You can increase sales by 50% or more in a month with a simple checklist. Most businesses are missing at least three of these 11 proven sales drivers.
I’ve produced over $200 million in online sales, including writing 100% of the sales copy for a $22 million two-week product launch, by using these tools:
- Raise prices: Say you sell 1,000 units per month of a $50 product for $50,000 in sales. Your current net profit is 10% or $5,000. If you can raise prices by $1.00 with no drop in unit sales, you make $51,000 in sales per month. You increase profits by $1,000. A 2% increase in price ($51 vs. $50) gives you a 20% increase in net profit ($6,000 vs. $5,000). This is the enormous power of raising prices. Give it a try.
- Run a promotion: If you don’t run at least two promotions per month, you’re missing out on sales. Give your promotion a reason, such as a holiday, and you always have an excuse for a sale.
- Add scarcity: Give customers a deadline. If you run a promotion, shout when the deal ends. If you’re running out of inventory on a product, let people know. Scarcity drives action.
- Improve your headlines: It’s been said that a headline drives 80% of the results of an advertisement according to direct marketing folklore. I’ve never seen data to prove this. But, it makes sense. Write good headlines. Copy the structure of some of the 100 best advertising headlines written.
- Bundle: Creating a new product can take three to twelve months. If you want to drive sales now, create bundles of your existing products. Each new bundle offers you an opportunity to message your customers and add a new product to wherever you sell. You also make more money per sale selling two products at a time versus one.
- Create a marketing calendar: You can create and manage a simple marketing calendar to drive sales throughout the year in about an hour a month. We created a guide and template you can get for free here.
- Launch or re-launch a product: People like events. Do a launch or re-launch of an existing product to drive more sales this month.
- Email your list more: Most business owners are too afraid to email their customer list. What’s the point of the customer costing you money on your email list if they don’t buy more from you? Send at least one email per week to every customer. (One $100M+ business I know emails every customer six to seven times per week.)
- Use the two-step sales process: First, gain permission to market to the prospect by getting her on your email list. Second, sell your products to her. This process of gathering email subscribers and then marketing to them, versus running promotions to non-subscribers, still works great.
- Create free content for social: A top social media expert I know gives a 60-90 minute presentation on how to improve social media performance. The summary? Take one piece of content and put that same piece of content on every channel; don’t worry about creating unique content for seven different social platforms. Create one piece of content about your product or content related to it and distribute it on every social channel you have.
- Gather and distribute testimonials: Some businesses don’t gather testimonials at all. Even more businesses don’t use them enough, including us. Post them on your website, add them to your email signatures, send them to your customers, and post them on social.
Increase sales is only one part of the equation to a better business – I’ve learned this the hard way. We also need to cut all wasted costs if we want to maximize the cash flow our businesses produce.
I’ve created a special guide called 45 Ways to Increase Profits. It includes 11 more ways to increase sales and 23 ways to cut costs to double profits in 90 days or less. Click here to get it for free now.