Turn EOFY into an opportunity for growth

End of financial year is in sight.

With only a few months to go, the temptation can be to hunker down, cross your fingers and hope that sales continue to track well so you reach your EOFY targets.

But don’t rely on wishful thinking alone. Take matters into your own hands by making a final push to drive sales and revenue to reach your business goals.

You never know, you could even end up smashing your targets.

But where should you start?

Firstly, assess how close you are to meeting your business goals. Do you need to reach more customers? Or are you facing a challenge in converting your leads into paid customers?

Understanding why you haven’t met your targets is the first step towards rectifying the situation. Read on to find out where to start.

Where’s the gap?

As Byron Sharp explained in How Brands Grow, businesses grow by continually expanding their pool of potential customers.

Growing your customer base is a numbers game. You need a large pool of interested parties before you can begin the process of leading them through the funnel to become a viable sales opportunity.

Start by tracing your sales funnel and identify whether you are reaching enough people. Based on your business’s conversion rate, estimate how many more leads need to be fed into the system to generate the revenue required to fill the budget hole.

Once you know this number, it’s time to assess your channels.

Reaching more customers

A workman shouldn’t blame his tools, but could you be using the wrong tool as opposed to a bad tool?

A staggering 33 per cent of marketers are unsure of which channel is making the biggest impact on their revenue, according to Webmarketing 123 (2015).

During this initial assessment process, identify how you are reaching your target audience. Are certain channels working harder than others? Or should you consider a whole new channel altogether?

There is a plethora of marketing channels available to marketers today, but when time is of the essence Letterbox, alongside Search, Email and SMS are a good starting point.

These channels can be targeted to a granular level to ensure that it reaches your target audience – and spread your message to interested parties quickly and efficiently. Each have their own benefits and are worth exploring.

Letterbox, for example, allows your brand to reach 17 million Australians with personalised content – straight to their home. According to the Australasian Catalogue Association, 54 per cent of readers have bought something from a catalogue in the past week. A traditional channel it may be, but Letterbox has been around for a long time for a reason.

Email, SMS and Search are also great ways to target your audience. Your offer will be integral to these campaigns and will require clear and consistent messaging. It’s a fine line, after all,  between engaging your audience and spamming them so be mindful in how you interact with your database. Always make it clear what is in it for them.

For quick returns, focus on people who have already shown interest in your brand. A retargeting campaign across Search and Email, for example, could be the perfect way to re-engage previous customers or newsletter subscribers.

You may also wish to serve ads to people who have visited your website in the past month. You could consider re-engaging customers who reached the checkout, but didn’t purchase, or old customers who have not bought from you in a while, through a Google Display Network retargeting campaign.

Ultimately, which channels you choose will depend on your success in using them to date and your end goal

Key takeaways

Increasing your conversions

Once you have identified how many leads you require to make a conversion, the next step is to consider your path to purchase.

Just how easy it is for your customers to buy from you?

According to Unbounce, only 22 per cent of businesses are reportedly happy with their conversion rate, begging the question: could you do more to help your customers make a purchase?

Customers are increasingly moving towards a self-service model and the trend is only set to continue. Therefore, it’s imperative to engage with your customers on the channels where they operate, which could be many. After all, today 52 per cent of customers use three or four channels to connect to businesses, according to VPI (2013).

Consider how your customers can interact with your brand.

Do you have social channels? Web chat, Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) and call centres? You need to be accessible to your customers whenever and wherever they wish to speak to you (and have the answers to their questions immediately).

As EOFY looms, could you introduce a pop-up call centre to take extra customer enquiry calls? Or could you add an online chat function to your website? Adding that extra element of personal service could be the difference between closing or losing customers.

Consider what channels could get you the quick returns required to meet your sales targets (and maybe even exceed them)

Key takeaways

So what next?

You’ve identified your problem and have secured budget from the executive team. Now what?

Discover how you can maximise your efforts to get more customers in the lead up to the EOFY. Salmat can help you reach more customers and increase conversions. Contact us today on 1300 725 628.