Selling flowers online or offline is not a road covered in roses (pun intended!). with skyrocketing existing competition, there seems to be a new florist emerging every day. In this situation, it is not a joke to stay afloat and make a sustainable profit out of your floral business.

But does that mean that you should quit? Absolutely not! After all, every problem has its solution. So, if you know how to strategically handle the critical aspects of your flower shop business plan, you’ll surely see yourself soaring through.

Here in this article, we have discussed at length about how to effectively grow your flower business in 2023. Keep reading to know more. And if you want an even easier way out, try Hana Florist POS. Hana Florist POS is a special point of sale system made especially for flower businesses like yours. Packed with useful features, Hana Florist POS makes all aspects of your business so easy to deal with.

Improve online presence

First thing first, if you are an online or hybrid seller, you must have an ecommerce website. However, if you only have a physical shop and don’t sell flowers online, we still recommend having an informative website about your business. Not just website, having a strong online presence increases any business’s credibility and also attracts customers. So, in order to strengthen your online presence, take the following measures:

1. Optimize your website

 Optimizing your existing website will help you in numerous ways. It will improve user experience, search engine rankings, website loading speed, and even conversion rates. In order to quickly fix existing issues and modify your website for better performance, optimize the following aspects:

• Improve website loading speed: a slow website will frustrate the visitors and they’ll move on to the competitor site at a glance
• Optimize content: check the existing content and update them according to current times, trends, and requirements to stay relevant and offer customers what they are looking for
• Increase security: a https secured and encrypted website is a must-have nowadays. Don’t ignore this aspect
• Use relevant keywords: in order to attract organic traffic and also to provide better solutions to your customers’ problems

2. Mobile app is a must-have

A website is not enough in 2023. If you want to truly create an impact and maximize your outreach, you must have a mobile app for your business too. This will:

• Improve customer engagement: customers in 2023 spends way more time on mobile than on any other device. Leveraging this and offering personalized experiences through apps will surely go in favor of your business
• Increased sales: you will be able to attract all users having a smartphone through your app, even if they don’t have a PC or laptop
• Competitive edge: it will offer you a competitive edge over others, as you will be able to offer unique features and benefits through the app

3. Profiles on all social media channels

Social media is one of the biggest game-changers in 2023. It is of utmost importance that you have a well-established presence on all major social media platforms including facebook, Instagram, youtube, snapchat, twitter, and linkedin. Social media allows you to:

• Increase brand awareness: it provides a platform to spread awareness about your brand to a large number of audience
• Direct engagements with customers: you can interact with customers directly and get to know about their requirements, complaints, and pain points
• Increased web traffic: a strong social media presence will allow you to redirect traffic to your website, lead generation and conversion
• Cost-effective marketing: social media is free to use. Even if you decide to run paid marketing campaigns, it is more cost-effective than other ways of paid marketing. 

4. Google My Business

Google My Business is a free tool that lets you register and showcase your business on google. You can control and maintain your online presence easily with this feature. Google My Business benefits your business in many ways, such as:

• It makes your business visible in google maps. When someone searches the local area for a flower shop, they will be able to find yours easily
• This improves your credibility and trustworthiness in customer’s mind. 
• It is a budget-friendly way of advertising your business with the most powerful search engine.

Hana Florist POS can help you a lot in this stage. It will help you optimize your website, or create a new one if you don’t have any, and also help in building an app. It will also provide valuable insights on how to manage your social media profiles or Google business pages.

Maximize business growth

After you take care of your online presence and make sure you have a strong foothold in the world of internet, it’s time to look into your business strategies and introduce some much-needed changes. 

1. Track revenue periodically

First of all, you need a very powerful analytics tool in order to track several metrics related to your business. One of the must-track metrics will be your revenue. It is important to track and analyze your revenue every month in order to know how your business is performing. It is required not only for measuring your success, but also to know whether you’re meeting your financial goals. It lets you know whether your business is growing at a desired pace. Overall, it is a good practice for financial management.

2. Introduce new products regularly

Regularly introduce new styles and designs in your bouquets, floral arrangements, and other floral products. It will help you stay ahead of competition and attract both new and existing customers. Flower lovers will always look forward to your floral designs when they want something unique and new. It will improve your brand name significantly.

