If you’re on the road or you’re just a busy person, then you probably struggle to find the time to think about and implement strategic improvements to your business.
Instead, you’re looking for easy-to-implement, tactical quick wins which will have a measurable impact on the bottom line. Here’s what we’ve got for you…
Branding
Create a custom banner for your site
A default theme or stock photo is fine if you’re in bootstrapping, start-up mode and need to get something decent but cheap/free up on your site.
When you’ve moved past this – or you’re ready to – you need to create the image to match. If you can’t afford a full website re-design, then at least get a custom banner made and integrate the rest of your site to match.
Create custom graphics for your products
If you’ve gone to the trouble of creating a product, do it justice and invest in a custom graphic or two to help promote it – at $5, you can’t afford not to.
You’ve probably noticed the difference it makes to your own first impressions and purchasing decisions when you see a hastily-made versus a professional graphic – so go one step further and get a custom graphic for yours. Not only will it look better on your site, it’ll look better on your affiliate’s sites.
Increase Engagement & Response
Improve the welcome email on your mailing list
One of the most effective ways to increase engagement on your mailing list with your readers is to encourage them to engage right from the start.
For example, I ask subscribers to some of our mailing lists a direct question, to get to know them and encourage them to interact from the start. I like to feel I know who I’m writing to so I make an effort to engage and get to know new subscribers as soon as they sign up.
Check your About page
Among other things, I used to write About pages for a living and the majority of subscribers sign up to our mailing lists on all our sites from the About page.
You should already know how important this page is to your website. It’s an ideal place to begin a relationship with the people who visit your site because they’ve just taken the time to get to know you; do the same with them and ask them to email you, subscribe to your mailing list or whatever you can do which encourages interaction and engagement. Here’s more help to write a more effective about page for your website.
Optimise your sales pages
Most sales pages – including ours – could do with some tweaking and polishing. In fact, in our business the best sales pages which convert the most sales are the ones which we’ve had fun writing. You’ll find plenty of advice about writing a sales page and there are tools, themes and plugins like Premise and OptimizePress to help you so there’s no excuse for a poor one.
Add Pippity or Hello Bar
The little bar you see which drops down at the top of some sites are usually from HelloBar. Pippity does a similar thing. Both are effective tools to increase sign-ups to whatever you choose, without being as annoying as those pop-up boxes.
Personal Productivity
Set up canned responses in Gmail
When you’re on the road or just plain busy, you can save yourself time by creating a set of canned responses in reply to some of the most common queries you get from clients, customers, readers, friends or family.
This doesn’t mean you completely lose the personal touch, it just saves you from having to write the same stuff out over and over again. I have a number of these set up then simply personalise the rest of the email.
Enable Offline Gmail
There’s not much point in the power that is Gmail as your email provider if you have to be online to use it. While you can sync your account with an offline app, such as Mac Mail or Outlook, you lose some of the power of Gmail which is why enabling offline access is a MUST.
Send from multiple email addresses from within a single account
One of the truly useful features of Gmail is the ability to manage, receive and send from multiple email addresses all from within a single account.
This is vital if you have multiple projects, ventures, websites or businesses and want to keep an integrated brand intact. It saves you from having to log in and out of various different email accounts and means you have access to all your emails in a single place.
Get More Customers & Clients
Leverage your email signature
Adding something to your email signature – a client testimonial or a link to your services or latest product – can be a great way to remind or let people know about what you do and offer.
It doesn’t have to be (read: it shouldn’t be) too showy or intrusive but it’s a great way to make it easy for people to know how they can hire or buy from you. Wisestamp is a handy little signature tool if you use Gmail, Yahoo, AOL or Hotmail.
Leverage your blog posts
Adding a small advert for your own product/service at the end of your blog posts is another simple but effective way to remind people of what you do and how you can help.
Contact one referral partner every day for the next week
If you’re a service provider, then you probably already know that much of your new work comes from referrals (if it doesn’t this is definitely something you need to be tapping in to). Rather than sit and wait for them, you can go out and find them yourself.
Look around at other businesses which offer complimentary services to you – those who work with the kinds of clients you also work with – and make contact.
It’s pretty simple to put together a mutually beneficial agreement which enables you to tap into each other’s networks and generates new clients on an ongoing basis. Make a resolution to identify and make contact with one new potential partner every day for the next week. You’ll reap the rewards pretty quickly if you do.
Add social or media proof to the design of your site
Adding testimonials to your site is something you’ve probably already done in the form of a testimonials page. Go one step further and add snippets and soundbites of testimonials throughout the design of your site if you want to see an increase in sales. There’s nothing more powerful than effective social proof.
Generate More Sales
Share a coupon code for newsletter subscribers
This is something that’s worked very well for our mailing lists in the past – share a coupon code for one of your products with anyone who subscribes to your mailing list. We don’t advertise this but we tested it for a while and it was responsible for many of our ongoing daily sales.
Set up Abandon Cart re-direct pages
These are re-directs that you set up which point people to a certain page if they’ve clicked “buy now” gone to the shopping cart to make a payment but then decided not to complete the transaction for whatever reason. We’ve set up test pages for some of our products & services which incentivise someone to complete the transaction.
Use 404 Page Coupons or Offers
We used to have a special offer for one of our products on each of our 404 pages. While it’s not ideal for your site to throw up lots of error pages, doing something creative when they do appear can create a winning scenario.
I used to have 2 options on some of our 404 pages: a sign up to our mailing list and a coupon code for a product with a “buy now” link and both work well.
Re-package your offerings
If you’re offering services and you have a lot of options for clients to choose from, reduce them and create more purchase-able offerings.
In line with the scientific evidence that most of us can only cope with choosing from no more than 7 options (hence why you should ideally not have more than 7 links in a nav bar), never give your potential clients too much choice.
You also need to package your services in such a way that it makes it easy for them to buy. When we did this across our service business, it resulted in a massive increase in the number of clients who purchase without having to email back & forth first.
Use bundles
To increase the amount per transaction that someone spends in a single purchase, consider offering a bundle of your products/services – rather than increasing your prices.
This not only offers more value and a better deal to customers, it increases your transaction value without requiring any extra work or effort on your part.
We did this with this year’s 4th July sale and made almost 2 months’ salary in just 2 days – proof that offering ridiculously good value at a no-brainer price is always tempting to potential customers who may be on the fence about buying.
Hold a regular sale/promotion
You may know that we used to hold a monthly “Crazy Pricing Experiment Day”. We never advertised it anywhere except to our mailing lists but the last 2 we held included a “Pay What You Can” day and a “Coupon Code Countdown” day.
Both were responsible for generating over $1k worth of sales in 24 hours. This only really works however if you regularly release new offerings and you’re constantly filling your pipeline with new people.
I can almost guarantee that if you do just one or two of these things, it’ll have a noticeable effect on your business. Imagine what would happen if you did them all? 