How to Increase Sales with Offers – 5 Effective Strategies

Believe it or not, sales promotions or offers are a way to your customer’s heart. This is not a new marketing strategy we are talking about.

Sales promotions have been employed in retail and online stores since the beginning, and they are still relevant and the most effective form of marketing. 

With so much competition in the eCommerce industry, it’s hard to stand out among your competitors. And since all of them offer sales promotion, how can we come up with something different?

All successful businesses offer personalization when it comes to coupons, discounts, and deals. How?

They sent targeted emails, offered cross-promotion, and much more. All to drive more sales and conversions.

You have to devise a similar sales promotional strategy to grab customers’ attention and increase brand awareness.

Sales promotions or offers are applied for a short period to create buzz around your brand and convert visitors.

It is a tried and tested marketing technique as about 93% of consumers use a coupon throughout the year, whereas 7 out 10 people use an email discount in a week. And the numbers keep increasing.

To make sure your sales promotions are effective, we are going to discuss 5 fool-proof strategies which will guarantee increased sales and revenue. 

Let’s get started!

Setting Goals for Offers

Before we fast forward to effective sales strategies, we need to first devise a strategic plan and list out goals.

For example, what do we want to achieve with these sales strategies? Do we want to increase sales? Conversions? Or get visitors to sign-up? 

Let’s break this down into easy steps

1. Audience: Choosing a target audience is crucial for an effective marketing strategy. Why? Because you can offer personalized suggestions and solutions that are relevant to your niche and thus relevant to your particular target market. This helps in focusing your resources on a specific audience rather than wasting investment by marketing to everyone. 

• Goals: What’s a plan without a goal? Thus, as mentioned above, setting goals and writing them down is very important. Want to increase sales in seasonal events? Want to increase brand awareness? Or get more followers on social media? Whatever the game plan is, assign it a reachable value, and this way you can easily mark if your strategy was a success or a failure. 

• Value: Here we are talking about both business and customer value. Your offer needs to grab your customers’ attention and be irresistible, so that they instantly click on the “buy now” button. If not, all your efforts will be for naught. Similarly, sales promotion also puts a dent in your profits, thus it is recommended to create time-limited offers to build urgency and save profit.

• Promotion: Promotion is key to an effective sales strategy. If your offer is not visible to the audience, it’s not going to generate sales. Thus, you need to figure out where your customers are most active. Which platforms provide greater reach and engagement and how can I persuade people to buy? