How your clients can use credit card processing to grow their business

What if you could discover something new every day that could drive business growth and help your business reach its full potential?

With every new year that comes, business owners find themselves thinking of how they will make this year better than the last.  It is normal to have personal resolutions; but, as a business owner, it is imperative that you are constantly striving for growth.

Long gone are the days of knuckledusters and little black boxes that simply provided an authorization or decline to business owners.  For less than $500, business owners can implement a device that not only provides the basics for credit card processing but also provides analytics that could mean the difference between keeping their doors open or not.

Payment Marketing Turns Transactions Into Relationships

Most small business owners take on five or more roles within an organization.  The challenge with being pulled in so many directions is trying to find the balance between execution and customer service.  Marketing is always the first thing that falls by the wayside.  Local business owners’ biggest complaint about marketing is that it’s too expensive and too time-consuming.  They also aren’t sure if the marketing campaigns they do launch are returning any of their investment.

Here are just a few ways that credit card processing sales can help a business if they have the right equipment in place:

  1. Monthly sales show a business owner their customer’s spending behaviors, allowing them to take action, and have better targeting for future marketing campaigns.  Best of all, a business owner can see the impact of marketing efforts.
  1. Smart terminals allow a business owner to create profiles of customers and segment them by categories like new, repeat or local, so they can market to them more effectively.
  1. Smart terminals can provide analytics that allows business owners to scope out similar businesses in their area.  They can compare sales and consumer spending trends at those similar businesses.
  1. Smart terminals can integrate with a loyalty program.  Business owners can incent and reward their customers for their repeat business.
  1. Smart terminals can help business owners understand how the weather can impact their business.  Proactive business owners can then run specials to increase traffic on days when the weather would typically hurt them.

                        For instance, if a local restaurant owner finds that their sales decrease by 20% on rainy days, they can run “rainy day specials” and then review their sales to see if that boosted their revenue.

The credit union space needs to keep up with the latest technological advances.  This information is readily available and often times not discussed with small business owners.  Offering services that can increase sustainability to the small business population can differentiate a credit union from a regional or large financial institution that is more focused on their mid-market and large corporate clients.

Christina Camacho

Christina Camacho

Christina Camacho is the Founder and CEO of Ivy Lender. Christina spent her banking career working with SME businesses as well as Fortune 500 companies at the top Financial Institutions ... Web: www.ivylender.com Details