No doubt you’ve heard how important a sales strategy is, so we won’t bore you with the details on this. However, we do want to highlight that there are various marketing campaigns that can help you secure sales, and discount marketing is one of them.
Discount marketing is a great way to drive sales, acquire new customers, and increase customer loyalty. In fact, most consumers love discounts; a whopping 88% of customers used a coupon for shopping in 2020.
You can track coupon usage so you can monitor how effective a campaign has been. It’s easy to see why businesses, whether physical or online, put time and effort into developing effective discount marketing strategies.
E-commerce sites are no different. Fortunately, plugins and apps are available for website-building services and platforms such as Wix, WordPress, and Shopify that allow businesses to implement and enhance their campaigns. This article will be looking at some of these in relation to discount strategy optimization.
Before we get into it, however, let’s properly define discount marketing and understand why it’s important.
What Is Discount Marketing?
In essence, discount marketing refers to the temporary lowering of prices or implementation of limited-time offers designed to attract customers.
Discounts can come in many shapes and sizes, including seasonal offers, flash sales, and loyalty programs.
You can use financial modeling to determine how effective your discount sales are likely to be based on historical performances and assumptions about the future.
What’s more, different discounts should be used at different times within a customer’s journey. For instance, a communications platform may offer one when a consumer first visits their site, or they may opt to give them 10% off if they purchase a plan that offers VoIP with SMS in Canada. For this reason, you need to consider at what points of the consumer journey you wish to implement your discount strategy.
One way to approach discounts at the sales level is to build a sales performance incentive fund (SPIF) that pays reps a cash bonus for selling contracts at the full price.
Discount marketing strategy has many benefits, including:
- Increases customer loyalty and satisfaction
- Helps towards meeting sales and marketing objectives
- Allows you to distinguish yourself from competitors
However, it is not enough to simply establish a discount strategy, you have to tailor it to your consumers’ needs and your own business objectives, ensuring that it is as effective as possible. To this end, here are four ways to optimize your discount strategy.
4 Ways To Optimize Your Discount Marketing Strategy
1) Test the Effectiveness of Your Strategy
One of the most important and intuitive steps to take when wanting to optimize your strategy is to identify its strengths and weaknesses. This not only improves your overall strategy but also saves you time in the long run, as you won’t be pouring hours and resources into elements of your campaign that are not performing well. Instead, you can focus on building on what does work.
So, how do you test how well the discount strategies on your e-commerce store are working? One of the ways to do this is with A/B testing and the click-through rate (CTR) metric. The steps to take are outlined below:
- Choose a week (must be seven consecutive days) during which to conduct your testing.
- Implement whatever discount it is that you want to test (for example, a 20% discount off selected items).
- Calculate the click-through rate for this discount range; to do this, divide the total clicks by your total impressions.
- Repeat the above three steps with another discount that you wish to test.
- Compare the click-through rates to determine which one gets you more conversions. The higher the rate, the more effective the discount.
2) Make Offers Visible
Formulating attractive offers is half the battle; the other half is making sure that customers are aware of them. This is especially true with websites. A discount stashed away on the side in small print is not going to draw attention. Instead, use bold colors and loud banners to ensure that your carefully thought-out discounts don’t go unnoticed.
What can be of great help here are plugins that allow you to create and customize call-to-action buttons. For example, you can use Common Ninja’s Nudge Button widget, to draw attention to the CTA and encourage visitors to click on it with eye-catching animation.
Of course, you can also use social media to increase awareness of your offers, such as posting about them on Twitter or Instagram Reels.
3) Use Automation
Automation can be a great force for good when used correctly and in the right context. Fortunately, it’s a great addition to your discount marketing strategy arsenal. Automation can reduce human errors (like forgetting to send a text or email) and free you up to focus on other tasks. Basically, it makes your life easier!
Take the Happy Birthday Discount app that can be found in the Shopify app store, for example. This nifty application is fully automated and lets you create customized birthday emails with unique discount codes and send them on the right date. It even displays campaign stats and discount code conversions.
There are other ways to automate pricing strategy. For example, making sure that your prices are always the cheapest on the market, or altering prices to match your competitors.
4) Incorporate Countdowns
Countdowns generate a sense of urgency combined, and FOMO (fear of missing out), makes them very effective discount campaigns. With it, you can introduce flash sales or seasonal discounts (Cyber Monday anyone?). Of course, the main element here is the limited nature of the offer, and this is what drives consumers to click on it and, hopefully, follow through with a purchase.
For example, a service offering an extensive communications platform may provide a virtual Canada phone number as part of the plan, if a consumer purchases a subscription within a certain timeframe.
For this to be effective, however, there needs to be a clear and visible countdown.
Conclusion
Creating a great discount strategy is something to celebrate; especially when you optimize it to ensure that you enjoy all the benefits that the strategy has to offer. Fortunately, you don’t have to leave it to chance, as there are many apps and plugins available to help you ensure that your offers are not only irresistible but unmissable.
