3 Ways to Increase Sales Revenue

You drive yourself crazy thinking about it.  As a business owner, I bet it even keeps you up at night now and again. That big, fat question: “ How do you pull in more more sales revenue?”
Half the time the problem isn’t trying to think of new ideas, it’s trying to decide which ideas are worth throwing your money and time towards.  Some common ideas include:

• Having a sale
• Launching a new product
• Sending direct mail offers
• Cranking up your online advertising efforts
• Increasing awareness with social media
• Finding a new partner and trading lists
• Dabble with TV or Radio or Print Ads
• Emailing your customers with more offers
• Instituting a “Tell a Friend” program
• Hiring more sales people

There. 10 ideas and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. So how do you decide which to experiment with first?
[show_to accesslevel=’free’]
One helpful way to think about this decision-making process is to realize you really don’t have 10 or more random ways to increase sales revenue. In truth, you only have 3.  Once you understand how this all breaks down, you can better categorize your experiments and ideas.
Once you do that, you can streamline your strategy and choose one from each “column” and work on those in sets of three at a time. This way you know that you are launching a true “three pronged attack” and building your business evenly while you try new things.

No sense in putting all your effort into boosting tons of traffic, for example, if you never get good at getting those visitors to come back and buy from you time and again. And there’s no sense in amping up your conversion efforts and new offers if you never have enough traffic.

So here are the three main “categories” of tactics to increase sales revenue:

 Category #1 : Increase Your Amount of Customers

I think of this is as casting a much, much wider net. Put some time and effort into upgrading that small handheld butterfly net into something that can haul in a much larger group of customers. (Envision instead those huge deep sea fishing nets we see reality TV sailors pulling in, hand over hand. Envision all those dozens, if not hundreds, of new customers!)
Getting more paying customers usually begins with getting more eyeballs on your website. Which means paying for or working on getting your URL out there, exposed to as many folks as you can.
So pick one of these tactics, or think up new traffic trick of your own!

1.     Sending direct mail offers
2.     Cranking up your online advertising efforts
3.     Increasing awareness with social media
4.     Finding a new partner and trading lists
5.     Dabble with TV or Radio or Print Ads
6.     Instituting a “Tell a Friend” program

That’s just a starter list, by the way. You can experiment with posting flyers at local business, holding meetups in your area. There are myriad ways to increase your exposure, and thus, increase your customer base.

 Category #2 : Increase Your Order Size

Okay, so now you have more people’s attention. And ideally, their shopping carts are full. They have their wallets out and they’re about to purchase your $10 product.  This moment is the absolute sweet spot for business owners. You’ve worked hard to get their attention, you’ve gotten them revved up to buy from you and they are about to hand their money over.

So why stop at $10? Are there ways you can make them want to spend $15 instead? How about $20? Make the most of this magic moment, this rarified air, and you could increase your sales revenue overnight.
Some ways you can achieve this include:

1. Offer an upgrade / new product
2. Offer an upsell/complementary product
3. Suggest they buy that $10 product in a discounted bundle with other products
4. If you sell a service, offer a longer time period at a discounted rate
5. Throw in a warranty
6. Offer faster shipping time for an extra fee

Pick one of those tactics and add it to your first tactic from the traffic category. Now let’s find our third and final tactic.

 Category #3: Increase Your Repeat Customers

You got them! They spent more than they were spending before.
Now…how to keep them coming back? All too often I see business owners’ breaking their absolute backs trying to get a customer,  ‘reeling them in’ and then, to continue the fishing metaphor…just throwing them back in!
Crazy. That customer is an open door to repeat purchases, larger purchases, even referrals and recommendations. But to achieve all this you have work at it. You have to put some effort in making them love you enough to spend money with you again!
Now I know I’ve already broken down the list into three categories, but even within these categories, there exist subcategories. In this instance, you can think of these “Increase Repeat Customers” broken down into 3 subcategories: Reminding, Rewarding, Locking.
“Reminding” is fairly straightforward. Too many owners are terrified of spamming their customers and so they are hesitant to email them post-purchase. Big mistake! You can and should be sending them happy reminders of ways they can reorder from you, or even buy other products that work well with the one they just bought from you.
“Rewarding” is a great one, too. I’ll switch my fish metaphor over to a dog training one. You know the best way to encourage good behavior in dogs? Reward them. Loudly, immediately, enthusiastically. Same goes for your customers. If you want them to ‘repeat that good behavior’ (buying again from you) you need to praise them wildly, generously and immediately.
These rewards can take any form you can imagine. You can send them instant coupons, making it clear that they aren’t available to the general public and only paying customers are eligible. You can even formalize it and invite them to join a VIP club. Call it a preferred customer program, a premiere member, call it whatever you want, but dump loads of free, customer-only content on them and they’ll never go anywhere else to buy.
Finally, locking is the third subcategory here. It sounds aggressive and unpleasant but really, you’re just playing on the very human urge to be lazy. Or the one that wants to always get the crazy good deal.

Amazon Prime is a “prime” example of locking.  It seems like they’re doing you a favor by letting you pay one annual fee and to get all this great stuff: free shipping, free streaming movies, etc.  But actually, what they’re doing is locking you in. Once you have paid that money, you’ll make damn sure you get your money’s worth. How do you do that? By BUYING from Amazon to get that free shipping. By visiting Amazon over and over to watch those movies. Well-played, Amazon, well-played.
Another way to lock someone is to offer annual subscriptions. They think they’re getting a fantastic deal, and they probably are if you discount your annual rate properly. But you are also guaranteeing revenue for a full year, versus that marginally more expensive but one-time-only purchase.
So I’ll leave you with this final list of the third category of tactics to choose from

1. Offer a membership with buying/shipping benefits
2. Offer an auto-delivery option
3. Incentivize them to let you automatically renew their order
4. Urge them to save their credit card number on your site for easier shopping next time
5. Set up a loyalty program

There are a ton of ways to make sure those customers keep coming.
So there, try my formula. Pick one tactic from each of those three categories and start experimenting. If the traffic one works but the order size one doesn’t, swap out a different order size tactic and so on.
 
What’s worked for you in the past? How do you amp up your sales revenue? Tell me in the comments below!
 
[/show_to]
[hide_from visible_to=’public’]

[/hide_from]