There’s no such thing as an “overnight success,” and when it comes to growing your business, you can’t leave it to chance. But, knowing you need to increase sales to grow is very different from actually doing it.
While many businesses plow money into expensive ad campaigns in the hope of boosting revenue, MarketBox offers a better way. In fact, it offers 12 of them. The flexible field service software supports your business’s growth at every stage, so when it comes to increasing sales, the integrated features make it easy to meet (and exceed) your sales goals.
Here are 12 ways you can use MarketBox to increase sales and grow your business without needing to spend hours on promotion.
Adding a book now button to your marketing website is one of the easiest ways to increase sales. In a recent survey of North American consumers, results showed that nearly 70% of participants preferred to book service appointments online.
To help you meet this demand, MarketBox offers a streamlined online booking process that makes it easy to capture leads and convert them into paying customers. Your online booking calendar exists as a separate subdomain, making tracking data easier and can be fully customized to suit your website. With real-time availability updates, you never have to worry about double-booking, and clients can filter by service, technician, location, and time/day for maximum convenience. For businesses with mobile workforces, each service technician can set individual travel zones so clients can find options nearest to them, and you can service a wider area.
For service-based businesses, the quality of your staff is everything. With MarketBox, you can highlight specific service providers to customers and potential leads to help increase sales. MarketBox makes it easy to store client data, and if you’ve built up an email list, send out company newsletters and alerts. These are perfect opportunities to highlight top performers or introduce new hires via short Q&As. (Bonus points if that new hire means you can expand into new coverage areas too!) With personalized booking links, you can even send clients to specific providers’ booking pages and allow them to book direct.
MarketBox has several integrated trust features that can be turned on or off and used to build trust with clients and increase conversion rates. The software gives you the option to send out automated review/feedback requests post-appointment and showcase results on technician profiles. Providers can also add their own photos, create a bio, and list their skills. (Users on the professional plan can also use these reviews to automatically boost their best-performing providers to the top of the list to help secure more bookings.) These features help customers make better decisions as they can rely on real customer feedback, rather than just marketing promises, and lead to an increase in bookings. For businesses that provide at-home services, it also helps build trust as the client knows who they’re expecting.
Empower service providers to self-promote via personalized booking links and boost your marketing efforts while simultaneously reducing your to-do list. Every time a new service provider profile is added to your MarketBox dashboard, they are assigned a personalized booking link, which directs people straight to their specific booking page. (It’s the same links that were outlined in step 2.) Encourage your workforce to publish this link on their social media profiles, websites, email signatures, and business cards and increase sales via direct bookings. After all, your employees are your best ambassadors.
If your business has a presence on social media, use it to your advantage and link your booking calendar to your profile, allowing customers to book services without leaving the platform. And if you’re not on social media, get on there! Around half the global population uses it, so you’re literally missing out on millions of potential customers — especially as MarketBox makes it so easy to expand nationally and internationally.
By offering this booking feature, you’re capturing the potential sales lost to the “five more minutes of scrolling and then I’ll do it” mentality and streamlining the booking process by removing the need to visit your website. It also helps boost any social media marketing efforts, as it allows clients to take direct action on a promotion, resulting in more sales.
Promo codes are a great way to increase sales via promotions, introductory offers, and loyal customer perks.
Creating a promo code is easy, and you can control the length of the offer, how many times the code can be used, the services it applies to, and whether you're offering a % or $ amount off a service.
If you’ve ever added a drink to your meal at a drive-through or been lured into buying an item while in the queue for checkout, you’ve experience upselling. The reason you’ll find it across almost every industry is that upselling is a highly effective way to increase sales. Why? Because selling to an existing customer who’s already invested in the transaction is much easier than convincing someone new to buy-in. In fact, it’s 14 times easier.
For service-based businesses, upselling presents an excellent opportunity to increase sales. Here are just a few ideas for upselling opportunities for different businesses:
With the MarketBox app, service providers can process payments in the field. If they’re successful in upselling a product or service, the charge can be automatically added to a client’s bill or processed using their card on file.
One of the more obvious ways to increase sales is to increase customers, but knowing where/who to target isn’t always easy. With MarketBox’s waitlist feature, you can start collecting data on underserved areas and identify opportunities for growth to help increase sales.
If you’re offering at-home services, technicians can set travel zones, allowing you to serve specific areas and clients to book the nearest option to them. But when a potential client searches by location and you’re not operating in their area yet, they can add their name to a waitlist. If you build up enough interest in one place, you know it’s time to start hiring service providers to cover it. This handy feature helps you to make informed decisions about your business’s future and attract more clients.
Another way to use the waitlist feature that’s popular among our users is to act on qualified leads quickly. When a potential customer fills out the waitlist form, they’re asked to leave contact details. Many businesses will then reach out and make special arrangements to cover this one-off job. The result? A happy customer that would be otherwise lost to a competitor, a reputation boost for the business, and the opportunity to add on a small extra fee to cover distance costs.
Word of mouth was voted the most effective form of marketing by 64% of marketing executives. Businesses that have a reputation for going the extra mile for their customers get talked about, and with the waitlist feature, you can make sure you’re leading the conversation.
We’ve already covered upselling products as a means to increase sales, but with MarketBox’s manual booking options, you can upsell entire services at any time. Available on the desktop platform and provider mobile app (available on iOS and Android), manual booking allows you or your service technicians to schedule additional services for clients. For example, if a client books a manicure and then wants to add a pedicure to the treatment, technicians can quickly change the booking, which will automatically add the charge to the bill and update their availability at the same time. This feature means you never have to miss out on an opportunity to capture sales or disappoint a customer.
With MarketBox’s user-friendly interface, it’s easy to create, edit, or remove services from your booking calendar. Not only does this make initial set-up quicker, but it also enables you to experiment with your service offerings at any time. If you have team members with core skills outside of your current offerings, you can trial new services/treatments and test demand. If it proves popular, you’ve just expanded your sales, and if not, it’s easy to remove the option from your list of treatments and try something else. With the ability to add short descriptions to each service, you can elaborate on more unusual offers or set client expectations for what will happen during the appointment before booking for satisfied customers all around.
MarketBox offers a powerful solution to the day-to-day stresses of running a service-based business, whatever the structure. The software supports mobile businesses offering at-home services, those with static locations, and businesses operating online. With that in mind, why not use the software to update your company structure and go hybrid. By opening up new revenue streams, for example, offering virtual appointments in addition to in-person sessions, you’re increasing your sales opportunities while also providing a more convenient service to customers.
The final way you can use MarketBox to increase sales is to use the software to take your business national or international. MarketBox is fully scalable and is designed to help your business grow, so if the opportunity presents itself to do just that, you can feel confident that the software will support you.
Setting up and editing travel zones can be done in just a few clicks, so if a service provider moves, you can simply alter the location and start servicing that area too. The MarketBox professional plan supports multiple currencies, allows you to set regional pricing that differs by area, town, or state, and automatically calculates tax based on location to remove the growing pains of going global.
If you’re ready to take your business up a notch, book a 1-on-1 demo to find out how MarketBox can help.
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