Throughout the year, ecommerce businesses utilize various sales techniques that help them turn their prospects into regular customers & also in retaining the existing customers. Overall, a good set of promotions & sales techniques are the driving force for boosting the ecommerce conversions & revenue.
But, this isn’t as easy as it seems. Planning and executing promotional sale oriented campaign asks for a lot more effort if you don’t opt for the right way. Various ecommerce business owners go for increasing more and more discounts to achieve targets. Instead, often a low discount, which is framed and promoted well, performs more efficiently than the former one.
If you are looking to run such profitable business campaigns for your ecommerce store, take a look at the trendy sales tactics compiled in this single write-up. These will surely be a game changer for you.
Limited Time Offers (Create Urgency or FOMO):
Some of the common promotional offers seen these days are limited time offers such as “Expiring Soon”, “Valid for today only” etc.. These create a sense of urgency among the online shoppers. The users feel that if they lose such an offer, would miss a great discount. ‘Limited time duration’ offers help in bringing more leads in a very short amount of time. This tactic is highly effective during stock clearance sales as well.
The ecommerce store owners can inform their existing email subscribers & app users using emails & push notifications. They can also run paid campaigns on various channels to retain existing users or to attract new prospects. Here are the two major approaches which offer promising results.
A) Offer time-based Discounts:
Just as its name suggests, this sort of discount means that a particular or a bunch of products are available under special/heavy discounts. But, such a discount would only last for a limited time duration like a day or two. On your ecommerce store, use a countdown-timer banner on such products (or category of products). A running countdown timer further excites the customers to quickly purchase that product especially when less time is left on the clock.
B) Offer time-based Free Shipping:
Offering a limited time free shipping can help you bring more revenue by helping customers bag more products from your store. Not having to pay the extra delivery charges already acts like a discount on the overall cart price. Who would want to miss that?
The store owners must highlight such ‘Limited-Time Free Shipping’ offers properly. Use a fixed top banner (like a sticky menu) that always appears on the top of every page. A thin banner with catchy color would grab everyone’s attention.
Few businesses even allow both these to exist simultaneously. Smart shoppers are hence able to utilize the discounts from both Limited-Time Discounts & Limited-Time Free Shipping.
2. Cross-Selling Campaigns:
Got buyer’s attention to one product only? Expand the same to other best products and compel them to buy a better or more profitable one or to buy more instead of one.
The word cross-selling may sometimes sound too promotional but when executed in the right way, it can bring huge profits. The simplest example of cross-sell is ‘Buy 3 Get 1 Free’ (& similar offers). Another common example is ‘Buy 3 Pieces from Summer Collection & get Free Shipping’.
This convinces the users that they are getting something extra than what they were going to purchase anyway. A sense of more profits can surely do wonders.
3. Seasonal Deals:
Upon every few months, it's good to present the customers with a completely new set of offers & discounts usually based on seasons. Such repetitive seasonal discounts keeps the customers retained & returning periodically for heavy shopping. This is usually seen on ‘end of season sale’, ‘Festival-based sale’, special discounts on holidays, etc.
Holiday season of 2020 is at our doorstep. It’s high time to focus on planning such offers. It would be better if their promotion is initiated from a month before.
4. Loyalty Bonus or Reward Points:
Loyalty bonuses are a great medium to keep your regular customers retained & happy. The more a customer shops, the more loyalty bonuses or reward points they get. Such rewards can be used by those customers as a discount (directly or indirectly) for their future purchases.
This urges the customers to shop even more so that they can avail all such offers. Loyalty/reward points are a kind of must-have for every ecommerce business.
5. Discounts for New Customers:
As just mentioned above, loyalty is for regular customers, there needs to be some motivation for the new buyers too. ‘First Purchase Discounts’, ‘Free Shipping on First 3 Orders’, etc. are examples of such offers. Once a new customer engages & utilizes such offers, he/she would automatically get used to your app or website & will be willing to shop more in future, given that your services & products are good.
6. Referral Bonuses:
If online stores provide discounts to their customers who brought new customers to their store, it’s a win-win situation for both store owners as well as buyers. A common example of this is the referral codes assigned to each existing customer (on an ecommerce store).
Whenever a new user creates an account (using the referral code of the existing customer, say a friend), then upon completing the first purchase, both the new & the old customer gets rewarded.
7. Gamified Discounts:
Spin to win kind of sales tactics are quite popular these days because of all the good reasons. They not only engage the customers but also entertain them. They are profitable for the customers as well as the store owners.
Take an example of Spin & Win discount wheel. It's a spin-able wheel with multiple sections, each section with a different discount amount. When the customer spins such a wheel, it randomly stops on a particular section & the discount amount displayed of it is availed by that customer. It’s like a lottery for discounts.
If a non-subscriber interacts with such a gamified element, he/she would then create an account & use that discount code to purchase something. Voila! This acquires you a new customer.
Wrap Up:
All these sales & promotional offers can be used in various ways & contexts to boost sales of your ecommerce businesses. Based on your target audience & their locations, use these tactics to offer the most efficient promotional offers.
Apart from planning your big promotional strategies, try out the above mentioned tactics as well. Hopefully, these prove helpful for all readers.
