How Do I Increase Sales? | 3 Strategies (+Free template)

If you want to increase sales, you have come to the right place!

That’s because there are only three ways to increase sales and you are going to learn exactly how in this article.

There are three ways to increase sales: 1. Increase your prices on your products and services, 2. Find more customers, and 3. Increase the number of transactions per customer.

Whether you want to increase sales revenue or sales transactions, having a strategy is crucial to your sales plan.

And when you use one of these methods to increase your sales, you can dramatically increase your sales.

But, when you use 2 or all 3 of these methods as part of your plan, your sales success can be massive. 

That is, you won’t just realize an incremental growth in sales, when you combine all 3 of these sales strategies together, the increase in sales will be exponential. This is just 1 of the incredible benefits of Free Enterprise in marketing (the alternative to Free Enterprise isn’t something anyone wants).

At the bottom of this article is a simple, handy free tool you can use to play with some numbers and see what is possible.

Let’s get started.

How to Increase Sales: 3 Powerful Strategies

There are many ways to execute your plan of increasing sales.

• For example, you could introduce new services or products. 
• You could improve your marketing strategies. 
• You can expand your market. 
• Or you can  work on your customer care with the intent of increasing your transactions. 

But, with the big strategy of “How do I increase sales?” as the main priority, all tactics fall under one of these 3 strategies.  

These strategies will provide direct results. Again, the 3 strategies are:

1. Increasing prices for your products and services
2. Selling to more customers
3. Increasing the number of transactions.

Let’s get started.

1. Increase your prices to increase sales

Increasing your product or service’s price can help you increase sales; however, it isn’t that simple. Price increments for products and services affect customer perception of your brand in two ways:  

• Your customers can purchase the product at increased prices or 
• Switch to cheaper products.

You can implement other strategies with your price increment to ensure your sales increase. For example, you should ensure you have an inelastic product or service that customers rely on to solve their problems. This is done by presenting them with a unique product that solves a problem and one that your competition can't easily replicate.

Increasing the price of such a product or service will give you an edge over your competition and attract more buyers. 

Doing this gives your buyers the impression that you provide a high-quality product or service, making them feel like paying for the product is worthwhile. For more helpful information on how to do increase your prices, here are three excellent resources on how to increase, set and position your pricing strategy:

• 5 Powerful Strategies to Increase Prices Without Losing Customers
• What are the goals of your pricing strategy?
• 3 Sneaky “Psychological Pricing Tricks” Businesses use to Increase Sales

2. Sell to more customers to increase sales

You can increase your sales by selling to more customers. 

This is quite obvious; however, it’s also where the “rubber meets the road”.

Selling to more customers requires you to improve your marketing strategies allowing more buyers to reach your business. You could do this in several ways.

To get started quickly, please go here for a list of top, proven methods for attracting new customers:

Marketing strategy to attract customers (List of 12 ways)

You can improve your sales by focusing on advertising and improving your marketing. 

Targeting new customers is easier once you have a handle on the basics of marketing. 

1. First, focus on your customer value proposition and the unique value that you provide to your target market. 
2. Second, determine exactly who your ideal customer is and identify where they are so you can communicate your value proposition. 
3. Third, focus relentlessly on testing new marketplaces in order to find message-market fit. (The first rule of marketing.)

An excellent resource to help you attract more new customers, is to learn to use the word “Free” in your marketing. Go here for a tutorial on how to do that:

How is “Free” used in marketing? (5 clever strategies)

3. Increase the number of transactions per customer to increase sales

There are several ways you can increase the number of transactions and increase your sales revenue. For starters, you should calculate your current transaction price and use it as a baseline. Next, if you are in ecommerce, find ways to make your customer buy more items in addition to what they have in their cart.

There are many tools available that can automate this process for you.

You can begin by suggesting if they want to add other (relevant) products to their cart. Next, you could display related items together or on the same page (if you’re selling your products through a website. Do it in print using direct mail if the metrics work in your favor. You can also use promotions and flash sales to entice your customers to make more significant purchases by introducing a sense of urgency.

You could also give them bulk or quantity discounts. Doing this encourages customers to purchase more products at a lesser price. It helps you earn an assured profit on your services or products and keep your customer. You can also offer services or products with a higher price tag and regular items. 

Focus on delivering and communicating more value to your customers, and the options here are virtually endless.

For ideas on how to increase your customer’s transaction rate, start here:

What is Your Email Marketing Strategy?

How can you implement all three strategies simultaneously? And what could happen? (Examples) 

Let’s now put all these strategies for increasing sales together.

Here’s what you do.

First, document where you are now. 

For this example, here’s the hypothetical facts:

• You have two products: Product A and Product B.
• Product A sells for $59, and Product B sells for $99. Last year you sold 1,000 units of each. 2,000 total sales transactions. Making a total sales revenue of $148,000. Each customer buys 1 time.

This year, you want to increase your sales.

Here’s what you do.

First, raise your prices for each product by $10. Send an email to your customers telling them that prices will go up in 30 days, but they can buy at the “discounted” price before that date. Second, communicate the extra value you have added to the product, i.e., in sourcing, new customer support, stronger material, etc. Look deeply and you can find more benefits.

You will get more sales with this strategy, immediately.

Second, do you research and find more customers who are just like your best existing customers. Do a Recency, Frequency, Money (RFM) marketing analysis on your customer database and cave out your top 5% or 20% of customers to send a survey to. Learn exactly how to create your survey and then request participation from your survey, using Google Forms.

Then figure out where these customers are, and start testing new marketing campaigns using the word “Free”. Learn how McDonalds does it here.

You’ll start increasing your customer base.

Third, communicate more value to your existing customers, more often to increase the number of transactions per customer. Make a goal to communicate with your customers 50-100 times per year, via great email and direct mail. Make the sales journey start the customer at a $59 entry point for Product A, and sell them the $109 Product B. Then, innovate more products.

With this marketing strategy, your sales will increase exponentially.

See the example of what is possible below:

Sources

https://www.infoentrepreneurs.org/en/increase-sales/

https://strategicmarketingpartner.com/marketing-strategies/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2021/03/30/14-simple-but-effective-techniques-to-increase-sales/

https://www.bdc.ca/en/articles-tools/marketing-sales-export/sales/how-improve-sales-process