Inflation is putting the squeeze on small and large businesses alike. With consumer spending focused on essentials as the same amount of money buys them less, many businesses have seen dwindling revenue. In that situation, it’s not surprising that you might want some ways to boost your overall revenue. Read on for eight things that can help bolster your bottom line.
1. Improve Processes
The reality for many businesses, and SMBs especially, is that their processes developed organically over time. Those processes are often inefficient in a lot of ways. Streamlining your business processes can improve efficiency and, in turn, improve your revenue. For example, many businesses buy from a vendor because they have always bought from that vendor. After you’ve been in a business for a while, though, you can often negotiate more favorable terms.
2. Focus on Repeat Business
One potential source of additional revenue that many businesses overlook is repeat business. It’s easy to focus on gaining new customers, yet customer acquisition is often very expensive. You can often upsell or cross-sell products and services to your existing customers with far greater ease and less expense.
3. Offer Deals
Another relatively straightforward way that you can boost revenue is to offer new and existing customers coupons and rebates. Depending on your product or service, discounts can entice customers to move up a purchase or even make purchases they might otherwise take a pass on. You can further entice customers by offering discounts on limited quantities of stock.
4. Additional Marketing
When revenues go down, it’s often tempting to limit marketing as a cost-saving measure. Yet, counter-intuitively, additional marketing is often the best strategy. If nothing else, your additional marketing puts you top-of-mind through sheer repetition of exposure. You can also get a little innovative with your marketing by embracing new tactics, such as promotional text messages.
5. Clarify Your Marketing
When the economy is good and people have lots of disposable income, you can often get away with so-so marketing. That extra disposable income lets people make buying decisions without necessarily feeling invested in a product or service. When money is tight, though, you need razor-sharp marketing to build that investment. You can focus on messaging, branding, or both.
6. Refine Your Lead Generation
The more qualified leads you generate, the better your revenue flow. Take a hard look at your lead generation process. While good lead conversion rates depend on your industry and products or services, you should probably be seeing a lead conversion rate between 2 percent and 3 percent from your website. If you’re not seeing conversion rates at or above that level, it likely means that your process requires refinement. For example, is your customer profile as accurate as it could be? If not, see if you can tighten it up a bit.
Also read: 10 B2B Sales Lead Generation Strategies You Can’t Ignore
7. Embrace E-Commerce
Brick-and-mortar businesses often put little effort into their e-commerce efforts, relying instead on foot traffic to provide their primary revenue stream. Yet, a lot of shopping happens online at the moment. If you provide customers with a way to buy now, even if they don’t get the product right now, you can often see a boost in revenue from your online efforts.
8. Entice Lapsed Customers
Most businesses have contact information for customers who haven’t bought anything in a while. Much like existing customers, lapsed customers can prove a source of increased revenue with a comparatively small investment of time and effort. For example, let’s say that you have an email list of customers that haven’t bought anything in at least a year. You can send a “We Miss You” email to those customers with a discount code or coupon. The discount or coupon encourages them to buy and can help bring those customers back as repeat customers.
Generating More Revenue and You
Generating more revenue can look impossible, particularly when the economy is working against you with high inflation. While economic factors can certainly make things harder, there are a lot of tactics and strategies that can help you boost your revenue streams. You can improve your marketing and lead generation. You can focus on existing and lapsed customers. You can open up a new sales channel with e-commerce. You can refine your processes to boost efficiency. Make enough small improvements and you can see a big jump in revenue.
