For a business owner, sales promotions or more commonly known as offers, are nothing new of the sort. Businesses employ time-limited sales from time to time to gain new customers, conversions and increase sales. It’s a fool-proof eCommerce marketing strategy that works every time.
Now, you must be thinking to yourself, “if every business knows about sales promotion strategy, then how are we doing it differently?”. And if you are not thinking this way, then you should. More than 90% of the consumers use coupons to make a purchase, that’s a huge market. As mentioned above, sales promotion is nothing new, it is an ever-green effective marketing strategy, but the timing and the way you promote these sales strategies is what makes you stand out from your competitors and increase business.
The eCommerce market is huge and the competition is tough. The only way you can stand apart from the competition and gain attention is by personalizing the shopping experience and giving your customers something they can’t refuse.
In this article, we will discuss sales promotional strategies that will help you cover both points mentioned above and increase sales. Let’s get started!
1. How to Make an Effective Sales Promotion Strategy
Every sales promotion strategy is different, but the goal remains the same, “get customers to your website or make a sale happen”. All strategies are created to make this step happen, and once it does, your job is halfway done. Now the shopping experience, customer service, and product quality will determine if the customer wants to do business with you again.
But to get to this scenario, there is a lot that needs to be planned out to create an effective sales promotion strategy. Let’s break it down into simple steps:
Choosing an Audience
You can’t just throw caution to the wind and market your product to everyone. Many businesses employ this strategy, and not only is it ineffective, but it also exhausts your resources and gives poor results. The right course of action is to define an audience, those that can benefit from your products or services, and target them personally for better conversion rates. The more relevant your brand is for a person, the more they will be intrigued by it.
Determining Goals
You have an increased 30% chance of success if you list your goals rather than just stating them. Determining goals is a key step when creating a strategy. You need to list what you want this strategy’s outcome to be. Do you want to increase sales or conversions? Do you want to increase traffic or have people sign-up for your newsletter?
Creating Urgency
Your offers need to be enticing, they need to be actionable, and they need to be limited. Promotional sale strategies are all about creating urgency in a short period. Here we can use two of the principles of human psychology which roughly translates to “Fear of Missing Out” and “People follow the masses”. We will discuss below how you can incorporate these psychologies in your strategies.
Promoting
What’s the use of your amazing sale, if people can’t see it? You need to promote your sales on multiple platforms such as emails, social media, Facebook, Instagram, SMS, etc. where your customers are active. The more visible you are, the higher your chances of achieving the decided goal.
Analyze Results
Once your sales promotion is over, it’s important to analyze the results and see which areas were successful and what can be improved for the next time. Comparing your results with other sales promotions or competition is a great way to keep improving your strategy.
2. Increase Conversions with the Best Sales Promotional Techniques
Let’s discuss some of the most effective sales promotion techniques and also share actionable insights on how to enable them on your website.
Give Free Samples or Trial
Anything labeled as free on your site is sure to give you a boost in your conversions. Quoting Perry Abbenante, Snack Factory vice president of marketing, “the conversion rate of the sampling efforts was between 25 and 30 percent” when offered for free.
The psychology behind free trials or products is that customers have nothing to lose and if they end up liking your product, they can turn into loyal customers.
Actionable Steps to Take
- Determine a target market and how your product can help them solve their problem.
- Offer product/service for free or on trial/subscription and reach out through emails to maximize future sales after product/service is used.
- Offer coupons or discounts for the first month if customers wish to continue.
- Make the cancellation process easy for subscriptions in case costumes want to terminate.
Provide Free Shipping
It has been researched that consumers find free shipping more valuable than a discount. More so that businesses have stated free shipping as 60% more effective than other marketing strategies. With such benefits, enabling this strategy on your website can help you achieve your goals faster.
For example, Asos is a fashion and cosmetics eCommerce store that offers and promotes “Premier Delivery” on their landing page, highlighting words like “Free” and “same-day delivery”, to encourage users to become premier members.
Actionable Steps to Take
- Collect customer data and create an email list to promote free shipping.
- Utilize social media platforms to promote free shipping.
- Advertise it on-site by highlighting it on the landing page, product page, and checkout.
- Use as many platforms as possible, see where your customers are most active, and how effective this strategy was for your store.
Pick a Loss Leader
This sale promotional strategy is usually employed by eCommerce and retail stores that choose few high-demand items and sell them at a cost price or even less. This pricing strategy is great for enticing customers to come to your online store and purchase more than just the discounted item.
For example, the Amazon Kindle is available for £129.99, which is certainly a loss leader for them, but the real profit stems from the add-ons such as apps, plugins, etc which Amazon upsells with the Kindle, thus increasing the overall order value.
Actionable Steps to Take
- Pick a high-demand item as the loss leader.
- Offer the product at cost price or lower.
- Upsell your product with add-ons and promote them through email marketing, or showing customized recommendations on-site to encourage customers.
