How to Increase Online Sales with Multi-Channel Offers

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase—“don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

While the online world is replete with opportunities, many brands simply rely on one channel to reach prospects.

In marketing, that’s a huge no-no, as you could be missing out on huge segments of your audience who could benefit from your products and services.

By selling across multiple channels that don’t all depend on one system or platform, you’ll elevate your business’s chances for success.

Today, Ignite Visibility CEO John Lincoln is going to discuss how to create a too-good-to-pass-up offer that will generate leads, as well as break down how to put the offer at the center of your multi-channel marketing mix.

Ready to increase online sales? Let’s get started!

What We’ll Cover:

• Why Take a Multi-Channel Approach?

• Publish An Industry Study

• Invite Customers to An Event

• Create An Online Course

• Design A Quiz

• Offer A Free Session

• Now that You’ve Created an Offer, What Comes Next?

Why Take a Multi-Channel Approach?

Multi-channel marketing allows brands to engage with customers where they want, when they want, and how they want. In other words, it involves using multiple channels to communicate with leads and customers at various stages of the customer journey.

Some of the key advantages a multi-channel marketing approach brings to the table include:

• Increased awareness: The more channels you use to communicate with customers, the more they’ll see of your brand. Casting a wider net to facilitate engagement means you’ll remain top-of-mind with interested parties who are still on the fence about buying from you.
• Consistent messaging: A multi-channel method means you have the chance to present a consistent, streamlined message across different touchpoints. By delivering the right message at the right time, you can continue to deliver it over and over, reinforcing your offerings and making sure that message really hits home.
• More data to work with: In order to increase online sales, you need to have enough data to inform your future marketing strategies. More channels result in more information collected about your customers. That way, you can determine what’s working for your customers and what’s not and refine your strategy accordingly.

In order to engage your audience via a multi-channel approach, you have to offer them something in return for their business.  Let’s explore some of those options:

Publish An Industry Study

The quickest way to become a leader in your industry is by publishing an industry study that’s available for customers to download. It’s one of the most effective tactics if you want to position yourself as an industry expert and attract more clients.

The goal here is to offer a study that is relevant to your audience and showcases a need your company can fulfill. But remember—it should relate specifically to what you’re trying to sell.

You can use Ignite Visibility’s industry study as a source of inspiration. In it, we explain how marketing budgets will be distributed over the next 3 years.

Remember—ebooks and white papers fall under the industry study category as well, balancing industry data with brand solutions. Be sure to include links to your content within the study as people will find your research more valuable, which will increase online sales in the long run.

RELATED: 7 Steps To Create An Industry Study 100+ Websites Feature

Invite Customers to an Event

The event options for today’s marketers are limitless. As long as you invite customers to an event where they can learn something, you’re halfway there.

And unlike 20 years ago, modern marketing events can take many forms like:

• Social media-based events: These span Instagram meet-ups, Twitter chats, Google+ Hangouts, and Facebook groups.
• Webinars: Virtual events allow marketers and other professionals to interact with leads and customers. You can opt to include live chats and resource sharing to generate more engagement.
• Live streaming events. If you have an event taking place in a physical location, you can stream it via video over social media or on your branded website. To get more leads, include a landing page with a registration form and include the link in your social media posts, ads, and email newsletters.
• Local events: In-person events like conferences, conventions, giveaways, and promotions allow you to have some much-needed face time with your customers. Again, advertise these events on social media and create a dedicated landing page for optimal visibility.

You can narrow down your event choices by answering these questions:

• What is my ultimate goal for this event?
• Which pain points will I be addressing?
• Am I trying to reach attendees at the local, regional, national, or international level?
• What is my event timeline?
• What is my marketing budget?
• Is this a one-time event or an event that will be offered numerous times for different user groups in different locations?
• Will it be offered online, offline, or both?
• Is my brand established or budding?

Your answers to each of these questions will guide your event marketing strategy and tell you whether it can be offered in several different media or is best planned as a local or virtual event.

Create an Online Course

Creating an online course is another surefire way to increase authority within your niche and connect with your customers in a meaningful way.

If you’re still wondering how to increase online sales this way, according to TechJury, eLearning has expanded income by more than 40% for U.S. organizations. So, it’s safe to say it’s a pretty profitable endeavor.

Before creating your course, ask yourself—“Who is my ideal student?” “How will this class differentiate me from my competitors?”

Once you’ve got those questions hammered out, you want to select a topic and a platform best suited for your audience. How do they like to receive information?

Luckily, there are several tools available to create a course that will deliver content in the most impactful way possible.

Some of my favorites include Canva, MailChimp, Zapier, Zoom, and Thikific. The best part is that they’re all free!

Design a Quiz

If you surf through the web, chances are you’ll see many people caught up on online quizzes—sharing the findings on social media and commenting on the results.

Fortunately, quizzes don’t have to just be for fun—they can be fully integrated into your marketing strategy to encourage two-way communication with customers and increase online sales.  Even though 87% of marketers consider interactive content to outperform static content, it’s a largely underutilized marketing tactic.

What’s great about quizzes is that it gives customers the opportunity to learn something new about themselves. For example, you could offer a quiz entitled “Are you really a good digital marketer? Take this quiz to find out.” Boom—you now have exclusive information about your customers that you can then leverage to nurture them until conversion.

A few things to keep in mind here when creating your quiz:

• Make sure the theme is relevant and fits your business theme.
• Generate positive, shareable results so people will be more likely to share the outcomes with friends and family.
• Keep it brief and avoid asking questions that are too nuanced or complex. They should be simple enough to collect data regarding their specific tastes and preferences.

Once you’ve launched your quiz, advertise it through all the different networks online and develop a cost per acquisition to increase micro-conversions. You can even add pop-ups to your website and once someone clicks on it, they’re taken directly to the quiz.

The sidebar of your blog, as well as your email newsletter, are a few other spots you can use to promote the quiz.

Obviously you’re going to want to set up an email nurturing sequence and/or ad nurturing sequence from anyone who fills out the information on these pages. This can lead into what would become a macro conversion or the final nail in the coffin—a successful purchase.

Offer a Free Session

This is a fan favorite among marketers. Offering a free session or consultation is an ideal way to capture qualified leads who are genuinely interested in buying from you.

With free sessions, there’s a higher barrier to entry when compared to other lead magnets. The visitor isn’t just giving you their email address in exchange for a free white paper; they’re investing time and energy in setting up a time to see what you can give them that another business can’t.

To transform leads into loyal customers, you need to prove you’re worth it.

Like the other offers on this list, you need to create a killer landing page so the customer won’t be able to pass up an incredible opportunity to work with you.

Now that You’ve Created an Offer, What Comes Next?

There’s a final step in this process that many marketers tend to overlook.

You’ve created this amazing offer, but how do you actually apply it on your website?

Your website should ALWAYS be a priority if you’re trying to boost your revenue potential and increase online sales. After all, you’re going to allocate all those offers to different areas of your website so that you can engage your customers more effectively and drive value.

These customers will then get cookied into a remarketing sequence. From there, you would serve these offers to them based on the pages that they visited because the topic of those specific pages applies to those specific offers.

Wrapping Up

There you have it—now you know how to increase online sales by creating an offer that your customers will love, as well as how to syndicate it to different places online and put it at the forefront of your multi-channel marketing strategy.

By giving your customers a consistent experience on the channel of their choice, you’ll significantly improve your odds of success in no time.