8 Ways to generate sales

All decoration businesses experience slow production periods at some stage.  This is where good sales and marketing strategies are key to getting those orders rolling in.  If you’re looking to grow or overcome a dry spell, here are some ways you can generate new leads or draw on your existing ones to gain more consistency with your sales.

 

1. Newsletters & Email Marketing

If you’re not already sending out a regular newsletter, this can be a great way to showcase your recent work, news, introduce new products, services or techniques or remind them of what you excel at to spark interest.  This could be embroidered caps, tote bags, folding/bagging, business cards, stickers, labeling, logo design or an awesome new product being offered by one of your suppliers.

Create an email campaign with a promotional offer such as free setup; a special offer on styles you’re looking to clear from your stockroom; a package deal for a set quantities of shirts; offer a free second or third placement or a free shipping deal. If you have an artwork set up recycling period, send an email to the customers whose set up period is about to end to generate reorders.

2. Customer Referrals

Happy customers make great advocates and in this digital age you can make it really easy for them to sing your praises.  In fact 92% of customers trust recommendations from their friends and family over all forms of advertising.  Offering an incentive to the referrer can enhance the willingness to participate, such as a discount on their next order, a prize or store credit.  This is a win/win as the referrer is likely to return to redeem their voucher as well as bringing new business to you!  

There are a number of ways to spark referrals, here are a few to consider:

• A post on Facebook, Instagram and/or Twitter for your followers to like, comment and share.  This could be an image along the lines of ‘I think John Doe Screenprinting is awesome!’ or ‘need shirts? I recommend John Doe!‘ or ‘support your local printer – John Doe’.  Encourage your staff, family and friends to get involved too by sharing the post with their network.
• An email campaign to your customers with a referral voucher they can forward on.
• Printed referral flyers to in every box or parcel you ship out.  This could be printed on the back of a ‘caring for your print/embroidery/transfer’ leaflet or as a standalone flyer.
• Ask your customers to post an image on social media of their newly received garments and tag you in on the post.

3. Surveys

Using Mailchimp integration with your DecoNetwork enables you to set up automatic follow up emails to your customers.  Send them a thank you for their order with a link to a survey at a timed interval from delivery.  Strike while the iron’s hot and use a service such as Survey Monkey to prepare the questionnaire. There’s a great range of pre-populated customer satisfaction questions available and you can add your own queries to the mix. If you have up to 10 questions it’s free and finishing with a comment box can gain you some great testimonials to display on your website or share on social media.  Surveys show your customers that you care about your products and service and value their business which leads to better customer retention.  It can also help you identify areas for improvement, who your best advocates are, what your customers value and why they love working with you.

4. Collaborations

Collaboration can be a great way to join forces with another business or brand.  A strategic partnership that is mutually beneficial helps you and them grow.  There are websites that facilitate this such Collabosaurus who can connect you with brands in your target market for a specific project.  You can search for opportunities such as providing printed tee’s for a big event in exchange for promotion to their attendees and to their social media followers.  Or  there is the traditional way of doing the research yourself for local festivals, exhibitions, concerts, seminars, etc. where you could approach the organizer and propose a collaboration including their own Affiliate Store to retail their products.

Another form of strategic partnership is with other decoration businesses.  They may offer a different service to you so you can refer that type of decoration to them and they reciprocate with referrals to you.  Perhaps you only do large scale runs on auto’s and there is a print shop you can refer small manual orders to whilst they direct orders beyond their capacity your way.  There are opportunities for referred work from other decorators who are booked up or can’t make a tight deadline.  Or maybe industry alliances such as pattern makers, seamstresses, offset printers and label makers.  It pays to network!  Don’t forget you can always share these opportunities with the DecoNetwork community via our forum or social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram).

5. Set up a webstore

Is there an event or special occasion coming up?  A popular culture reference (Hold the Door!), an interest that you have or a designer with mad skills that you could showcase?  Why not open your own DecoNetwork online store?  It’s easy to set up, there are no upfront costs and this gives you another revenue stream.  You are in a great position to retail your own designs with a nice profit margin and you can showcase your skills with special techniques or finishes to inspire your customers.

6. Warm up cool leads

With DecoNetwork’s Business Hub you can filter by rejected quotes to compile a list of contacts to follow up.  Emailing these customers to let them know you’d still love to work with them can prompt a sale, particularly if you entice with a special offer.  You can also filter by open active quotes so its super easy to follow up with these customers.  Prioritize the leads according to those with an upcoming event or deadline as they are more motivated to order promptly.   

By checking your Abandoned Carts in Business Hub you can see what stage of the buying process the customer is bailing out of the sale. This can provide valuable feedback on what is holding customers back in ordering from you.  For example if you find customers commonly abandon the cart at the shipping stage you might need to review your shipping costs.  These customers can also be followed up with a courtesy email and discount offer.

7. PPC & SEO

Getting as many qualified leads to the site of an online based business is key and two methods for this are SEO or Search Engine Optimization and PPC or Pay-Per-Click Advertising.

SEO is about putting simple strategies in place to ensure your website can be found in search engines for words and phrases relevant to what your site is offering.  There are some simple things that you can do to optimize your website to improve your search ranking within DecoNetwork such as configuring your page content, titles and meta tags and integrating with Google Analytics to track your website’s performance and monitor visitor traffic.  For further reading check out our blog post on SEO here.

PPC is a form of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked on, so you are buying visits to your site rather than earning those visits organically via SEO.  A lot goes into building a successful PPC campaign, there’s researching and selecting the right keywords, setting up PPC optimized landing pages and bidding keywords may be competitive but it is a great way to boost traffic with immediate results until your SEO builds enough momentum to bring traffic organically.  There are some great videos on PPC on the Google channels on Youtube here or on SEO here if you’d like to delve deeper.

8. Get social

We recently compiled statistics on our customers’ social media activity and we found that those receiving a high volume of orders often correlates with being highly active on social media (posting 3-7 times per week).  Whilst of course many factors influence sales results such as quality products and great service, having a strong presence on social media certainly gives a good first impression to a potential customer and encourages loyalty and interaction with existing ones.  It is also a great marketing tool, improves SEO and directs traffic to your website.  More and more consumers conduct their research online before making a decision about a product or service, so if you aren’t present or active on social media it can result in lost opportunities.  Even if you are not ready to start posting now, be sure to create an account on each platform you intend to use that you can secure your name.

 

If you find creating content difficult find someone in your business or a friend/relative who enjoys social media and has a knack for it to help you out.  If you lack the time then set aside time just once a week to schedule out your posts for the following week so you’re covered.  Find the applications that work best for you, that you enjoy using and that your customers or potential customers frequent. Social media can be fun and a great way to showcase what you do best, engage with your customers and attract new opportunities you might not have otherwise gotten.  Just yesterday I was approached by a local wildlife park to supply t-shirts as they were impressed with my Instagram account!  Atkinsontshirt recently wrote a great post on promoting your shop through social media if you would like some further tips.  It doesn’t take a lot of time or effort and it’s free, so get social! 

All the best with your sales and marketing strategies, go get ’em!

 

from DecoNetwork Blog http://www.deconetwork.com/blog/8-ways-to-generate-sales/

Hover your mouse to Deconetwork.com