Gift Focus inc Attire Accessories - May/June 2020

Growing sales in your creative business Catherine Erdly helps product businesses grow their sales, manage their stock and make more money. Here she lists four key ways to help you get the monetary results you want 1 GET MORE PEOPLE TO COME To increase sales, you need to attract more potential customers to come to you. More traffic to your website, more followers on your social media platforms, more email sign ups and ultimately more visits to your shop − on or offline. You need a flow of fresh customers coming into a business at all times. Getting more people to come isn’t easy and can often be expensive. However, there are lots of ways you can drive more people to your business. Get your name out there, whether that’s through PR, making sure your SEO is up-to-date and working effectively, or organising a collaboration with another business to get in front of their audience too. 2 GETTING MORE PEOPLE TO BUY WHEN THEY COME The second way to grow your sales is to get more of the people who are coming to actually buy, or in other words, increase your conversion rate. If you had 100 people visit your website and two of them made a purchase, that’s a conversion rate of two per cent which is the average for online shops. For context − with a physical retail space − between 30 per cent to 50 per cent is typical. So, if you have 100 people come into your shop, you would expect that between 30-50 of them to buy. You, therefore, need to aim for the average and if you’re already there, then you can improve! There are lots of ways to improve conversation rates but I think it falls into two main categories. Firstly, is there enough information for the customer to easily see in order to make their purchase? It’s always a good idea to review your online shop user journey and/or your customer experience in your shop. Secondly, people won’t convert to customers if you’re not selling what they want or your stock is not fresh. Reflect on who your customer is. Trial new products. Review your offering to ensure it meets the needs and wants of your customer − especially your loyal tribe. 3 GETTING PEOPLE TO SPEND MORE WHEN THEY BUY Take a look at your average transaction value, or your units per transaction, or the average selling price of the product that you’re selling. If you can increase any, or preferably all of these then you will grow your sales. If you have the same number of people coming to your shop, converting to purchasers at the same rate but spending 10 per cent more, your sales will grow by 10 per cent at no additional cost to you. There are lots of tactics to do this. You can bundle products together, or come up with other ways to encourage multiple purchases. However, my top suggestion is this - offer great customer service. The personal touch that independent businesses can offer will set you apart and grow your sales. 4 GET PEOPLE TO COME BACK MORE OFTEN The final way to grow your sales is to get people to come back and shop with you more often. Make your business the go-to buying option for your customers. Creating a loyal tribe will grow your sales and also create a lot of quality marketing for you through customer recommendations. It’s important because returning customers on average spend around 67 per cent more than people who were shopping with you for the first time. It costs seven times as much money to acquire a new customer as it does to keep an existing one. So, are you looking after your existing customers? Are you reaching back out and engaging them? Are you coming up with some way of building loyalty into your business? That’s my brief overview of my top four ways to grow your sales − are you giving time to all four? Catherine Erdly has more than 19 years’ experience working with product businesses of all sizes from high street names (such as Paperchase, Laura Ashley and Coast), all the way down to brand new businesses with just a handful of customers. As well as speaking at numerous trade shows such as Top Drawer, The Stationery Show, Fashion SVP, Natural and Organic Products - Europe and the Retail Expo, Catherine is also on the Editorial Board of Modern Retail, a judge of the Good Retail awards and a contributor to Better Retailing magazine and Stationery Matters. For further information, visit www.futureretail.world 47 BUSINESS