3. Free delivery and store pick-up options

Enabling free doorstep delivery is a great option to immediately give your customers a reason to choose you! after all, everyone loves it when they get good value out of their money. Another great option to offer your customers is the ‘Buy online, pick-up at store’ offer. This allows a customer to purchase their favorite flowers online at their convenience. However, they don’t have to wait around at home to receive the delivery, as they can just pick it up from their nearest outlet at a time convenient to them.

4. Partnerships with local businesses

Partnering with local florists is a great way to expand your business. A local business always appeals to the emotional side of a customer. A local business is better aware of their customers’ needs and preferences. By partnering with them, you can leverage all these benefits.

5. Improved customer service

No business can survive for too long if they’re not making their customers happy. If you too have not been paying attention to this side of your business, it’s high time to rectify that mistake. Thanks to AI, it’s now very easy to offer AI-supported customer service 24×7. The AI-based customer support can handle all primary problems related to customers and their orders, and escalate the more complex ones to human representatives. So, have this option at your website now! Also, think of other ways to increase customer satisfaction and improve the services offered.

Hana Florist POS can revolutionize how you optimize your business strategies. Firstly, it comes with a superior analytics feature. You can track several metrics related to business growth such as website traffic, conversion rate, customer acquisition cost, revenue, churn rate, and more. These analytics data will help you take better business decisions. Secondly, it helps you to set up AI-powered customer support that is available 24×7. This will help improve customer satisfaction a lot. Thirdly, Hana Florist POS can automate all backend operations and manage them smoothly, and in an error-free way. For example, it can take orders, check whether all the necessary materials are available in the inventory, assign delivery agents for orders, and mark an order as ‘Completed’ after it is delivered to its destination. These features not only makes the process faster but also reduces your operational cost.

Marketing strategies

Next up, it’s time to create some highly targeted marketing strategies for your restructured floral business. In order to attract more and more traffic, generate more leads and convert them into customers, increase your outreach and social media followers, and in general, grow your business, it is essential that you take marketing seriously.

Look into the following things in order to achieve this goal:

1. Local SEO

As a florist offering service to a limited geographical area, it is of optimum importance to you that you take care of local SEO. This means, when someone makes a search with keywords related to your services along with mentions of your local area, you should have a good ranking on search results. This will help local customers discover your service in an organic way, and help you acquire more customers easily.

2. Google Merchant Center

Google Merchant Center is a tool that allows online businesses to upload their product data to Google, making it available to users of Google Shopping, Google Search, and other Google services. By creating a Google Merchant Center account, businesses can submit information about their products, including images, pricing, and other details, such as product descriptions and availability. This information is then used by Google to display the products in search results and in Google Shopping.

3. Top-notch product descriptions

Product descriptions play a critical role in SEO, as well as in making a sale. Write all your product descriptions in a compelling way that answers to the customers’ questions, and inspires them to make a purchase. Use relevant keywords in order to increase SEO score. Having high quality, zoomable product photos is another requirement along with writing product descriptions. Since in case of online ordering, a customer cannot check out the products themselves, product descriptions and product pictures should give them as vivid an idea about them as possible.

4. Helpful blogs for organic traffic

Introducing a blog section on your website is a very helpful way of increasing your SEO score and generating organic traffic. The primary purpose of your blog section should be to educate and inform your audience about your products and services. However, it should be formed in a way that not only blindly promotes your business, rather, provide helpful answers to the readers’ questions. Blogs should be able to genuinely help out the readers by providing useful solution to their problems. Including relevant links to your products and services will help redirect the traffic to your product pages. This will increase your organic reach and help you build a sustainable customer base.

5. Email marketing

Email marketing is still a powerful tool for a floral business. You can do so many things with it if you know hoe to properly use it. From offering personalized purchase suggestions to offering exclusive discount coupons, and from new product announcements to sending the bestsellers list- email marketing does it all. Email marketing allows you to communicate with your audience in a very effective and yet budget-friendly way. From lead generation to increasing sales, you can do everything with email marketing.

