As entrepreneurs we all want to grow our businesses. Most entrepreneurs that we meet are ‘too busy’ and ‘too time poor’ working in the business to take time out to think strategically about how to significantly ‘grow the business’.
From working with over 200 businesses we have found that there are 3 main ways to double your business.
The first one is to get more clients, but I guess that one is pretty obvious. If you can get double the amount of clients then you can pretty much double your business. This is also the hardest and most costly way, as the most expensive clients to get are always new ones because you don’t have an existing relationship with them. They may need multiple touches with you and your brand before they know you, like you and trust you enough to do business with you.
Number two is to get your customers spending more. The most common way of doing this is with up-sells. The best example of this in common culture is the McDonalds ‘do you want fries with that?’. But think for a moment, is there an up-sell that you could be implementing at the time of purchase for your customers?
An ideal up-sell compliments the original purchase, but it shouldn’t be something that the customer would expect to have been included in the original purchase. An example would be if your prospect opted in for a ‘Social Media Strategy Planning Guide’, then a ‘Comprehensive Facebook Ads Course’ could be a good logical up-sell as it compliments and adds value to the original purchase, and it’s not something that they were expecting to get included in the original opt-in or purchase.
We are lucky in the Internet Age that we live in that increasing order value is relatively easy. eCommerce store platforms like Shopify have Apps that you can buy that allow you to easily create up-sells without having to write a single line of code. This can also be implemented with other CRM’s like Infusionsoft but it is more complex, and may require a developer to implement.
Another great way of getting customers to spend more is by creating bundles of products that go together. Often how this will work is if there are two or three products added to the cart together as a bundle the customer can get a discount on the purchase. See the example below from the Product Bundles Shopify app.
The third main way to double your business is to get your customers buying from you more often. The best way to do this is with strategically designed nurture sequences and marketing funnels. This way you can follow up with your customers and be ‘top of conscious’ with that consumer and progress them further down the buying cycle.
Amazon is one of the best in the business in this space with their ‘Book Recommendations for You’ based on things that you have previously purchased or shown interest in. See the example below.
Email marketing following a sale has traditionally been the best way to follow up with customers and get them to make an additional purchase. It may well still be the best way, but a close second is remarketing. Remarketing is where you apply tracking codes to your site that then allow you to follow site visitors as they navigate around the web.
Facebook remarketing is now getting quite advanced with its segmentation as it gives you the ability to progress buyers through the buying cycle and ascend them from one product purchase to the next based on pages on your site and marketing funnel that they did or did not reach.
All these 3 business ‘levers’ of get more clients; get them spending more; and get them coming back again work well on their own – but the real magic happens when you utilize them together. The mathematics of the business gets exciting, sort of like compound interest, as they have a multiplying effect on each other.
Think about it for your business. What would happen to your revenue and profitability if you got your landing page conversion up 10%; added a low price product sale (tripwire) behind the opt-in; added an up-sell behind the tripwire; improved your phone sales script conversion by 10%; added an email follow up sequence; added a Facebook remarketing campaign; and then increased your targeted traffic by 10%? The reality is you would have a massive increase in your leads, sales and profitability. That alone could be enough to double your business.
So think strategically about your business as a whole rather than just thinking about every job that you need to do. Pull those levers in your business and start watching it multiply.
Greg