As we embark on a new year, now is the right time to develop sales strategies for the year ahead and utilize the potential channels to boost sales in 2022.
8 Sales Strategies to Crush Your Sales Goals
To help you in the process, I have put together this guide of the hottest sales strategies for 2022, along with actionable tips which you can execute to increase conversions. Follow these tips to building a robust sales pipeline and crush your sales goals!
1. Start with a Customer Re-engagement Strategy
You need data from happy customers. Offer an incentive to get your customers to tell you what they like and dislike about your products and services. Then use this information to make any necessary adjustments to your offerings. If you sell online or are a retailer, use email marketing to develop a special offer to reengage your customers in your holiday specials or new offerings. If you sell B2B, at the very least, pick up the phone and call all your existing customers. You want to find out their priorities and goals for the new year so that you can position yourself as a partner and scale your business alongside theirs.
Why is this one of the most important sales strategies?
Because your existing customers are 60-80 percent likely to buy from you again, so focusing on a retention strategy is always a great idea to boost sales.
2. Develop a Personalized Marketing Strategy
Personalization will be one of the hottest sales strategies of 2022. Personlized marketing allows you to create customized content to improve individual buying experiences and build positive relationships with your prospects.
You can personalize how you communicate with your audience by creating buyer personas and getting more granular by identifying their aspirations, interests, goals, social media habits, and purchase patterns. This will enable you to tailor your emails, marketing messages, and offers accordingly.
Why is this important?
Personalized marketing increases conversion and is a must-have if you want to boost sales in 2022. Here are some stats to prove this:
- 91% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that provide relevant recommendations and offers.
- 80% of buyers are more likely to purchase from brands that offer personalized experiences.
- 72% of consumers only engage with personalized messaging, so always include your target’s name
3. Build Fast Loading Landing Pages
Fast loading speed is an essential component of a high-converting landing page and generating more sales. And this is particularly important on a mobile device. Therefore, page loading speed can directly influence sales conversions, which is why it makes my list of sales strategies for 2022.
While pages that load faster can boost sales, slow loading pages can negatively impact the purchase process and result in shopping cart abandonment.
Why is this important?
Page loading time is important because:
- 40% of consumers abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load!
- 47% of people want web pages to load in 2 seconds or less.
- An e-commerce site making $100,000 daily can lose $2.5 million a year due to page loading delay of 1 second.
- Every second of delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
4. Use Retargeting Ads
Retargeting ads have been one of the most effecitve yet underutilized sales strategies for some time now. Not all your website visitors will buy the first time they visit your website. To complete the sales cycle after their first visit, you need to remind them about their interest after they browse products and leave the site, or add the products to their shopping carts but never complete the purchase. How are you going to draw them back in to consider your offer? The answer is ad retargeting.
Retargeting is a way to bring those visitors back to your site through online advertising, so they complete the transaction. The best thing about retargeting ads is that they are fairly inexpensive compared to traditional Google or Facebook Ads.
Some interesting stats and data about ad retargeting:
- Retargeted ads, along with other marketing tactics, can boost sales by 50%.
- Retargeting can increase ad engagement by 400%.
- Retargeted ads have a ten times higher average click-through rate than display ads.
- 30% of consumers have a “positive” or “very positive” experience with retargeted ads
- 25% of consumers appreciate being reminded of products they viewed in the past.
5. Develop a Cart Abandonment Email Campaign
Consumer open 41.18% of cart abandonment emails and brands that use cart recovery email sequences can bring back 3% to 14% in lost sales, which is why this is one of the sales strategies you must try in 2022.
Shopping cart abandonment emails work and should be part of your marketing strategy if you want to boost sales.
A cart abandonment email series includes 2 to 4 follow-up emails sent to people who visited your site and added items to their cart but left the site without ordering. These emails are usually sent within a 48 hour period, and it is an efficient way to retrieve lost sales and up your revenue.
Why is having a shopping cart abandonment email sequence important?
According to Klaviyo, sending two to three emails in an abandoned cart email series can draw in the maximum revenue. In addition, brands that use shopping cart recovery emails can bring back 3% to 14% in lost sales.
6. Ramp Up Your Social Selling Efforts
Social selling is the process of leveraging social media platforms to find and connect with your target audience in order to build and nurture relationships, generate interest in your products, and close more sales.
Social selling helps brands to create a positive brand reputation, build authority, provide value, and engage with prospects and customers in meaningful ways.
By creating and sharing relevant and high-value content, commenting, and engaging with prospects, you can build trust and earn the right to pitch your offers, which will ultimately help you achieve growth and sales. But just know that, compared to other sales strategies on this list, social selling is a long-term process. The worst thing you can do to try to sell too quickly and alienate or turn off a potential customer.
Why is social selling important?
According to LinkedIn –
- Social selling leaders create 45% more opportunities than peers with a low social selling index.
- Social selling leaders are 51% more likely to hit their sales goals.
- 78% of businesses that use social selling outperform businesses that don’t use social media.
7. Sell Direct to Consumer When Appropriate
Direct to consumer (D2C) is a marketing approach that allows brands, manufacturers, retailers, and e-commerce companies to directly sell and ship products to consumers detouring third-party sites or intermediaries.
In a recent September 2021 article, Deloitte recognized the importance of D2C for sustainable growth. As COVID-19 reshaped the economy, many brands and Fortune 500 companies embraced D2C, and those brands that adopted D2C strategies significantly increased their revenue.
According to Statista, D2C e-commerce sales in the U.S. are expected to reach $174.98 billion in 2023.
Image: D2C e-commerce sales in the U.S. from 2019 to 2023 (in billion U.S. dollars), Statista
8. Humanize Your Brand
Does your way of communicating with your prospects, leads and customers make them feel like they’re interacting with a business that lacks empathy? The most effective marketing messages create an emotional connection with your target customer.
Humanizing your brand makes your audience feel like there’s a human sitting on the other side who hears them, understands what they are going through, and genuinely cares about them.
Humanizing your brand is a practice of sharing personal stories, infusing character, and cultivating a brand personality. Of course, video marketing is a great way to do this. Allowing your target customers to get to know the business owners, see behind-the-scenes shots of your creating your products and services, or just being silly sometimes, makes your brand relatable and interesting. This will help you build meaningful relationships with your future and existing customers.
Personalization is the key to humanizing your brand. Without adding a personal touch, your brand will appear cold, robotic, and you’ll struggle to make sales.
By personalizing your messaging and communication channels, you can instantly bond with your target audience and make them more receptive to hearing from you and acting on your marketing messages.
Sales is never easy, but if you apply some or all of the sales strategies shared in this article, you’re surely going to boost sales in 2022 in your small business. Remember to stay consistent, deliver value through content, and build relationships with your leads. Finally, don’t forget to evaluate your performance to know which of your marketing efforts work best.
Best of luck as you give these sales strategies a try in 2022!