Browse the internet for e-commerce store, and you’ll find millions of results in 0.1 seconds. If you’ve just been smitten by how well Shopify is doing to help new e-commerce stores, and want to start your own e-commerce store, we’ve just opened the coffers of free knowledge.
Whether you’re an existing business, or fresh out of the oven, discounts & offers are a key strategy to boost sales. Learn from Instagram, say goodbye to your stale, conventional methods, and welcome new trends with both arms wide open.
Target Existing Customers
Don’t get us wrong but older customers add twice the number of items in their cart as compared to new customers. A new business can profit from fresh customers, but once retained, old customers have 9 times the conversion rate, and generate five times more revenue.
Amazon rewards their customers with loyalty programs and reward points, and that has boosted its sales by 45% since its inception.
This is how to tap on the existing customers:
- Reward points for every dollar spent on your website.
- Customer loyalty programs to give customers an incentive to spend money.
- Special ‘additional- discounts’ for existing customers.
Give-Away Offers Work the Best
Let’s get this straight, people love free stuff. The more you give away for free, the more you shift the balance towards your profit. How? Easy.
Peruse your list of current offerings, is there anything you have in excess or can afford to give away? No-obligation trials (if you’re a software company) or demo-products (for a non-software company) are the most preferred method in our expert’s opinion.
These may work best for you:
- Reward-based incentives
- Two-for-one offers
- Buy-one-get-one (BOGO) offers
- Trial memberships
- Give-away samplers
Percentage-Based Discounts & Quantity-Based Discounts
Break free from the shackles of profit margins. It’s a medieval marketing strategy that’s as old as time. Researchers believe that a human mind gets more enticed to purchase a product that has an artificially inflated price slashed down to lower amounts.
For starters, jack up the base price of your products and put them up for sale. Take a look at how provides 50% off on their website to increase site traffic and boost sales. Keep your profits in mind before you blatantly give out more discounts than you can offer.
Providing a quantity-based discount boosts both the sales and the average order value. If you are a website like Amazon, it’s much easier for you to sell to an average customer, distributors, and merchants. This is how you can structure your discounts:
- Sliding scale
- A fixed percentage
- A flat rate
Tiered Pricing System
Imagine you go to a nice restaurant and glance at the menu. You find everything is either too expensive or too cheap, so you end up ordering the mid-priced food article. This is a well-known manipulation of human psychology called ‘decoy-pricing.’ The same formula can be used by e-commerce stores to increase sales with a tiered pricing system.
Include a third ‘decoy’ option to push people to buy from the articles you really want them to buy. While discounting on your website, make these articles the most appealing by a three-tier pricing system.
Often deemed as a marketing hack, the ‘asymmetric dominance effect’ could be a very subtle way of letting people buys what you want them to. Show the value of the pricing options instead of just the prices. Tell the customers how they can get the best from a particular option.
Bonus: App-Specific/ Mobile-Based Offers and Discounts
Sadly, most e-commerce stores are badly designed and have poorly optimized ‘mobile’ sites. 29% shoppers globally use mobile coupons to make their first purchases. You should memorize this fact and affirm that mobile phone e-commerce is the next big thing.
Create user-friendly mobile sites if you still haven’t and give users a welcome coupon or discount to make their first purchase. App-only coupons could tap on this constantly growing number of ‘mobile shoppers’ and skyrocket your sales in no time.
End-Note: What Do You Do Next?
You could always use these strategies in a combination to suit your e-commerce needs. A sample strategy could be somewhat like:
● Increase sales and traffic with free social media coupons.
● Showcase the products with tiered pricing and decoy pricing.
● Capture customers’ data and reward them for their loyalty.
● Provide discounts for festivities and holidays.
Go ahead; use these methods to boost your ecommerce sales immedia
