Where’s your time going?

Work Smart Not Hard Tip No. 3 in a series written for Indie Cambs

A few weeks ago I spoke to a business owner who had been spending between five and six hours a day on social media.

Between five and six hours…

A day…

He’d become convinced that posting new content and interacting with other people’s content on Facebook and Instagram was essential to keep his business visible and of course got sucked into endless scrolling and comparisons of how his accounts compared to his competitors.
He had no way of telling if these activities generated any business so decided to stop completely to see if it made any difference.

It didn’t.

What he’s doing now is concentrating on bringing in repeat business from existing customers and increasing the value of each order and he’s seeing an immediate upturn in profits.

In the first Work Smart Not Hard tip we talked about the fact that given the choice between having more time or more money most business owners chose more time, so as well looking at how making more money enables us to buy more time by systemising and outsourcing we need to check that we’re using what time we have in the most profitable way.

There’s a lot of research that shows it costs between 6 to 7 times more to get a new customer vs. getting more orders from the customers we already have. Increasing order value is another really profitable use of time.

When it comes to getting new orders from existing customers, email wins every time.

According to new survey data from Digital Commerce 360 and Bizrate Insights, email is the most influential retail-marketing channel. It impacts purchases, including online sales, more often than social media, paid-search or influencers. Perhaps most interestingly, direct mail comes in right behind email as a driver of online sales.

This makes a lot of sense because the people you’re emailing already know you, and if you did a good job the first time they bought from you, they trust you.

So when it comes to making the most profitable use of the time you have, collecting email addresses from customers and keeping in touch in ways that encourage them to buy again and refer a friend is right at the top of the list and, unlike social media, you own the contacts.

Have you changed the way you use your time to make your business more profitable? There are lots of other ways to do this that we’ll look at next time!

If you’d like to talk this through and find out what would work for you, get in touch and let’s chat.