How to increase your Avon sales

So you want to increase your Avon sales? Well you've come to the right place. I'm going to give you as many hints and tips as I can think of, but first of all for those of you who don't know, I'm going to tell you who I am and why I know that these hints and tips work. I'm Louise Antoine. I've just got married so previously I was Louise Hadfield and I am a top 50 UK Avon representative. At campaign 18, 2018 I have currently sold £75,000 worth of Avon in the previous 12 months and I'm standing at number 11 in the country. I joined Avon in 2002 needing £50 per month extra income. Today, Avon is my only income.

Ok that's me so here's my top tips on how to increase sales. 1) Tell everyone you know that you do Avon. It sounds simple but you would be surprised how many reps are too shy to tell people they're a rep. You would also be surprised how many potential customers want an Avon brochure but don't know where to get one and you'll be VERY surprised when people start asking to see the brochure as soon as they know you do Avon. Let's flip that. If they know you do Avon they may not buy from you but there's a chance they will. HOWEVER, if they don't know you do Avon they definitely won't buy from you. 2) Work more territory or work territory if you don't currently do so ~ Now I appreciate that going out in the cold and wet isn't always very appealing but seriously this is the easiest and quickest way to build your business and increase your sales. It is no accident that the top 50 reps order books in their 100's. Simply order 50 brochures and go and post them through letter boxes. Knocking first to see if the customer wants a book will make your books go further but blanket posting is more time efficient. I always leave a note asking them to tell me if they don't want a brochure. Leave them 3-4 days, go and collect them, take out the orders and replace the order forms and then go and post them out again as many times as you can within a campaign. From December 14th 2018, the UK reps will no longer be tied to working specific allocated streets. They will be able to go anywhere. Rather than seeing this as a negative thing, (as in, other reps may try to steal my customers...they can try but customers are very loyal to repliable reps), see it as a positive. You can go out and prospect where ever you like. If you want to order 200 books and canvass all the streets where you live or across the border into another area, YOU CAN! All Avon ask is that you are respectful of customer wishes and of other reps customers. If a customer says they already have a rep back off. There's no harm in leaving a card with your details on in case their rep ever stops doing Avon but do not try to steal other reps customers. It's a big no-no. 3) Use 2 order forms per brochure with your regular customers ~ one for them, one for a friend. They may not take the hint but on the other hand they might. 4) Shops, offices, dentists, doctors, etc. ~ in fact anywhere where small groups of people congregate. So many reps miss this opportunity. Isn't it far easier to collect and deliver 4 orders to the same place than it is to deliver them all to different addresses one by one? People work in these places and they generally have a lunch break when they have nothing to do except browse magazines etc. Ask if it's OK to leave a brochure for their "staff room" and then set up a time to come and collect it. Leave one brochure with about 5 or 6 order forms. 5) Do raffles ~ How? simply put together a collection of your left over stock as a prize. Buy a book of cloakroom tickets from your local pound shop. Attach a ticket to each order form with a note saying order £x or more (or simply place an order) and you will be entered into a prize draw to win XYZ (whatever your prize is). When they place an order write their name on the ticket and place in a hat. To keep it all above board you must not charge and entry fee and you cannot charge them anymore for the product than the brochure price.

6) Sell at car boots & school fairs ~ check with the car boot organiser to see if trade people are allowed. You can set your own prices on the products you are selling so this can be very lucrative if you've acquired products free or cheap. It's also a great idea on the run up to Xmas to make up gift baskets to sell at school fairs that people can buy on the day. 7) Share your link to your store at every opportunity ~ This is a no brainer. It goes back to tip number one. If they don't know you have one they won't order from it. Getting your store noticed and increasing sales through your store is a whole separate topic, and I am writing a blog about this but for now you simply share your link at every opportunity. Whenever you post to Facebook or Instragram (which I think is better) include a link to your store. Use hashtags #. Hashtags will enable people to see your posts when they are searching online for that particular topic. Make your hashtags relevant but not all Avon-ish. Yes have a hashtag #Avon but, for example, the Penguin tealights featured in the Brightest Christmas Ever campaign may also appeal to #penguin lovers as well as people looking for #ChristmasGifts and customers shopping for unusual #tealights. Obviously keep context and don't bombard people, but regularly and consistently share posts. It could be an Avon offer (Black Friday deals is hot at the time I write this), it could be a snippet of news about Avon or it could be a video of the latest Avon advert. There's lots of ideas in the Social Media Centre and on the Rep Hub. There's also Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and LinkedIn that you can share content to (but only if you have an account set up...hint,hint). The trick is to keep on doing it even if you think you're not getting results. It takes time to build up and it will not build off one or two posts.

