I’m sick of it!
Everyone seems to only be talking about ways of generating more traffic.
Don’t get me wrong… you need traffic and (unless you’re making some of the mistakes we talk about on this blog) more traffic leads to more sales.
But traffic is the hardest, most expensive, most time-consuming way to increase sales.
There are only four ways to increase sales. I call them The Four Levers of Sales:
On the left we’ve got Sales. That’s what we’re trying to increase.
You don’t have to be a physicist to know that the closer you are to the pivot point, the harder you have to push to get the opposite side to move. If that doesn’t make sense, try to remember being on a teeter totter as a kid. The closer you were to the end, the easier it was to lift the other person.
As you can see, traffic requires the most effort.
But what about the other three?
I could talk for hours on this topic (and often do). But here are a couple of quick ideas:
Increasing Order Size
You may already be doing some of these:
- Cross-sells
- Up-sells
- Sales / Specials
- “People who bought this also bought…”
- Featured products
- Bundles
- One-Click Upsells (the best… read more here)
NOTE: you’re not even adding any products to your catalog. You’re just promoting and reusing what you’ve already got.
Increasing Order Frequency
The holy grail here is a membership or subscription program. Those can be easier to setup and maintain than you think (I’ll post about this soon).
What if you’re only selling physical products? Do you have anything that people buy regularly? Consumables? If so, what if you created a subscription program that just auto-delivers them on a reasonable schedule?
The other option, which is available to anyone, is to use your email list. There are lots of moving parts to great email campaigns, but there’s one big mistake that I’ve seen too many people make:
Train Your List to Buy
I have a friend that has a list of 14,000 people… in a relatively small, niche market. Sound great, yeah? Except… he can’t monetize it.
Why?
He’s trained them that their on the list for “news and updates.”
Don’t get me wrong. You need to provide great content in your emails. New ideas. Things to try. Suggestions. Inspiration.
But every email should also have a Call to Action.
It could be something simple like sharing on social media or clicking to watch a video.
But if you don’t train them for engagement, selling to them when the time comes is going to be a major problem!
Conversion Rate
So… many… things…
Let’s just say that Conversion Rate is the easiest lever to move for the biggest reward.
If your conversion rate is 1% and I simply increase it by 1%, you’ve now doubled your sales!
If this seems impossible, or you just want to know more, see if you can catch me talking about it, in-depth in an upcoming webinar…