While slow sales can be a daunting challenge in the business landscape, it’s important to remember that they also present an opportunity for growth and resilience. Experience shows that slumps in growth and fewer sales can be disastrous if you don’t know how to turn things around or ride through rough patches and downturns. This can happen to any business at any time; the recent COVID-19 pandemic was a testament to that, with both larger organizations and small businesses feeling the impact this had on the world.
While forecasting can help you identify patterns that dictate slow periods so you can make plans and prepare, it is important that you fully understand how you can impact your sales and boost them to help you ride those leaner periods with success.
Evaluate Your Proposition
As a business owner, your ability to quickly and clearly articulate the value of your product or service is crucial. It should be immediately obvious to both you and the customer. If it isn’t, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board and make it instantly obvious. This understanding will not only inform your marketing strategy but also prepare you for potential downturns.
You need to know how you fit into your customer problems and get you to help; you need to know the gap you fill, if any, and what quantified benefits you get as a whole to make you stand out from the competition. If you don’t have one or you don’t know, then you need one.
Multiple Payment Options
You need to be able to diversify how you accept payments and how you process them, which needs to be smooth, easy, and efficient. There are multiple options for you to consider to encourage customers to spend more money, from backend-only payment processors to end-to-end merchant services by North that improve the efficiency of your accounting and finances. The easier and safer it is to pay, the more chances you have of customers completing the sale. On top of this, you need to allow customers to pay how they prefer. This means accepting both cash and credit card payments and allowing payments from options like PayPal or Apple Pay, for example.
UGC
UGC has become quite the powerhouse in terms of supporting and boosting sales. The reason for this is that customers are more likely to be persuaded to buy from others who have used the product or service and left a genuine review based on their experience. This can be using testimonials or written reviews in your marketing. It can be sharing social media posts customers have created to demonstrate the value they received by way of your company and much more. Not only can it boost your marketing and save you money on creating your own content, but it can be a powerful tool to boost sales, too.
Build Trust
You can build trust in various ways to enable you to appeal to existing and new customers and prove you are the right company to partner with. No one wants to be scammed or give over tiger details of a company they don’t fully trust, so using this to boost your sales can be extremely effective. Adding trust icons to your site to show you meet industry and legal standards is a great place to start; seals from Verisign, BBB, and Norton Secured can be valuable. A payment provider offering enhanced payment security is also a must, as it utilizes stringent cybersecurity measures to protect data. The safer your customers feel shopping with you, the more inclined they will be to come back.