8) Share the Instant brochure ~ The instant brochure can be a fantastic tool. It is NOT a replacement for the paper brochure. It is an additional tool that you can send quickly to several people at the same time via Whatsapp or Facebook messenger. In whatsapp you can create a broadcast message by tapping on the dots at the right hand side and then on New broadcast. Simply add the numbers of your friends who don't see a regular paper brochure attach the link in the body of the message and hit send. Your friend then can view a condensed version of the brochure, add things to their basket and send that basket back to you via whatsapp and you then simply add the products onto your next order. Repeat this is not a substitute for the paper brochure. If you have a customer who orders regularly from the paper brochure why would you want them to see a condensed version? This is for those people who don't see a brochure, and who may want to. It costs you nothing to try. It's also useful for those customers who have seen a paper brochure and haven't had time to look. You want your brochure back, and they've still got something to look at. 9) Host Facebook parties ~ This does require you investing in stock. Buy products cheap from the customer clearance (not First Look clearance as these are non-returnable unless you have another way of selling them if they don't sell at the party), or from the main brochure when on offer and then set up a Facebook group for your parties. Advertise the group and add as many of your Facebook friends as you can. Get your friends to add their friends and build your audience over time. Set up an event in Facebook directing people to your group on the date you are going to host your party, then all you do is post pictures of your products with the price you want to charge (make sure it's a bargain for your customer) and then the first few people to comment get the goods. So for example, if you have 3 of something the first 3 people to comment get it. It helps if you write your text beforehand and copy and paste the text into each post to keep the pace moving. Start with a roll call to see who's there and every so often throw in a competition to win a prize. The first person to answer correctly wins. At the end of the party just scroll back through all the posts and write out order forms for successful bidders. 10) Sell on eBay ~ At one time selling on eBay was frowned upon. Now it is perfectly acceptable and is sanctioned by Avon. Check out the Advertising guidelines on the Avon representative website and you'll see a code of conduct. If you comply with eBay's code of conduct then you automatically comply with Avon's. Again this option requires buying stock in advance. You set your own prices on eBay so you only have to have due regard for what the competition are selling at. There is loads of information about how to sell on eBay on eBay's website so I'm not going to go into that in depth. When you sell I always recommend selling at fixed price. This will enable you to sell multiple quantities of the same item from the same listing. So if you have 10 supershock mascaras, for example, 10 will be available to buy on eBay. Offer free shipping (of course cover the shipping costs along with eBay/Paypal fees in the cost of your item). Do research to see what other people are listing and see if they're selling successfully by clicking on advanced search and ticking the "completed listing" box when deciding what to buy. I trade on eBay as The Ding Dong Bazaar Ltd and it's worth a visit there to see how I'm set up. One caveat the above applies to Avon UK. Other marketplaces have different rules with regard to selling on eBay so if you are from outside the UK check before doing so. It is also possible to sell on Amazon but not for the faint hearted. Amazon idiosyncrasies can make it a nightmare for those who don't know what they're doing so you need a mentor to show you the ropes. I do mentor people but can only take on one at a time and I will only ever mentor people within our own team of representatives. 11) Sell on a market stall ~ Ok this is one I've never tried myself but know plenty of people who do and make a very decent living doing so. You will need a licence and you will need a stall which you can find information about on your local authority website. You need to assess whether or not the money you may make would outweigh the costs involved with setting it up. Again like other ways of selling this would require the purchase of stock and quite a bit of stock too, as people going to a market don't want to see a half empty stall, so you would have to be serious about making this work. Again you would set your own prices and you'd be looking for stock to buy at bargain basement prices to ensure you made a profit. The advantage of this over eBay/Amazon is that your stall price will be fixed (whereas eBay/Amazon take a percentage of every sale) and there's no shipping costs, so once you've covered the cost of the stall, everything else you make is profit. The more you sell the more money you will make. 12) Advertise your business ~ This goes back to making sure as many people as possible know that you do Avon. I have car magnets on the sides and rear of my car which you can get cheaply from Vistaprint and I have had a jacket printed with my Avon, my name and phone number on which I ordered from www.clothes2order.com. I have been stopped in the street on numerous occasions and been asked for a brochure. Now I'm not suggesting for one second that you run out and spend 100's of £'s on promotional material straight away. This is something you would do over time but there are lots of promotional products on the Avon reps website and there are promotional posters that can be downloaded in the "My Campaign Tools" section that wouldn't break the bank. Then there is Google Adwords and Bing Ads. A lot of the top reps are using the latter two channels to advertise their businesses and I've had quite a bit of success myself. You set up an advert and bid for the keywords. If you win the bid then when someone is searching for that keyword online your advert will appear and if the person clicks on your advert (which takes them to your store) that's when you pay. So you only pay when someone clicks your advert. You set the maximum amount you're prepared to bid and a maximum budget overall so you don't end up with a surprise bill at the end of the month. To be fair I usually spend as much on advertising through Google as I make in profit when I've tried this, but it's useful to give your orders an extra boost if you're trying to achieve presidents club or a special incentive. Both platforms do free advertising vouchers (e.g. spend £25 and we'll give you £100) for new advertisers so it's worth searching for these online.

So there you go. My top tips for increasing your Avon sales. I'm sure there are more that I've not covered so please feel free to share yours in comments below. I'm also going to publish this article on my own website www.makeup2udirect.co.uk and I will add more tips there as I think of them so please be sure to checkout my website too.