With increasing use of email and electronic invoices, it is extremely important to keep in mind the role social media can play in increasing your sales through invoices. Till a couple of years ago, invoices were considered a dull topic which nobody was interested in. Now, everybody realizes the role invoices can play in helping your customers remember you and also refer new sales leads your way. We earlier covered the 7 must have features for invoice templates, in this post we will go a bit deeper to understand how to leverage social media to increase sales through Invoices. Before we look at the actual billing invoice design, let us look at the other ground work which goes in before that.
Step 1 – Identifying Social Media Channels to Leverage
- Blogs
These are the simplest social media channels to leverage while sending out invoices. Not all these channels work for every company. If you are a company making enterprise software it might not make a lot of sense to go with twitter, but do keep in mind that your customers are also humans and are most probably using these social channels for personal purposes. Even in a non-professional setting people can be influenced with the right messages. So what this means is your product might not be interesting enough to be shared virally, but if you can send a convincing message through social media it will be noticed and probably remembered.
Step 2 – Designing the Invoice for Social Media
Now that the social media channels have been identified, the business owner needs to make sure that all his marketing efforts leverage these channels. Invoices is just one of them. The commercial invoice design should keep in mind that the main objective is to educate people about the products/services and also to arouse their curiosity to find out more about them. To do this the following options are available:
- Provide images of your products/services in the bottom half of the Invoice to advertise your offerings.
- Describe a special offer and ask users to go to your social media channel to take advantage of the offer.
- Provide discounts to your Twitter followers/ Facebook fans.
- Have free giveaways (not an iPad, nobody will trust you) through your Social Media channels. e.g: A study on the latest trends in your industry
- Any other ideas which might interest people to go to your social media channels
Note: It is very important to not lose your customers trust, so never have misleading offers or dummy discounts.
You can either create these invoices from scratch or you can download some of the free invoice templates provided by Apptivo Invoice.
Step 3 – Developing your Social Media Channels to gain more customers.
Once the users interest is aroused through your invoice, the next step is developing your channels. Which we will address in the next post.
