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3 Powerful Tips to Make Your Small Business More Profitable Right Now

Jason Artman653 10-May-2019

For a small business, keeping your operation profitable is never easy. Unlike online businesses that can stay lean and mean, a small brick-and-mortar business like yours has expenses such as rent, utilities and employee salaries that cut into the profits of every sale you make. On top of that, you can’t simply expand your operation by reaching more people. The members of your local community, for the most part, are your entire potential customer base. The real path to sustained growth isn’t acquiring new customers so much as it is earning more from the customers you already have. These 3 incredibly actionable tips will make your small business more profitable starting right now.

3 Powerful Tips to Make Your Small Business More Profitable Right Now

Manage Your Business Digitally

One of the best things that you can do to make your small business more profitable immediately is to upgrade to a digital POS system that does most of the heavy lifting for you. If you’re still taking sales with a cash register and a card swipe machine and using a spreadsheet to manage your inventory, you are way past due for an update. These are just a few of the things that you can do with a modern digital POS system.

• You can track your store inventory automatically and have your POS system notify you when it’s time to reorder products.

• You can create a customer loyalty program and have your POS system track reward points automatically.

• You can link customers’ contact information to an online marketing platform and announce coupons or sales via email and text messages.

• You can track your customers’ buying habits to find out what your most popular products are.

• You can identify customers who haven’t visited your business in a while and launch special marketing efforts to bring those customers back.

The features of a modern POS system don’t just help you save time and money; they also open up new marketing channels and techniques that are presently unavailable to you. We’ll discuss those shortly.

Improve Employee Efficiency

Most employees of small businesses are happy to have their jobs and will work hard to make your business successful. With the right management and incentives, though, you might unlock hidden potential that takes your business to even greater heights. Of course, workers always enjoy monetary rewards. If you have the ability to offer commissions to your salespeople, that’s an excellent way to ensure that they’ll always do their best to close deals.

If you can’t offer sales commissions, think of other ways to reward your employees for great performance. It isn’t always about the money; sometimes people just want to know that their employers appreciate their hard work. Little things like dedicated parking spots, tickets to baseball games and restaurant gift certificates won’t cost you much at all, but they’ll go a long way toward improving employee morale and productivity.

Do you pay your employees to track inventory on a spreadsheet or close out the register manually at the end of each day? Get a POS system that does those things automatically and pay your employees to do more productive things. Do you have a worker with a talent for writing or web design? Maybe that person should handle your digital marketing rather than working on the sales floor. Do you have an employee who takes frequent smoke breaks? Get him a vape pen like the Aspire Breeze 2. Let him vape at his desk if other employees don’t object. Increasing employee efficiency is all about improving the day-to-day work experience and giving your employees, whenever possible, the ability to improve their own bottom lines.

Touch Your Customers Where They Are

Earlier, this article touched on the value of email and SMS marketing. You most likely understand the importance of having a website for inbound marketing. Until now, though, you may have never given much thought to outbound marketing aside from perhaps sending occasional email newsletters. If that’s the case, get ready because true omnichannel digital marketing is now within the reach of any small business, and it’s going to change the way your company operates forever.

Here’s how it works. You’ll begin by launching a customer loyalty program, which you’ll manage through your POS system. To join the program, you’ll ask your customers to provide their phone numbers and email addresses. Now you have two points of contact – but you won’t stop there. You’ll use that information to find your customers on social media, and you’ll ask those people to follow your business on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Now you have as many as five touch points per customer.

What can you do with those touch points? That’s limited only by your own creativity, but here are a few ideas to get you started.

• You can use SMS messaging to announce a flash sale, reaching your customers while they’re out of their homes.

• You can use Facebook to target friends of your followers with advertisements, reaching people in your community who may not be customers yet.

• You can send an email newsletter advertising your sales and promotions for the month.

• You can use your email or SMS marketing platform to segment your customer base according to their interests or purchase frequency. Use special deals to reengage the customers who haven’t visited your store in a while.

Once you begin to fully unlock the world of omnichannel digital marketing, you’ll wonder how you ever managed to run your business any other way. Running a business in the modern age means that you’re competing for attention with many other brands. The customer has more power than ever, and he expects a stellar buying experience every step of the way. Omnichannel marketing helps you provide that experience by ensuring that you always touch your customers over the channels that they use. Some customers love informative email newsletters. Others like the instant gratification of text messaging. Still others like the visual stimulation of social media. Omnichannel marketing means that you can supply any of those things to any customer at any time.



Updated 10-May-2019
Jason Artman is the owner and author of eCigOne.com. A professional freelance writer and SEO consultant with more than a decade of experience, Jason works with vaping companies around the world to increase their targeted web traffic and improve their revenue.

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