When you are running a business, growth and progress are always at the forefront of your mind. It’s helpful to have some general sales goals for your company when starting each new year in order to ‘keep the needle moving’. We all want more sales, don’t we?
Sale strategist Jill Konrath once noted that “Sales is an outcome, not a goal. It’s a function of doing numerous things right”. If you want to make 2023 your biggest moneymaker yet, then you’ll need more than one tool in your toolbox.
Which is why having some thoughtful advice and helpful tips on hand can aid in propelling your business even further..
Here we provide our 12 most powerful tips to help you increase sales in 2023:
1. Use Phone Tracking
It’s estimated that phone call leads deliver between 5–10 times as much revenue as online form submissions alone. Despite the fact that calls are typically the biggest revenue generator, most businesses fail to track them. This means that they have no idea which of their marketing channels are leading to those calls.
The failure to track calls can, in turn, lead to misallocating your advertising budget away from marketing channels that produce the best return on investment (ROI). The way to avoid this problem is to put in place call tracking. Using a virtual phone number service, enables you to use different numbers on your website and third party sites. This means that you can identify exactly which online advertisement, email or social media platform are generating phone calls to your business.
2. Get More Google Reviews
Google reviews are one of the easiest, but often neglected, ways to generate more prospects and sales. If your business relies on local customers, then you need to have plenty of Google Reviews if you want to outrank your competition in the local search results. Secondly, Google Reviews make your listing stand out in the results. If your website has plenty of these reviews, then users are more likely to click through to your site.
Positive Google Reviews are fantastic social proof that your product or service will deliver the results that your prospective buyer wants to achieve. Having these reviews obviously builds instant trust and means prospects are more likely to convert into buyers.
3. Ensure Your Site is Optimized for Mobile
66% of the time spent online shopping is now done on smartphones. However, it’s estimated that roughly only half of the websites are fully mobile optimized. Websites that aren’t optimized for mobile are difficult for smartphone users to navigate and interact with. If your website isn’t properly optimized for mobile, prospects will frequently leave before completing a purchase.
So many business owners not only forget how important a well-functioning website is, but how crucial mobile optimization is. Your website is your virtual store front..make sure it’s as inviting and clean as possible.
4. Add Pop-ups
Pop-ups allow you to increase your conversion rate and the size of your email marketing list. By having pop-ups you can encourage users to join your email newsletter with the added bonus of a discount on their first purchase/service. The discount will help encourage first-time customers to make a purchase. Even those who don’t decide to use the discount code provided may decide to join your email list. This gives you more opportunities to market to those potential customers in the future.
5. Bring Back Buyers with Remarketing
The CTR (Click through rate) of remarketing ads is 10x higher than that of standard online ads. It’s estimated that on average only 2% of visitors will convert into buyers the first time they visit your website. In order to sell to the other 98%, you need to have a way to bring them back to your website. That’s exactly what remarketing advertising achieves.
6. Add in Upsells and Cross-sells
Businesses often focus on generating more leads and buyers for their businesses. But a smart approach is to not exactly focus on increasing the total number of buyers, but instead the average amount that they spend. Acquiring a customer who spends $100 or $120 may cost you the same amount. But, in the latter case, you have increased revenue by 20%. Do that across all of your customers and your business is now significantly more profitable. This can be achieved by introducing cross-sells and upsells into your sales process.
Cross selling is a long-used tactic of encouraging customers to purchase more products/services in addition to the items they already intended to purchase. Say you own a clothing shop and a customer is buying a pair of jeans, you can then suggest a top or belt that would pair well with them. BAM, you just cross-sold and increased your sales!
7. Increase your Email Follow-up
It’s estimated that on average there are 5–7 touch points needed in order for a prospect to be converted into a buyer. Increasing your email follow-up is one of the best ways of achieving this. Use methods like the pop-ups mentioned above, to induce visitors to your website to provide their email address. Then use an email automation platform like MailChimp, Aweber or ConstantContact to facilitate an automated sequence of email follow-ups. Using email marketing can familiarize your prospective buyer with your business, build trust and explain the benefits of your products or services.
8. Learn From Others
Tony Robbins once remarked that “If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results that you want, copy what they do, and you’ll achieve the same results”. When it comes to increasing sales this certainly applies. But, don’t just copy your own industry. Some of the best ideas can be found by looking at completely different industries and then replicating successful sales and marketing strategies.
We truly can learn from others, even competitors to help us propel our businesses. Build on the success that your competitors have had, learn from their strategy and technique in any aspect of their business—not just their product. It can be really insightful.
9. Minimize Friction During Check-out
When a customer adds a product to their shopping cart but doesn’t complete the purchase, it is a real lost opportunity for your business. You will likely already have spent significant marketing budget to bring the potential customer to this point. You want to ensure that shopping cart drop-out is reduced as much as possible. One important way to achieve this is by minimizing friction during checkout. Understand your conversion rate and then ensure it as easy as possible for customers to complete their purchase once a product has been added to the cart.
There is nothing more frustrating than being ready to purchase something and then a websites check-out system bugging out. Keep your website up to date by performing any necessary maintenance needed, fix issues immediately if they come up. You don’t want that scenario happening to you, so don’t let it happen to your customers.
10. Experiment with Tiered Pricing
Tiered pricing is a clever psychological tactic that allows you to direct buyers towards a particular price point. When people are presented with three different price points..low, medium and high, they will generally choose the middle option. By having a high price option you create a price “anchor”. The medium priced option now looks relatively inexpensive. Use tiered pricing to increase the average price of your product or service, without encountering buyer resistance.
11. Use Facebook Lookalike Audiences
Imagine being able to market to only those people who are most like those who have already purchase your products. That’s exactly what Facebook lookalike audiences achieve. Using Facebook’s advertising platform, you can upload data about your existing customers. Facebook will then build an audience of Facebook users who most closely match that audience. Your Facebook ads will then be displayed to those audiences.
Advertising can be tricky to navigate if you are newer to using it for your business. Starting with this particular avenue sort of takes out the guess work, since you are advertising to people similar to your current customers.
12. Add More CTA Buttons
Adding more CTA (Call to action) buttons is one of the fastest and easiest ways to convert more website visitors into buyers. Call-to-action buttons help to direct website users down your marketing funnel. They can be placed throughout your website including on your blog, product, and about-us pages. Use them to encourage users to sign-up for your email newsletter, download free reports or visit your best-converting pages.
The Last Word
Warren Buffet points out that “it is not necessary to do extraordinary things to achieve extraordinary results”. This is definitely true when it comes to increasing sales for your business in 2023. By consistently taking action on the tactics detailed here you can make this year your most extraordinary year yet.
Stephanie
Stephanie is the Marketing Director at Talkroute and has been featured in Forbes, Inc, and Entrepreneur as a leading authority on business and telecommunications.
Stephanie is also the chief editor and contributing author for the Talkroute blog helping more than 100k entrepreneurs to start, run, and grow their businesses.