Want to increase your business revenue, or at the very least, know how to ramp up revenue when you choose?
The good news is, you can.
And without investing big in new marketing avenues or sales staff.
Sure, there may be times you’ll want to do that too, to grow your business. But that takes time and money. You have access to smaller adjustments that make use of what you already have, right now.
You can optimize what you have to significant effect. That’s leverage.
Leverage is something you can apply to several areas of your business to increase revenue. This article focuses on just one of those areas: pricing.
The prices you charge should directly reflect the value that you offer through your business. That’s something to keep in the front of your mind as you’re considering leverage opportunities. Always, always, always create value!
To generate revenue in your business, here are 3 ways you can leverage your pricing for more income:
Raise Your Rates
This may seem like an obvious way to increase revenue. On the surface, it is. But there’s more to it than just sticking a higher number on your product or service.
Chances are, you don’t fully appreciate the value that you offer with your product or service. Value is not just about what it costs to produce or deliver your offering, though you absolutely want to ensure those costs are recovered.
Value is truly in the eye of the beholder, your prospect or client. And in marketing your business, the task is to find ways to fully communicate that.
Take a close look at your products and services. Did you consider each one’s full value when you set your prices?
Are you including the experience that your client has and the value they place on it? Do you deliver on time, as promised? Do you provide a fun or relaxing experience? How does dealing with your company make them feel?
Collect data about how the value of what you offer is being perceived on an ongoing basis. Write down what happy clients say, especially when they share why they chose you instead of someone else to work with.
When you have a clearer idea of the value that you offer, you’ll better be able to gauge if a price increase is in order. It’s likely that you are due for an increase. Most people undervalue what they do.
Your pricing is worth revisiting periodically. As your product or service gets better, you’re increasingly offering more value. Check in to see if your prices reflect that.
Develop Price Layers
For every service or product you offer (or plan to offer), develop versions at different price points.
For example, if you offer 1-on-1 counseling, you can add group counseling for a higher priced layer to that service.
For each service or product you currently offer (or plan to offer), what related service or product could you add to it?
Another way to create revenue layers is to modify what you already do.
For example, develop a do-it-yourself version of what you currently do on a customized basis. If you currently offer in-person workshops, offer a self-guided version of all or part of the workshop.
Three price layers or tiers are a good idea, because people tend to choose the middle level. It helps make their decision easier.
Don’t offer more than three layers. Having too many options is confusing, and it stops people in their tracks. They then make no decision at all, and you have lost the sale.
Time Your Offers
Now that you have 3 different price layers, you can time your offers to create more revenue.
When you are making an offer, it’s easier to build in additional offers that make sense for the client at that time.
Here are 3 opportunities available to you when you’re already in conversation with someone about a possible sale:
Upsell: offer a higher priced product or service
Cross-sell: offer a related product or service
After-sell: provide a follow-up offer that is special to those who just bought
What can you add to upsell, cross-sell, or after-sell?
Leverage has the biggest return on the investment of your energy and resources, because it utilizes what you already have available to you.
As you spend time considering your leverage opportunities, use these incremental steps to expand the wealth of opportunities available to you.
How Else Should You Optimize Your E-Commerce Website?
When most online business owners optimize their websites for organic search, they begin by optimizing their copy for search terms they’ve selected. They pepper those terms into their copy and add them to their meta-tags. But many stop their efforts there, and that’s a mistake. There are some fairly easy measures you can take to further optimize your e-commerce website to capture more traffic and make more sales.
Other Shopping Sites
Many online shoppers start shopping for a product by using a search engine. You can list your product data and photo at Google Merchant Center. Just open a free Google account first, if you don’t already have one. The info you post with the products you list will link back to your e-commerce site.
Always include a product photo with your listing. When possible, make it one you’ve shot yourself if you have the equipment to do it right. Otherwise your photo may look the same as those of your competitors.
Update regularly. Put a reminder on your calendar to update your listings so they always show the latest model, price, features, etc.
If you can, it’s best to vary the copy on your product listing from the copy on your website. That’s because Google looks for duplicate content and rather than listing all the sites with duplicate content, it picks what it thinks is the most valid and only lists that one. So if you change up the copy on your outside listings, you may have your products come up multiple times on a search, instead of having Google see it as a duplicate and leave it out of the results.
Blogs and Other Social Media
Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter became much more relevant to e-commerce when search engines started to index them. Social media postings tend to affect search rankings only temporarily, though, so it’s best to post regularly. There are auto-posting tools on which you can pre-load posts for some social media sites to help you have a consistent presence.
Each social media site in which you establish a presence adds another touch point that can help increase public awareness of your website or products. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you start to realize the huge number of social media options available to you. The thing to do is start small. Pick two or three social media sites and get good at staying on top of them. Once you’re comfortable with them, you can add more to your social media repertoire and start to get a feel for which sites are doing the most good for your business. Then you’ll know how your time is most profitably spent.
Local Search
If you haven’t listed your business there yet, go to Google.com/Places and list your business. Even if your business is strictly online, your listing includes a back-link to your website-always a good thing. Additionally, people looking at Google Maps in your area will happen upon your listing.
Many metropolitan areas have search engines specific to their areas. Make sure your business is listed in those, as well.
Images and Videos
Product images are essential to your e-commerce site’s success. If you can add video, your conversion rate will likely go up. Photos can tell about your products far more quickly than copy, and video can do it even better.
When you put images on your website, remember to incorporate rich ALT text for each image. Describe the image using the same keywords for which you’ve optimized your copy. Include those same keywords in the image file names, when possible. Finally, make sure that the image caption and all the copy around the image are highly relevant to the image.
Video reduces bounce rate by keeping customers on your site longer. That’s because it’s engaging. Instructional or how-to videos are best. Keep them short-two or three minutes-to increase viewership. Visitors will often stop a video or not even start it when they see it’s long. Remember to tag your video with appropriate keywords that will maximize searchability. In addition to putting your video on your website, upload it to other popular sites, as well, to get more exposure.
If you have the budget, and you want to reap the reward of more advanced techniques, it’s best to hire a professional agency rather than spend the time trying to learn it yourself. Professionals do it every day and know what will get you a higher search rank consistently.
