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As you expand your business, adding multiple sales channels to increase brand awareness is a very logical and strategic step forward. Today, customers are driven by convenience. The more you are represented online, the more likely your customers are to find you.
However, as you add multiple sales channels, you are also adding more for you and your team to manage. Here are 4 ways to keep your team sane and increase sales across all of your sales channels:
- Organize the details. Increasing sales across two, three, even ten different channels sounds great in theory. But if you want to stay on top of it all, you’ll need systems or apps that allow you to track inventory, orders, customers and supplier information accurately and in real time. All of these details must be easy to access. The more time you invest getting these things organized now, the less frustration you’ll experience down the road.
- Get a centralized view of your data. As you grow, quantifiable data that supports the decisions you make as a business owner will continue to grow in importance. Unfortunately, sales reporting and order analytics can be a drag when you’re logging in and out of several different outlets to retrieve the information you need. Find reporting tools that integrate your sales channel data into one location so you and your team all have the same information. Access to this type of data will allow you to make smarter purchasing decisions and avoid communication breakdowns between you and your suppliers.
- Test as much as you can. Once you have systems in place to track your product performance, customer behavior and order history, you’ll be able to run tests to optimize your online presence and product listings. Everything from listing titles to photography to product descriptions can be altered to increase conversion rates. Focus on testing a few key elements at a time to avoid over-testing multiple items at once.
- Gather customer feedback. Reporting and internal testing will certainly help you increase sales and enable you to better manage your business, however quantitative data only goes so far. In order to get a well-rounded perspective of your business and areas of opportunity, get in touch with your customers. Send a customer survey or follow up each completed transaction with an email asking for their satisfaction rating. The more you know about a shopper’s behavior and preferences, the better you can customize their experience to increase loyalty and social sharing of your products.
And finally, as promised last week, here is our shortlist of apps that can help you organize the details, view your data, streamline your systems, and gather customer feedback.
- SellerActive is an all-in-one inventory management system that streamlines many of the systems that business owners must manage while selling across multiple platforms.
- Stitch Labs will sync your inventory data and sales as your orders are processed. It will also unify your sales data with easy-to-read reports.
- Xero provides beautiful accounting software that conveniently integrates directly with Stitch. After integration, your invoices will automatically sync every ten minutes along with inventory financials such as COGS, assets, purchases and adjustments without manual entry.
- Zendesk is a customer-service centered app that allows you to provide quick, consistent support to anyone that buys your product.
- ShipStation allows you to import, manage, and ship your orders with over 40 selling platforms. Check out their full list of shipping partners.
If you’re already a multi-channel seller, what other apps would you add to this list?
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