All businesses have customers, According to HMRC, even they have customers…
Sales are the amount of goods and services that you provide your customers and there are three main features that affect your annual turnover:
- Number of customers
- Price
- Footfall
The first is fairly obvious, the more customers you can acquire, the greater the potential to increase sales.
Increase prices and this may increase turnover, but only if you can do this without affecting the number of customers you can retain.
Footfall is a less well known feature. It is the number of times you can encourage customers to return and buy more from you in a particular trading period.
Of the three, maintaining and increasing footfall is probably the most effective way to increase sales. This should be one of your principle strategies for maintaining and increasing sales as you have already met the costs of acquiring the customer (advertising etc). Encouraging a customer to buy from you once a month instead of once a quarter has the potential to increase sales from that customer by an average of 300%.
During the present COVID disruption this may not be possible, but as we emerge from lock-down this may be a strategy you could consider.