the internet. As a result, their sales pitches end up in spam and trash folders. The recipient needs to know who you are trying to reach out to, whether it’s a product manager, an HR representative, or the company's CEO.
A personalized and well-written professional email is far more likely to get a response than sending your proposal to mass email addresses like info@email.com. So how does anybody find the right contact?
First, define the job title of the person responsible for implementing or purchasing what you're offering. Second, search for their work email address. Email-finding extensions will help you discover the correct email through the company's website.
Once you've found the right person to contact, don't limit yourself to emails only. LinkedIn Sales Navigator has proved to be an excellent tool for business negotiations. You can also use buyer intent data providers (ahem – like G2!) to identify exactly why prospects are interacting with your brand and use that data to market to them.
Lastly, try contacting lower-level employees. It’s a known fact that salespeople are far more responsive than upper management.
Perfect your sales pitch
The elevator pitch tactics work for online communication as well. The only difference is that in the case of emails, three minutes in the elevator turns into three seconds of reading the email's subject line.
You may possess the mental dexterity to compose a killer sales pitch, but writing skills aren't enough to get a response from your recipient. These seven simple rules will help you boost both the email open rates and response rates:
Include the recipient's name in the subject of your email.
Keep the subject of your email short, clear, and catchy.
Use simple language and bullet points to show the value of your product for specific customers.
Don't oversell. Make your emails concise.
Follow email etiquette. Avoid overusing exclamation points and uppercase text.
End your email with a question that requires more than a simple yes or no.
Set up video calls as another way to build trust.
And last but not least: follow-ups are great until they turn into spam.
Understand the buyer journey stages
It all starts with understanding your customers. If you want to get more customers to finalize their purchase, it's essential to know a buyer journey, which includes:
- Triggering the buying process by identifying customers’ needs and wants. Two types of triggers play a role here: internal triggers from basic needs (hunger) and external triggers (smell of baked goods) that can influence purchase decisions.
- Evaluating solutions by researching available options to fulfill their needs. A lot of customers stick to the brands they already know, but others might be more open to trying something different and new.
- Comparing the alternatives by focusing on the cost and benefits of the products. Present your best features to ensure prospects pick you over the competition.
- Making the purchase decision after personal evaluation. This is the stage where you want to make the buying process super easy to encourage the final purchase. Offer multiple payment modes and an easy checkout process to prevent losing sales.
- Evaluating post-purchase by comparing the product to their expectations. Buyers might also seek support through queries, feedback, or refunds.
Segment Your Email Campaigns
You should segment your email campaigns to customize your emails for your users.
According to a survey done by MailChimp:
- Segmented emails will be opened 14.31% more frequently
- They will have a 100.95% higher click-through rate
- They offer a nearly 4% decrease in abuse reports.
You may create some lists based on location, business, experience etc. By doing that, you’ll prevent inaccurate targeting and after a while, you’ll see actual results.
Businesses use audience builders to collect data and categorize people based on several factors. Then, the companies target their well-designed marketing campaigns to the most interested groups. Previous actions, customer preferences, and demographics are some elements to consider when forming a group.
Tools like audience builders help businesses get to know their customers and provide insight into their actions. With this gathered data, you can create impressive lists of audiences and increase sales by building a personalized experience for your clients.
For instance, you could build a list that shows which users decided not to make a purchase and abandoned their carts after visiting the site. That data can be used to re-target these customers with a campaign carefully designed to re-engage them and encourage them to return to your checkout page to complete their purchase.
56% of sales professionals obtain high-quality leads from existing customer referrals.
Source: HubSpot
Create an upselling strategy
A well-planned upselling strategy significantly lowers the cost of online marketing and increases the likelihood of customers purchasing from you. Upselling helps you make the most of each sale. You look at what fulfills the customer's needs and build on loyalty. The seller and the buyer both get value from these kinds of purchases.
Of course, making the experience seamless is critical. For instance, offer a checkout experience without the need to enter payment details again. You can also create a personalized upsell based on the product or customer purchase history.
Even if your upsell is irresistible, making the purchase experience easy for a customer is equally crucial. Many shopping carts witness massive drop-off rates of abandonment due to complicated payment gateways and checkout processes.
A great example of an upselling strategy is Amazon. The website always suggests more items to add to your cart based on your previous purchases, browsing history, or current cart items. And if the customer decides to buy an item, all it takes is a single click, making it instant and easy.
Measure Your Content
After creating the best content for your target audience, you should track your data to understand the most popular content on your website. It’s an effective way to see what people are looking for on your website.
Furthermore, you can see the amount of time people spent on a particular page of your website. These results will be helpful for your future posts and will increase sales.
In this case, we highly recommend that you use Google Analytics to track your data and get insights on how to grow your business.
Create a customer loyalty program
When you’ve put enough effort into attracting customers to your business, how do you keep them engaged and interested? A customer loyalty program!
It costs a lot less to sell to existing customers than to acquire new ones, which is why brands choose to invest in loyalty and rewards programs. Loyalty programs are a great way to keep your ideal customer engaged and reward their commitment to your brand with discounts, free products, and insider perks.
Your customer segment is far more likely to spend on your product when they receive incentives for their purchases. It also generates word-of-mouth referrals, social media shares, and repetitive purchases.
Use Keyword Research For Content Ideas
You probably know that SEO rules have changed. Google announced that content which consists of keywords in a misguided attempt harm rankings.
Example image of keyword research for SEO.
To use it to your advantage, you should pay attention to keyword research with respect to content, in a smarter manner. To do so properly, you should pay attention to your customers' interests and what they’re looking for.
If you identify what popular terms resonate with your target audience, you can create content that interests them. Also, by using high volume keywords you will improve traffic to your website.
Use PPC To Test Your Keywords
Pay Per Click diagram.
If you know how to use PPC, it’s a great resource for organic campaigns. You can use your paid marketing efforts to test selected keywords.
You may create landing pages and ad copies for your intended keywords and see how many customers click on your ad.
It’s a great method to measure those keywords' impact on your targeted audience. After looking at traffic rates, you can create organic campaigns consisting of those high volume keywords to boost your website's traffic!
To increase sales, remarketing is essential. You can run a remarketing campaign for an abandoned cart. You may remarket with a video on Youtube or Facebook. To track them, you should connect an account to an AdWords account. You may develop some email marketing strategies to reach them again such as using better abandoned cart email subject lines. It’s all up to you.
Business owners and retailers share the dream of witnessing a sharp increase in sales when they tweak their strategies. It won’t happen overnight, you need to start somewhere.