Coupons and discounts have always been a great way to drive sales. Whether your shop is online or in a shopping mall, placing a discount on some items will make more people likely to buy. It’s that simple. Learn the best ways to use coupons and discounts as a strategy to increase eCommerce sales revenue.
But there is one drawback to discounts.
Using Coupons & Discounts For Sales
The danger of discounts
The problem with discounts is they’re unsustainable. No ecommerce website wants to make discounts their only edge against the competition. If they did, they could just cut prices altogether.
However, many resorts to discounts to increase sales in the short term. If you do this long enough, you will attract frugal living aficionados who only buy when there’s a discount. Having a lot of deals on your website signals the users they don’t have to buy now since the item they want will be on sale soon.
You have to use discounts strategically to boost your long-term success. Here’s how you do it. Learn the best ways to use coupons and discounts as a strategy to increase eCommerce sales revenue.
Getting new customers
This is why discounts have always worked well. Some people who know nothing about your product will only make the first contact if you offer a discount code. You can use coupon aggregators like Coupon to reach new audiences or run an ad campaign showing items on sale. Bountii states that, for businesses, coupons can encourage repeat business from existing customers. Coupons can help to clear out old inventory and they can also introduce consumers to new products, leading to a wider customer base and enhanced brand loyalty.
There’s one problem with this strategy. You’re going to invite a lot of freeloaders to the game. Some customers will only buy from you because of a discount and never turn back.
Here’s what you have to do to make sure you’re making the most out of a coupon campaign. Check how coupons increase eCommerce sales.
- The offer is limited in time
- You take users’ contact information
- You restrict the number of products available
Unique offers
The main appeal of a discount is being unique. When you slap sales on every product, you devalue that feeling of uniqueness. Take it back by making your offers genuinely unique.
Use your subscriber list to offer your loyal customers discounts and coupons. If your customers give you their birthdate, offer a small discount on their birthday.
Another offer you can offer your customers is a discount to get them back to your website. If a customer hasn’t purchased for an extended period, send an email with a personalized discount for them.
Abandoned card discount: Coupons increase eCommerce sales
Businesses lose trillions of dollars on abandoned carts. If you don’t want to share this problem, you have to devise a solution that would save at least a part of the carts.
There are three tiers of preventing cart abandonment. The first one is having a pop-up that shows up once a user wants to leave the checkout page. Include information about how easy it is to complete the purchase. This alone can make many people come back.
If this didn’t work, you could choose two variants. If you have the user’s email, you can send them a message offering to proceed with payment. Include a small discount just for them. This may be enough to convince them to buy.
The other way to solve this problem is by using retargeting campaigns. Show people ads about products they recently viewed to convince them to go through with their abandoned cart.
Influencer campaign: Coupons increase eCommerce sales
People tend to trust other people over brands. While most people will ask their close friends for advice, you can sway some customers to your side by collaborating with influencers.
Find the people with a large social media following in your niche. You may have to look at Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. The choice of the platform depends on your niche.
Contact them and negotiate the terms of the promotion. Make sure their posts are reviews, not aggressive sales.
Include a discount for those who use each influencer’s discount code. This allows you to increase the number of people visiting your website and track each influencer’s performance. Learn the best ways to use coupons and discounts as a strategy to increase eCommerce sales revenue.
Social media campaign: Use eCommerce coupons
The beauty of social media is that you can get into people’s feeds in the most surprising ways. One of them is asking your customers to post a photo with a product on their accounts. Offer a discount on the next purchase, but only if they show the post.
This allows you to spread awareness about your product and get more people to purchase it. If people see their friends’ posts about your product, they may become interested and come over. Once they buy, they can join the social media campaign by posting a photo.
Discount Coupons with Comments (survey or feedback)
Companies also develop like humans. You cannot survive today with a strategy you employed a few decades ago. Every day, you must enhance your business to become more effective. And customer feedback can help you achieve improvement.
However, collecting customer feedback is difficult for many companies. In an environment where people are uninterested in liking a YouTube video, who would provide feedback? As a result, you must entice them with a proposal that counterbalances their criticism.
And what is more beneficial than a discount? As a result, in this type of coupon marketing, you can exchange a discount coupon for feedback. Receiving credit for feedback is more appealing to users and motivates them to assess your work. So, coupons can increase eCommerce sales.
Create FOMO for your discounts
The fear of being left out (FOMO) can remarkably influence people. Even the aggregate data from multiple studies indicate that customers fear missing the deals and special offers on the products they want to purchase. Half of the Millennials prefer limited-time submissions to regular prices.
Designing coupon marketing strategies that focus on limited-time offers effectively attracts customers who are primarily in the decision-making or consideration stages of their purchasing journey. These timed offers are typically displayed during product launches or special sales events during the holiday seasons.
To spread the word about your limited-time coupon offers, you can promote them via pre-event promotional emails to your constant customers and subscribers. Alternatively, you can initiate a pre-event sale, similar to the Amazon Prime Sales Festivals, especially for your subscribed customers.
Do not overuse discounts
Discounts and coupons can help you grow the number of active followers or make your bottom line sink. Use these strategies to make your discounts unique and appealing to customers. But do not forget that your goal is selling the products at full price.
