Want to make more money?
Then you need to find a way to get more sales.
Of course, that’s easier said than done… But it can be done.
You just need to think outside the box.
Today we are going to discuss five creative ways to increase sales volume.
You will surely find at least one idea that you can apply to your business!
5 Out of The Box Ideas to Increase Sales
Here are five creative approaches to marketing, pricing, and sales:
- Cross-sell to your existing customers.
- Drop the free plan.
- Experiment with multiple pricing tiers.
- Experiment with decoy pricing.
- Have a generous affiliate program.
You can use them to make more money per sale, increase sales volume, and generate more revenue.
Let’s take a closer look at each of them…
#1 Cross-Sell To Your Existing Customers
You have probably heard the terms “upselling” and “cross-selling” before. But what do they mean?
- Upselling is offering the customer a better version of the product. Remember how McDonald’s employees used to ask “Would you like to supersize that?” when you ordered a meal? That’s upselling.
- Cross-selling is offering the customer a complementary product. You know how McDonald’s employees ask “Would you like fries with that?” if you order a burger? That’s cross-selling.
Today we are talking about increasing sales volume, so let’s take a closer look at cross-selling, which can help you do just that.
Here’s how you can get started with it:
- Examine the products you sell. Which of them go well together?
- Once you have identified complementary products, make sure that when the customer decides to buy one of them, you also offer them the others.
You can use software to set this up and put cross-selling on autopilot.
It may take a while to get it right, but once you do, you will start getting more sales without having to do much to keep them coming in.
Example: Dollar Shave Club
Dollar Shave Club is a company that broke into the men’s grooming and hygiene industry with an innovative business model: subscription boxes.
You take their quiz, they create a custom box for you, then they ship it to you every two months.
Cross-selling was one of the sales techniques that they used to get to their $1 billion acquisition by Unilever
They would send an email offering the customer relevant add-ons before shipping their box to them.
This allowed them to move more inventory without having to spend much extra time, energy, or money on it.
Cross-selling works best for ecommerce companies, but it may make sense for other types of online businesses as well, depending on their product range.
#2 Drop the Free Plan
The freemium pricing model is extremely popular.
You offer people several pricing plans, including a free one.
One of the most famous freemium success stories was Evernote which used it to reach a $1 billion valuation and get the coveted “unicorn” status.
Back in 2010, a then-CEO of Evernote Phil Libin even told the Fast Company magazinethat “The easiest way to get 1 million people paying is to get 1 billion people using”.
But in 2015, the company’s growth started to slow down, and, as Tom Petrocelli phrased it a year later, it fell prey to the Catch-22 of the freemium model.
A few years after that, the media started talking about it being in a “death spiral”, with the New York Times doing a piece on Evernote’s struggles in 2019.
Think about it. Even the poster child of the freemium model can’t figure out how to make it work in the long run. It seems that this approach to pricing is not as great as we have been led to believe.
So if you have a free plan now, consider either downgrading its functionality or dropping it entirely.
This may seem scary. After all, once you drop the free plan, there comes the inevitable moment of truth. Do people value your product enough to pay for it?
But it’s better to face the reality, whatever it may be, than use an unsustainable pricing model to fuel unsustainable growth. – Read more
