You think you made a great promo, but it didn’t perform well and you don’t know why??

Well, I am sure one of these 3 main points is insufficient:

✔️Engaging offer

✔️Interesting copy

✔️Appropriate list

All of them are important and should be balanced, however, sometimes even a good offer is enough to make your promo profitable $$. ?

It’s not a secret that most of us are offering some amount of % discount in our promo emails. And there is nothing really wrong with it, but in the long run, you might notice that these offers begin to produce worse results.? This can happen because your customers get used to such offers and they don’t seem to be so attractive and unique anymore, therefore they don’t engage to buy. 

In such a case you have to think of new ways to engage your customers and induce them to buy. Here you have two options:

1️⃣Increase the size of a discount.? Making a significantly bigger discount than usual might engage your customers, but having more sales with smaller margin might leave you in the same financial position and you can end up spoiling your customers too much. So it’s not really worth doing.?

2️⃣Be creative. ?Think of other types of offers besides regular X% discount. Sometimes new offer might be even less beneficial for the customer, but just the unseen format of it or some psychological aspects of a new discount can make it sell.

So you should be already thinking about what new offers you can create. To ease it up for you here are some examples that you can try:

➡️ X$ discount. ?This one is very powerful especially if you are selling more expensive products, but don’t have high margins. Instead of offering a percentage discount offer an absolute($) discount. The beauty of such an offer is that it might look more appealing for the customer than regular % discount but in reality, it is more beneficial for you. ? In this case, it is worth having a minimum order price requirement. 

➡️Buy and get a gift. ? Everybody loves receiving gifts. So why not give them? It doesn’t necessarily have to be something expensive to get your clients attention. Just the fact that they will be getting something for free might stimulate to buy. Also, this is a great way to introduce new products to your clients, for example by sending samples or get rid of the stock you don’t need. Depending on the prices of your selling items, you might want to consider a minimum order value for this offer as well.

➡️Free shipping. ✈️According to the Walker Sands Future of Retail 2016 study, 9 out of 10 of the survey participants said free shipping was the No. 1 incentive when asked what would make them shop online more often. So obviously if it is not default in your store, offering this in your promo campaigns can be very powerful.

➡️ Progressive discount.? A discount which increases respectively to the size of the order. A good example can be buy 1 get 11% discount, buy 2 get 22%, buy 3 get 33%. Numbers should be adapted to each store, but in this scenario, if people buy 1 item you might profit more from it than from 1 item out of those 3. But when you combine the profit of all 3 of them your profit becomes bigger so it’s a kinda win-win situation-you get bigger total profit and customer gets a bigger discount.?

➡️ Excite the curiosity. Don’t even tell what the discount is, just promote that there are reduced prices, special, exclusive offers. Combined with good copy, such an offer will definitely have good results, as people will be opening to check what kind of offer it is. Such strategy is very useful if you are unable to offer huge % discounts which would look attractive.

➡️Discount for the second order. Most of the successful ecom stores are based on repeated sales.? Did you know that according to the report from Adobe’s Digital Index in many cases 40% of store’s revenue is made from 8% of its customers? These 8% are repeated customers, so it’s clear that they are extremely profitable. Habituate your customers to buy the second time. Suggest them an irresistible offer on their second purchase.

➡️Membership discount. ?Offer an exclusive opportunity to enter some specific group that you have. It might be a VIP segment, some kind of a private or paid membership (example Amazon Prime) or any other valuable group your store can offer. This will make you client feel special and appreciated, also if the membership is limited – scarcity to use its perks asap, that means more sales for you!

Many of these discounts are easily creatable using Shopfiy Discount function. If you need help setting it up, feel free to ask me. ?

Pro tip: ? If you are promoting the discount in your emails, make sure to add an automatically applicable discount on all your clickable buttons, words or images (the link can be generated by Shopify). However, I would still recommend keeping the promo code in the email, just in case.

Augustinas Pocevicius,

Hustler Marketing