In this pricing strategy, your loss leader product might not bring in much profit, but it will help in increasing brand awareness and increasing conversions. You also need to focus on how you can effectively upsell items with the loss leader product.
Engage in Giveaways
Even though this is not anything new, it is still worth mentioning. Giveaways started with retail stores, but now the exposure we can achieve with social media platforms, its importance keeps on increasing in eCommerce marketing. Giveaways provide the best opportunity for you to create buzz around your business and promote it effectively by providing customers with a gift or subscription month.
Take a look at Krispy Kreme’s marketing tactic, they are offering free doughnuts for a full year if you are getting vaccinated. Even though this is not increasing their profit, but it helps in gaining conversions and increasing brand awareness.
Actionable Steps to Take
- To run a giveaway, first, determine your audience and list your goals.
- Choose the product you want to giveaway and how it would be beneficial for your selected audience.
- Clearly state the rules of your giveaway, this depends on the goals you have determined.
- Promote the giveaway on multiple platforms.
- Analyze results.
Negotiate Prices
Another interesting way to increase conversion and engagement is to offer your customers the chance to bargain for their desired products. Customers love to negotiate and if they feel like they can control the price, they will be more interested in buying. You can easily enable this feature by using WooCommerce Make-an-Offer plugins. Moreover, this tactic is also great for increasing trust and engagement, which is a must for retaining customers.
Actionable Steps to Take:
- Either add this option on all products or select a few.
- Add an enticing CTA on the product page.
- Use this opportunity to cross-sell products or services.
Use Referral Discount
More than 90% of the consumers consider family and friends’ recommendations before making a purchase and that is why referral or word-of-mouth marketing drives 5x more sales than any other marketing strategy.
Referral marketing provides you a great opportunity to make your loyal customers feel special and also market your brand for free. It brings in organic traffic and the chances of conversion increase up to 30%.
For example, Evernote, a note-taking app, introduced a referral program that rewards referrers with points whenever they successfully convert referees. These points can be used to unlock premium features, which is a great incentive for customers.
Actionable Steps to Take:
- Pick out loyal customers.
- Define the rules of referral marketing, such as the product on discount, what your referrals will get when they bring in new customers, etc.
- Offer discounts/gifts to both referrer and referee.
- Create an easy sign-up process for referrers.
- Provide incentives in the form of gift cards, coupons, discounts, points, etc.
Enable Buy One Get One Free
Another marketing strategy that is sure to win you sales and customer loyalty is BOGO deals. Getting 2 in the price of 1, or getting 50% off on another product if you buy a particular product is a great way to encourage sales and increase the overall order value. Because people will always end up buying more when they can avail discounted stuff.
Actionable Steps to Take:
- Choose the product that is limited on stock, or you want to clear it before the next collection hits the store.
- Set a time limit for the offer.
- Use powerful headlines, gifs, images, to promote your offer.
- Use social media to create buzz and engagement.
Surprise with Clearance Sales
Clearance sales are the best ways to trigger human psychology by creating urgency and scarcity among your consumers and urging them to purchase before the deal runs out. For example, many businesses use emails as a way to promote their clearance sales by highlighting the discount, the number of days left on the deal, and using attractive headlines.
This is a win-win situation for both the business, as they get to clear stock or increase conversions, and for customers, as they get products at discounted prices.
Actionable Steps to Take
- Create captivating banners and headlines to entice customers.
- Show stock availability and the number of days left on the sale to entice customers and create urgency.
- Create exclusivity around your deal by limiting it through platforms or time.
3. How Offers Play a Role in Conversion Rates?
There are multiple factors in creating an effective deal that contributes to conversion rates. In all the sales promotional techniques mentioned above, there are a few things common that could turn a good sale into an amazing conversion tool.
- The first is Value Proposition. To achieve a maximum conversion rate, your deals should hold considerable value to persuade customers to take you up on your offer. The better the proposition, the better the chances of you promoting it effectively on different platforms and gaining a larger audience.
- Next, you need to add triggers to create urgency in your customers. This can be created by showing the scarcity of the product on sale or by showing the limited time left. Either way, these are powerful incentives that lead and offer success.
- Lastly, no one thing is perfect for every business, and thus you should always track and analyze your results and enable A/B testing on your website. Through A/B testing, you can see which version, for example, different landing pages, works best and leads to increased conversions.
Sales promotion/Offers provide you the perfect opportunity to give back to your customers and show them how much their business means to you. And in return, offers to help you gain increased visibility, sales, and conversions, all of which are the ultimate goals of any business.
Conclusion
Your sales promotion can be very beneficial for your business. Not only do they help in increasing engagement, traffic, and sales. It also helps in retaining customers and increasing their lifetime value.
The only way your strategies will be effective is if you spend time creating a proper strategy, implement it at the right time, and promote it to the right people on the right platform. There is a lot that you need to calculate before you start on this journey, but once you do, it will be worth it.
