To succeed as a wholesale business, you need to ensure that your customers are always coming back to your store to make repeat purchases. In other words, you have to determine how to increase your wholesale order frequency.
If you’re like many businesses out there, you may not know how to go about doing this. After all, the task of boosting your wholesale order frequency can feel overwhelming. You probably don’t know where to begin. Not to mention understanding all the factors involved and how they work together can be challenging.
In this article, we’ll give you 3 pointers on how to boost the frequency of orders at your wholesale store. We’ll also go over some of the best WooCommerce tools that you can use to expedite the procedure. Let’s get into it!
Why You Need To Increase Your Wholesale Order Frequency
Re-ordering frequency is a great guiding metric for your wholesale business. For one thing, it lets you know if you have a problem with your wholesale customer happiness. For another, it’s a valuable growth indicator to follow if you want to monitor profitability.
Typically, a happy wholesale customer will order more frequently. So how do you increase the frequency of their orders without running constant sales like you often have to do on the retail side?
3 Best Ways To Increase Wholesale Order Frequency
How do you increase your wholesale order frequency?
There are three core components you should consider when addressing this question:
- Building an awesomely efficient ordering process
- Keeping in regular contact with your wholesalers
- Providing incentives for ordering more
Let’s explore these components in more detail!
1. Build an awesomely efficient ordering process
If you haven’t already, you should try to put yourself in the shoes of your wholesale customer.
Quite often, after they’ve ordered from you once or twice, they’ll want to get in, make the order, then get on with their day.
Without our wholesale plugins, here’s what a normal ordering process might look like for your wholesale customers:
- Login to the site
- Navigate back to the store (by default, WooCommerce drops you back to the My Account page after login)
- Click through categories, subcategories, and product explanations to find the product they’re after
- Repeat #3 until they have all the products they need in their cart (this can take quite a while if your catalog is designed to be browsed by retail customers)
- Find the cart to review the order
- Proceed to the checkout and make the payment
Our Wholesale Order Form plugin is designed to make ordering a little more fluid for these customers.
This plugin shortcuts steps 3 and 4 above. In addition, it makes 5 and 6 much quicker if you follow our guide to setting up an amazing wholesale ordering form.
If you use our wholesale plugins, here’s what the new streamlined process will look like for customers:
- Login to the site, then get redirected immediately to the Order Form (thanks to our Wholesale Lead Capture plugin)
- Search the table for products, then hit add to cart, which instantly places desired products in the cart without any page refreshing
- Review their orders in the sidebar cart widget (see our guide)
- Proceed to the checkout and make their payment (you can even give wholesale customers an invoice option if you want to use Wholesale Prices Premium)
2. Keep in regular contact with your wholesalers
To encourage a customer to make repeat orders, you should always strive to be at the front of their mind. Being in touch often reminds them of their need to order from you.
Many retailers miss out on this opportunity by perceiving themselves as “too busy” to write regular emails to their customers. This is a mistake, as constant email communication can actually trigger instant orders.
To ensure your messages are received positively, be creative with your emails. With that in mind, here are a few great ways you can stay in touch with your wholesalers:
- Send them resources like sales guides or promotional gear to help them sell more
- Ask them to fill in a survey and then send them the results in a follow-up email
- Let them know about any time-sensitive offers
- Send them a review email about any media mentions you’ve had, especially if it involves one of your wholesalers.
- Let them know about upcoming product launches
To reduce boredom and email fatigue, it’s all about mixing it up and providing some variety to your message. I’m sure you can come up with another dozen ideas on top of our shortlist.
Remember that the goal isn’t to “sell” to these people because you already have them signed up as wholesale customers. The goal is to keep your company in front of them as much as possible. The orders will come as a result of this regular contact.
Plus, it saves you from constantly chasing them and asking for orders!
3. Provide incentives for wholesale order frequency
One of the best ways to excite your wholesale customers is to offer higher volume price breaks.
Your mind might immediately jump to the “sales” model, where you continually send them tempting offers. This works well on the retail side, but wholesale customers are motivated differently, so I suggest trying another approach first.
First, separate your wholesalers into tiers to indicate their commitment to your company.
Then, dedicate some time to analyzing the recent orders from wholesalers in each tier. This will help you identify the customers who are on the cusp of meeting the minimum commitment for the next tier. Make a list of these customers.
Once you’ve compiled such a list, send personalized emails to the customers on it. Then, invite them to move up to the next tier level so that they can receive a price break on their orders.
To further enhance the effectiveness of your communication, you can illustrate the impact of this move on their business. Specifically, you can highlight the cost savings they can enjoy on the specific products they frequently order.
Conclusion
The fastest way to grow your company is to expand into new markets and sources of revenue. However, doing so requires a leap of faith. You need to be willing to take the risks involved in growing a business. In addition, you have to ensure that you’re not paying for growth too late in the game.
If you’re one of the many businesses that struggle to keep up with their wholesale customers, there are three great tactics you can employ to increase your wholesale order frequency. To recap, these are:
- Build an awesomely efficient ordering process
- Keep in regular contact with your wholesalers
- Provide incentives for wholesale order frequency
Do you have any questions about increasing the wholesale order frequency in your store? Let us know in the comment box below, or send us a message!
