Are you ready to pickup some extra sales in the evenings? Photo via Pexels

Being open later hours in the evenings is hard for a lot of small businesses, but we have an easy promotion for you to make more sales later in the day.

Reach out to your existing customers, and let them know you have a new service:

Call ahead, and we’ll have it ready for you!

Think about your customers’ lives. They’re busy when they get off work at 5. They have a lot of errands to run, and yours may or may not be a priority. Let’s make it easier for them.

Tell your customers they can call, text, Messenger or email you with an order by 2pm, and you’ll have it ready for them to pick up after 5pm.

Then during the slower parts of the day, you can assemble the orders, ring them up and get them ready for a quick pick up.

You can pick the channels, so if email doesn’t work well with your workday, then don’t offer it. You can pick the times, so if 2pm is the wrong time, you can change that. If you want to set an end time, you can do that, too.

Credit for suggesting this promotion goes to our friend Rob Hatch.

More ideas for selling more in evening hours

Deb Brown and I share more ideas like this in our latest webinar at SaveYour.Town, Downtown After 5. We know this matters to you because in our Survey of Rural Challenges, you ranked staying open later hours as one of the top small business challenges.

The Downtown After 5 lesson is available on-demand starting Tuesday August 28, 2018, and it is only available for two weeks. If you sign up now, you can also participate in the live Q&A session September 4. We welcome your questions, stories and examples from your own town.

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About Becky McCray

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband own a retail liquor store in Alva, Oklahoma, and a small cattle ranch nearby. Becky is an international speaker on small business.

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