Saving extra cash is crucial for businesses through this down economy. Below are some simple ideas to potentially help save your company big dollars. While some tasks below are at an intern level (not paying them isn't one of the ideas, we were all interns once), they might just save enough extra bucks to make the holiday season a joyous one.
Spend Less for New Customers & Get Fast Feedback
An intern, or business owner with enough time, can scour search.twitter.com. You say you sell refrigerators? Awesome. Searching Broken Refrigerator brings back a tweet/day about potential customers complaining about their broken refrigerator. What a great opportunity to contact, offer an incentive, and sell. Feed numerous queries through a reader and get your Twitter sales stream going. If the tweet is providing a solution to an obvious need, it's hard to deem these tweets spammy.
There was also one very trouble college student with a broken refrigerator who was chilling beers in a wet sock in front of his air conditioner. Wow, I really don't miss college.
Next, searching “online deals” on 12/8 brought back Walmart Cyber Monday ads. While Walmart isn't in the same position as the “not so big anymore” three, relevant ads are vital for a successful PPC campaign for any company.
Does your PPC manager have attention to detail? Conversion rates dropping even .25% can have a major impact on revenues. An ad displaying Cyber Monday deals leading to a page with no Cyber Monday deals is guaranteed to be an extremely unprofitable conversion rate. Be relevant with your PPC advertisements & landing pages to make the most of your budget.
Conversion rates. If your business bring in 30,000 visitors/month and the average customer spends $100/order, upping your conversion rate from 1.5% to 1.75% will bring in an extra $90,000 in sales over a year. Still don't have the time/money to hire a usability expert?
An extremely affordable way to receive feedback on your site without spending a few thousand on a usability expert is to put out a HIT on mturk.com. A reasonable payment per HIT is $.40. You can receive feedback on your site and processes in a day for under $10. Can't beat that with a stick.
Do the Green Thing
Going green always makes you feel better, why not get paid for it too? BoxCycle.com is one of a dozen sites that will pay for your unwanted boxes. While it may only be enough to pay the intern, something is always better than nothing.
You don't have boxes? You already laid people off? Perfect. Take the extra software that isn't being used and sell it back to WeBuySoft.com. This company will buy back Office, Photoshop, Corel and numerous other software products. Save money AND clean out house.
