5 end of financial year marketing ideas to boost sales
It’s the time of year when you may have noticed a few EOFY signs in stores around you. The end of the financial year presents businesses with an opportunity to gain new customers and increase sales. It’s an ideal time to implement new marketing ideas to help improve sales. It may be overwhelming for businesses, especially small businesses, to navigate this time of the year. Whether it’s your businesses first time in the season or after hitting a wall with ideas after many years in the game, here are a few marketing tips your business can use this EOFY season to help boost sales.
New year, new website
Right before the EOFY is an excellent time to make an audit of your website and assess its traffic. Are the contents up to date? Is it up to par with the latest digital trends? How is the SEO of the content on your website? Note anything that might need to be changed, including layout or design changes. A new website can help boost traffic, which can convert to sales.
You could promote the new changes on your social media and perhaps introduce a promotion that could drive customers to your new revamped website. Remember to highlight any EOFY promotions on your website and that they have a compelling call to action. Placements of these promotions and calls to action on your website are also crucial to get customers’ attention and turn them from passive customers to active ones.
Sneak peek into the year ahead
The EOFY season is a great opportunity to get rid of old stock while also introducing new stock. While it presents itself with a chance to have sales on the old stock, it is also the best time to promote the latest products. Social media can be used to tease these new products and encourage customers to sign up to your business’s mailing list to get a heads up about the upcoming products that will be available soon. Having incentives to join a mailing list could also be established, such as having pre-orders for the new products or having discount coupons for signing up.
An ideal way to present the new products is to not reveal all of them at once. Build a social media campaign that spans over a few days, teasing or revealing each product; once that is done, open pre-orders or introduce the discounts. This results in customers returning to your website or social media, which establishes better traffic and customer retention. However, be careful not to overwhelm your audience with the campaign; the idea is to keep them intrigued for long enough that they will still be excited and or curious enough to return, which will more likely turn into actual purchases.
Rewards with purchases
Customers love to be rewarded, and there are multiple ways to make a customer feel like they’ve received value for their money. A great way to achieve this and boost sales is by offering gifts or redeemable coupons on purchases. There are different ways to go about this. One could offer a free product (or from a choice of products) with purchases above a specific value. Another could be offering a discount for the next time the customer buys from your business, which is an added way for customers to return in the future.
EOFY is also an ideal time to introduce offers such as ‘Buy One Get One’ (BOGO) or ‘Buy Two Get One’ deal.
Apart from keeping customers happy and feeling like they are being rewarded with a gift, it is also an opportunity to clear out any unwanted stock, which helps with the stock takes for the financial reports for taxes. Most small businesses struggle to carry out year-end audits on stocks and must conduct them manually rather than use expensive technology, which is time consuming and could lead to errors. Therefore, the BOGO type incentives have multiple benefits to keep customers and employees happy while helping your business grow.
Loyalty pays
Many customers look forward to the EOFY season because of the number of sales by different businesses they want to participate in; this provides a good opportunity to introduce a loyalty point program that can be used not only to boost sales but also for customer retention. The guarantee of a loyal customer buying from you during a sale is always much higher, and you are highly likely to gain new customers during this time too. When there is this kind of traffic to your business, it’s a great time to introduce a loyalty program. Loyalty programs allow you to capitalize on the present ongoing sale while future proofing and creating revenue in the future.
Optimization and visibility
Remember that your business will not be the only one vying for a customer’s attention. It’s a season where all businesses will put their best foot forward, so you must ensure your business stands out above the rest. With whatever might be left off your financial budget at the end of the year, invest it in digital marketing tools such as Google Ads or professional SEO marketing help from an expert. In recent years, countless pieces of evidence have proven the benefits of these strategies resulting in high ROIs.
Running paid advertisements during the EOFY season will help boost traffic to your website at the best times. As it is, many customers already have an incentive to make the most of the sales during this time, so they will now need to be guided to your business with the right visibility. SEO marketing also has the added benefit of helping a business in the financial year ahead by appearing on the first page of searches when a new product launches. SEO marketing helps you in identify the specific keywords that people are searching for during the EOFY season which can help you optimise your content accordingly to boost your websites visibility further.
Author: Jenny Varghese
Image Source: Shutterstock
