Consumers love discounts and I am no exception. While purchasing something online, I look for coupon codes. This is the natural consumer behaviour.
Discount coupons are helpful to entice customers to shop and not only it boosts your sales but brings higher conversions.
As per a survey conducted by Statista in 2019 that had 1000 respondents, 92% of the US consumers said they had used coupons for shopping.
With consumers getting habitual of using coupons and benefitting from other discount and promotions as well, it’s vital to implement a strong promotional strategy.
The strategy should focus on acquiring new customers and retaining the existing ones.
Why should businesses offer Discounts?
Apart from consumers’ love for discounts, here are a few reasons why online stores should offer it.
1. Boost Sales
While discounts may seem a compromise in the profit, they boost your sales significantly. Offering discounts or running promotions at regular intervals keeps customers hooked with your brand. Moreover, discounts reduce the possibility of cart abandonment.
2. Attract New Customers
Targeting visitors with promo codes that would be applicable only on the first purchase holds the potential to bring you a lot of new customers.
This is the ideal way to convert a visitor into a customer. Exclusive coupon codes for the first time users/shoppers are highly persuasive.
You can highlight the promo code on various places such as on your website’s home page, social media accounts, or reach out to those users via email who have registered on your store but haven’t shopped yet.
3. Increase Website Traffic
After the first two points, this doesn’t need much explanation. As you market your offers and promotions on different platforms, it will likely bring more visitors to your website. Ensure that they are not just exploring your website but also getting converted.
Related: 7 Ways to Increase your Website Traffic
4. Build Loyalty
Consumers feel valued when you reward them with discounts or coupon codes which ultimately builds customer loyalty. Nothing would please a brand more than loyal customers.
Types of Discounts
I have put forward 7 types of discounts or promotion strategies that you can use to entice customers.
1. Discount on the First Purchase
Having already discussed this above, this type of promotion should run forever on your website. You never know when a visitor comes across your brand and if there’s nothing for him/her on their first purchase, they might not show interest in shopping from your website.
Have exclusive and alluring discount coupons for first-time shoppers.
2. Bundled/Package Discounts
As it suggests, this type of discount includes offering a bundle of products at a slightly lesser price than the sum of the individual cost of those items. It provides you with the opportunity to sell more number of items and eventually increases your average order value.
Check your inventory and see products that complement each other. Create a bundle and offer them at a discounted price. You would probably have products that aren’t purchased independently. Including them in a package increase their sales count as well. This is an effective cross-selling strategy.
3. Pre-payment Discount
This type of discount is usually offered to make customers pay the complete order amount at the time of checkout.
For example, on many eCommerce websites, customers are encouraged to pay full amount at once using the online payment method and get a discount on their order else they are devoided of discount if they choose cash on delivery.
This is also seen on hotel booking websites where there is a price difference for paying online and paying at the hotel.
4. Seasonal Discounts
E-commerce sales touch the sky during the holiday season. When occasions like Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, etc. arrive, consumers look to shop and spend a lot.
Brands introduce occasion-based coupon codes to give customers a heavy discount on their purchase or announce a sale prior to the occasion highlighting how much discount they would get on the coming sale.
5. BOGO Deals
BOGO deals, abbreviated for Buy One Get One are great promotional deals from the cross-selling perspective, having a significant impact on your average order value.
These are highly enticing deals where customers get two items at the price of one or get a complimentary product worth the same amount on the primary purchase.
You can run deals like Buy 2, Get 1 or Buy 3 and get the 4th one free to encourage customers to spend more.
Different Ways of Offering a Discount
Implement discount strategies at different moments in a customer journey. Let’s see how you can win customers by offering them discounts in different ways.
1. Use Popups
Popups are amazing to present your offers, deals, promotions or coupons to your website visitors. Some of the popups that you can consider are-
Exit-Intent Popup
This popup appears only when a user is trying to take an exit from your website. So you can use this to attract users at the last moment and change their mind.
You can try our Exit popup module and highlight your offers.
Spin and Win popup
This popup works exceptionally well for websites. It adds a Gamification element on your website in the form of a spin and win wheel. Users can spin the wheel and earn some exciting discounts.
Scratch coupon
Use our scratch coupon module that places an unscratched coupon on the header and generates curiosity in the visitors to scratch the coupon and see the discount coupon code which they can claim on the checkout page.
2. Persuade Abandoned Cart Users with Discount
Not chasing your abandoned carts can cost you a high number of conversions and lost sales. Reach out to those abandoned cart users and persuade them to complete their purchase by offering them a discount.
You can check out our Abandoned Cart module for this matter.
3. Referral Offers
Referral marketing is one of the best ways to encourage customers to spread a word about your brand and get rewarded in return.
So, you can run some referral programs like “Invite your friends and you both get $5 OFF on your next purchase.” This will help you acquire new customers and boost brand awareness.
Final Thoughts
The game of deals and discounts is necessary to survive in the rapidly growing eCommerce market. If you want to be ahead of your customers, you will have to come up with some exciting offers.
While discount and coupons are exciting for customers, make sure you are not compromising much on the profit margin especially if you are a new business. Consider every factor before you start running deals on your website.