If you want to boost your sales next year, now’s the time to start laying the foundations for a successful campaign. While it is true that the cost of your products and the quality of items you offer are key, this is not the only thing that matters. If that were the case, there would be no competition, and the vendor who offered products $0.01 cheaper would always take the cake. Instead, you can leverage your ingenuity to drive sales higher. Here are the top five tools that can help you do just that.
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1.Call-tracking apps
Tracking all the calls between you and your customers will provide valuable insights. Since these apps don’t disturb your operations in any other way, there’s no downside to introducing them. You should compare different call tracking platforms to find one that suits you best, as each has slightly different features that may best suit your organization.
- Optimization of advertising campaigns: By tracking calls and associating them with different marketing campaigns, you can easily check which marketing efforts generate the most calls. This way, you determine their efficiency and make the necessary improvements.
- Handling your calls much better: People answering the calls could do with positive feedback. By tracking these calls, you have something that you can analyze to see what your team does great and what could be done better.
- Geo-targeting: The region from which the customer calls is also quite important. This helps with customer segmentation and fraud detection. Even though most people (and almost all scammers) use VPNs nowadays, it’s still smart to watch for these things.
- Real-time analytics: The insights and data you get this way will be available in real-time. You can monitor call performance and make immediate suggestions or adjustments to your teams. This can give you a quick way to fix your sales strategies instead of only improving them at the end of the cycle.
Overall, you need to track as much data as possible; these calls are just one resource you must watch out for.
2.Customer relationship management (CRM) software
The customer is the one who decides if your offer is good enough for their money, but if you know enough about them, you can make this offer completely irresistible. So, you could consider using a CRM to customize the offer. Here’s what you get this way.
- Sales forecasting: A good CRM can predict future sales (relatively accurately), which will help you manage your inventory more efficiently. It will also help adjust your marketing strategy so that you can hop onto the latest trend faster than your competitors can.
- Complete user view: A CRM can be a central database giving you a 360-degree view of every customer in your organization. This can help you create a better-customized approach to each customer, regardless of what channel you use to send the message.
- Cross-selling and upselling: These two sales techniques are amazing for your revenue if they make sense. However, they first need to make sense, and the way to do it is to understand your customers’ previous purchases, as well as the items they were looking at.
- Customer retention: Making a customer return is the key to the survival of any business. About 20% of regular customers make 80% of your profit, and CRM will help you make them return repeatedly.
A CRM tool gives you both a passive and an active boost to your sales. It just helps you deal with customers and potential customers more effectively.
3.Email marketing platform
There’s no business without email marketing, but handling this manually isn’t a realistic solution in 2023/2024. The number of emails you can send via an automated email marketing tool and the level of personalization you can get are unparalleled.
- Automated email sequences: Not only can you have a personalized email sent to a potential customer, but you can also set a sequence that happens if certain conditions are met. This means you can set up the welcoming email and subsequent emails as they go.
- Product recommendations: Recommending products to your customers is how you make them stay longer on your site. It’s how you make them come back or visit you. It’s how you make them buy products. A good recommendation will do all the work on its own.
- Cart abandonment recovery: Your most important target audience is people close to making a purchase but didn’t go through with it. You can use these email marketing platforms to incentivize these people to come back.
- Post-sale follow-up: Another important aspect of this is the post-sale follow-up. You want to thank your customers, ask them to come again, send them a digital receipt, and inform them if they’ve won some loyalty points.
The bottom line is that most discourse between you and your customers (while they’re not on the site) takes place via email. With the right tool, you can make this more effective.
4.E-commerce platforms
If you want to sell online, you must have a reliable platform. The key thing to remember is that your audience has a different outlook on these platforms than you have. They want something sleek, simple, secure, and efficient. Here’s how using a platform like Shopify or WooCommerce to make your online store could help.
- User-friendlier online store: The first major advantage is that these platforms are designed to give you a simple, intuitive, and user-friendly online store. There are templates you can use, and the overall design system is fairly simple.
- Mobile-responsive sales platform: You must also understand that most people use different devices to browse these products. It’s no longer just computers and tablets; even smartwatches are becoming more prominent. Your platform needs to be responsive.
- Secure payment processing: The integration of payment gateways is essential to the success of your enterprise as a whole. With these platforms, integration becomes as simple as possible. Remember that if you don’t have their preferred payment method, many people will likely leave without even giving you a chance.
- SEO optimization: Your e-commerce pages need to rank well; some people will go to them directly from SERPs. E-commerce platforms are already organized in a way that makes the insertion of metadata and technical SEO more effective.
This part is non-negotiable, and while you can just make a store in WordPress, keep in mind that these e-commerce platforms give you a simpler way to achieve better results.
5.Social media advertising
How many times have you bought something that you saw on Instagram? You don’t even have to follow the link; sometimes, you make an order straight through this social media platform. Here’s how you can leverage social media advertising to increase your sales.
- Product showcase: Social media formats are ideal for product showcasing. Regardless of whether it’s a photo, a mini album, or a video, people are more receptive to product placement on social media. This is why you need to take advantage of this opportunity.
- Collaborations with influencers: If a person with a large following and authority associates with your brand on a social network, this could completely transform your online presence. Still, influence is a currency, and you’ll have to pay in order to acquire some of it.
- Targeted ads and retargeting: Social media ad algorithms are incredibly sophisticated. People on social media are seldom offered random products. This is why, by investing in social media advertising, you can get access to more accurate targeting and segmentation.
- Social proof: Ultimately, every comment section is a review section. Positive comments are a uniquely effective form of social proof. You can even use screenshot snippets of these comments for social proof on your site.
Using social media to promote your products is an effective method to both attract new customers and reconnect with existing ones.
Sales are more effective with the right tools
With the right tools, you can more effectively target, segment, and reach out to your audience. Just remember that the platforms are a boost, not a self-sufficient element that will stand alone and make or break your enterprise. With that in mind and without further ado, you might also want to re-examine your offer to make a real difference.
