How to Make Discounts, Best Offers and Deals to Drive Sales
As an entrepreneur, you want your business to succeed. However, with so many competitors out there, it can feel overwhelming to try and entice customers to shop from your storefront. One of the most common options available for companies is to present discounts or exclusive deals. However, if you do this incorrectly, it could wind up hurting your bottom line, rather than helping it.
So, with that in mind, we want to share the best ways to make discounts, best offers, and deals that can drive sales. Whether you’re new to your industry or you want to increase your sales numbers, these strategies can help you succeed.
Step One: Identify Your Goals
Unfortunately, “increasing sales” is too general to be a goal for your business. Instead, you need to be much more specific. For example, perhaps you need to get rid of excess inventory, or maybe you want to focus on selling more of a particular product.
Defining your goals beforehand will help you craft a better discount strategy. All too often, companies will blindly reduce prices without really thinking about how it will affect them. In most cases, the deal can either cause a loss or force the company to break even.
Here are some examples of sales goals.
Brand Awareness – in this case, you’re trying to get as many people to see your offer as possible. In these situations, you may opt for a calculated loss because the ROI of building your brand is worth the investment.
Customer Retention – are people shopping from you once and then never returning? Is there a reason that customers aren’t coming back? A retention strategy could be offering discounts for repeat buyers, enticing them to see what else you have to offer.
Inventory Close Out – sometimes, you have a bunch of products sitting around, waiting to move. Because storage can be highly valuable, you want to get rid of them as quickly as possible. Selling them at a deep discount is usually better than letting them go to waste.
Step Two: Understand Your Customer’s Needs
It’s not enough to know what your customers are buying – you need to understand the why as well. One of the easiest ways to figure out a buyer’s intent is to create customer personas. Rather than trying to appeal to everyone possible, focus your attention on a single (fake) person.
Who is your target demographic? What kind of problems is this person facing, and how can your product or service address it? Tailoring your discount to fit the needs of the individual can help it resonate more with your audience, helping to achieve your sales goal.
Step Three: Know What You Can Afford
As we mentioned, one of the most frequent issues with the best deals and discounts is that stores do them without figuring out the math on it first. Ideally, you will still be able to make a profit off of discounted items, but how can you know if you haven’t calculated the difference?
Be sure to attach a dollar value to every deal you create. If you are anticipating a loss, you want to identify a threshold that you can’t exceed. This way, you can track your progress easier and ensure that you don’t wind up hurting your business more than you’re helping it.
Step Four: Timing is Everything
Yes, there are specific times of the year when offering discounts is not only valued but expected. For example, if you don’t have any Black Friday deals, then your customers are likely going to head to a competitor that does.
That being said, you need to be strategic about when you offer these discounts, not just how. Timing details should be included in your buyer personas so that you know the precise moment to act.
For example, if you have a lead in your sales funnel that is ready to buy but needs that final push, you can offer a time-sensitive discount that forces the person to act immediately. In other cases, you may be able to utilize customer information to create personalized deals that will drive sales (i.e., a birthday discount).
Step Five: Create Conditional Deals
Blanket discounts are great for customers, but not necessarily for your bottom line. If you want to protect your margins, you can create best deals that require certain qualifiers to activate. For example, if a customer buys a certain amount of product, he or she can bundle an additional item at a steep discount.
By using conditional deals, you can ensure that you always come out on top. Not only that, but you may be able to offer better discounts, which can seem more enticing. One example could be offering a percentage discount (or free item) for customers who reach a particular threshold (i.e., $100).
You can use One-Click Upsells to create additional deals on your e-commerce website.
Step Six: Analyze Your Results
As with all marketing tactics, you need to know what works and what doesn’t. Not only do you want to make sure that your deals are driving sales, but that you’re still making money in the process.
Fortunately, there are plenty of programs out there that can assist with analysis, but be sure that you’re using them frequently. Pay attention to quantifiable numbers and then test various strategies to see how they impact the data. Testing and refining your approach will ensure long-term success that you can repeat over and over as necessary.
