Discounts can be a great way to attract new customers to your e-commerce site. However, they can also be a road to ruin.
You have to carefully consider your strategies for employing coupon codes to ensure you get the best return on your investment.
Whether you’re considering how to sell makeup, fishing tackle, or car audio equipment online, deploying discounts in a wise fashion is paramount to making them work for you instead of against you.
Here are 4 great ideas to ensure your success.
1. Reward Loyal Customers
You run the risk of training your customer base to wait for the next sale with discounts. Then again, if you tie the markdown to an act of loyalty, you’ll have a better shot of keeping them in the fold and buying at full price after the deal is gone.
One clever way to do this is to give repeat customers a coupon code for referring another shopper. This gets them a good deal for helping you attract more business. They win, you win, and their friends win too!
A popular place to list offers is on ShareASale.
2. Give Them A Reason To Come Back
Studies show only 2% of shoppers make a purchase the first time they visit a new e-commerce site. Research has also found a retargeting campaign is a good way to bring them back to get them to look you over again.
If you set the retargeting activity to trigger only for visitors who have spent a set amount of time on your site, or visited a set number of pages, you can offer discounts on the products featured on the pages they viewed.
This also works well for items in abandoned shopping carts. Sumo has lots of features that help bring people back to your shopping cart including automated emails that create urgency along with a percentage off (usually 10-15%).
3. Personalize The Offer
If you’re smart, you’ve kept records of your customer’s purchases over time and can find the pattern for items they purchase repeatedly. E-commerce sites like those offered by Shopify make this easy to do.
If you’re devising a plan for how to sell makeup using coupon codes for example, you can tie a deal to oft-replenished items like mascara when your analysis tells you they’re about to need it again. Offer them a more favorable rate if they also purchase brushes and perhaps a lipstick too.
In other words, create a bundle containing the item you know they’re about to need with some other items they might be interested in trying—based upon what you’ve observed from their past purchases. If you sell online courses, Teachable has a great bundle feature as well.
Price it carefully and you’ll still enjoy a nice profit and introduce a repeat customer to new items to buy from you.
4. Use Them To Arm Influencers
With social media has come the rise of a group of people who have built up loyal followings who rely upon their purchasing advice.
If you choose to work with one of these influencers to get the word out about your site, or a new offering on the site, or some other promotion, provide a coupon code for the respondents to use to get a special deal.
This will serve a couple of functions. It gives the influencer’s followers more incentive to buy from you and it makes it easier for you to determine just how effective that influencer really is. If you provide each of them a unique code, you’ll know from whom the lead really came when it’s redeemed.
These 4 strategies for employing coupon codes can help you build your business while minimizing the cannibalization effect markdowns can impose. With more and more retailers relying upon them to get eyeballs on their products, your offers can easily get lost in the clutter.
Using these tactics will leverage your existing relationships to help you cut through the clutter, broaden your customer base and improve your revenues.
And ultimately, that’s what it’s all about.