6. Personalization

In order to establish yourself as the leading florist in the area, you must also apply a few personalization techniques to offer your visitors an even better experience. It increases your brand loyalty, customer engagements, and overall sales. In order to offer customers a personalized experience, here are a few things that you can do:

• First-time user discount: offer a nice discount for first-time users when they make their first purchase
• Product recommendations: offer product recommendations based on their past purchases, so that they don’t have to search a lot for what they are looking for. Also show them popular products that are trending, so that they can stay updated on current trends
• Complementary purchase suggestions: if someone is buying an anniversary bouquet, suggest them to purchase a candles set or a chocolate baskets as accompaniments. Or, if someone has bought a Mother’s Day flowers last year, remind them to make a purchase this year too.

7. Offline events

Hosting exciting offline events at your local area is another great way to market and promote your floral business. Host a flower-bouquet-making workshop, or arrange for a flower-painting competition with the children in your area. You can also arrange for social events, quizzes, or seminars, and spread awareness about your work and business. Later, you can post these pictures and stories at your social media feeds to inform and educate even more of your target audience.

8. User-generated content

Using user-generated content for marketing your business is a great idea that yields very good desirable results. Encourage your customers to leave reviews. The negative reviews will help rectify your mistakes, while you can use the positive ones for promotions, and show them off to attract more customers. Not only that, arrange for special events like a selfie contest, or a video contest. Ask your customers to post selfies or videos with flowers purchased from your store, and offer the best ones a free gift or a discount coupon.

9. Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is huge right now. When done right, you can leverage the huge follower count of an influencer and reach out to thousands of potential customers. Choose an influencer whose field of work, values, aesthetic sense, and interests align with yours in order to make sure that you are reaching out to the right kind of audience. Influencer marketing helps you big time to showcase your products to a large number of people when you don’t have that kind of follower count yet.

Sales strategies

After marketing, you should also apply some sales strategies to give your overall revenue a boost. You need to apply these sales strategies occasionally and for a short period of time in order to maximize their effectiveness by creating a fear-of-missing-out feeling on your audience. Here goes:

1. Product bundling

Simply put, product bundling is offering two or more of your products as a packaged deal. When a customer buys the bundle, they get it at a reduced price than their individual cost. This encourages customers to try out bundled products. It is beneficial for both customers and your business. As customers, they get better value for their money, whereas as a business, your products sell more.

2. Upselling and cross-selling

Upselling and cross-selling are age-old sales techniques. When a customer chooses a floral bouquet worth $100, and you suggest them to try out a similar but more elaborate one priced $125, it is called upselling. Whereas, when a customer buys a Valentine’s Day flower bouquet, and you suggest them to buy a stuffed toy or a box of chocolates to go with the bouquet, that is called cross-selling. Upselling and cross-selling are effective ways of making more sales for the business. But that’s not all, when done in a right way, effective upselling and cross-selling also increase customer satisfaction by being helpful and relevant.

3. Free gifts

Who doesn’t like freebies? Using free gifts as a sales strategy is a very good way to impress your customers. However, while offering free gifts along with a purchase, you should keep in mind a few things. When you offer product B for free with product A, B is perceived as an item cheaper than its original price, while A is perceived to be an item more expensive than its original price. So, after the deal is over, customers tend to buy product A more and ignore product B. so, when you decide to offer free gifts, it is a good idea to create smaller and limited-time special items to give away for free.

4. Limited time deals

Limited time deals create a sense of hustle in customers, and that increases sales. This sense of urgency is mixed with a sense of scarcity, i.e. the products that are offered in limited time deals are limited in number. So, this makes the customers to quickly take a decision to purchase the items before the deal is over. Limited time deals also have other benefits. It increases website traffic a lot for a period of time. Also, if you have excess supplies in your inventory, you can create limited time products with them and clear out the existing stock.

5. Loyalty programs

It is a fact that a business spends thrice as much to acquire a new customer than to retain an older one. So, when you have the chance, you should go above and beyond to retain your old customers and encourage them to make as many repeat purchases as possible. In exchange, offer them loyalty points that they can use for discounts and special deals offered by you. this creates a positive experience for customers and also prevents them from navigating off to other flower sellers. This gives you a competitive advantage and helps you create a loyal customer base.

In 2023, running a flower business comes with many challenges. Here in this article, we have tried to discuss all possible hurdles and the effective solutions to overcome them. If you follow these strategies at every step of your business execution, rest assured, your revenue will increase manifolds and you will earn a brand name of yourself which will be the best in your area. Hana Florist POS will help you do all these things in an even faster and better way. So, what are you waiting for? Get Hana Florist POS now!