10 Tips for Boosting Your Business’s Bottom Line

If you want your business to continue to be successful, you will have to make it sustainable and profitable and keep a nice contingency cash buffer in reserve.

However, in the current economic climate, that is tough to do. So, how can you ensure you not only keep your head above water but also start to thrive?

Thankfully, there are several things you can do to book your business’s bottom line.

In this post, we’ll showcase ten of the most positive steps you can take to put your venture on a more secure financial footing.

1. Accept more payment options

One of the first steps your business should take is to accept more payment methods. Today, people use various means to purchase goods and services.

If you don’t have one already, you need a secure EFTPOS machine such as those offered by Smartpay.

Depending on your business, you should also consider allowing your customers to pay with a range of other options, including Buy Now Pay Later services (such as Afterpay) and Cryptocurrency.

Ultimately, the more payment options you offer, the more chances you have of making sales.

2. Improve marketing effectiveness

Another good way to improve your chances of making sales is to improve how effective your marketing activities are.

In the pursuit of customer orders, it can be easy to overspend or set-and-forget payments for promotional campaigns that aren’t delivering a good ROI.

Therefore, you should make a conscious effort to analyse how much you spend on marketing, in what areas it goes, and how successful it is in bringing in revenue.

If you eliminate spending money on what is not working, you’ll take a good step toward enhancing your bottom line through better marketing strategies.

3. Increase your prices

Increasing your prices can be a good way to improve your short-term sales and cash flow, but you must be careful.

Sometimes, you could lose a sale if customers can no longer see the value in buying your product at the new, higher cost you have set for it.

4. Sell your products in different ways

Stock that is not being sold is dead stock, even more so when it is sitting in your warehouse.

For this reason, you should take steps to sell your products in different ways. For instance, a lolly shop can sell its products as part of a pic n mix, in 100-gram bags, and as part of a gift basket.

By offering your products in different ways, you’ll likely sell more products much quicker.

5. Cross-sell and upsell

Cross-selling and upselling are terrific ways to entice customers to spend more money at the checkout.

Therefore, you should create bundles or packages based on specific items and related products to promote to your customers.

6. Improve your customer service

Your customer service might already be good. But is it world-class? Because that’s what you should be aiming for.

At the end of the day, the better the level of customer service you offer, the higher their degree of satisfaction. This, in turn, should result in greater loyalty and more repeat sales over time, and ultimately, a bigger boost to your bottom line.

7. Customer Reviews

According to this research, a whopping 90% of customers read online views before visiting or purchasing from a business. Some 85% of all reviews come from only four sites: Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor and Yelp.

Subsequently, if your business does not have many reviews on these sites, you should take steps to increase the number of them. A good way to do this is to ask or incentivise your current customers to post one.

8. Invest in staff recruitment and training

The most successful and profitable businesses hire good people and invest in training their staff to do their jobs as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Essentially, the better your staff are at their jobs, the more this will translate into increased sales, efficiency and overall customer satisfaction.

Therefore, you should dedicate sufficient resources to enhance the professional development of all your employees.

9. Automate processes or outsource functions

One of the main reasons for a faltering bottom line is that many resources are being wasted on labour-intensive activities that do not generate revenue.

While they might be an important part of your operation, many activities, such as marketing, invoices, and social media, can be automated or outsourced to third parties.

By doing this, you will save a lot of time and money, which can be better diverted to other parts of the business and directly improve your profit margin.

10. Follow your competitors

Lastly, you shouldn’t be afraid of your competition but rather see it as an opportunity to improve your overall business operation.

As much as you wouldn’t like to think so, invariably, your competitors are doing better than your company in certain areas – whether that be marketing, order delivery or customer service.

A good way to find out what they are doing well is to read their customer reviews. Common themes will soon arise, which you can investigate, even if you purchase directly from them in the name of research.

This will give you a good insight into what they are doing well and enable you to apply it to your business and processes.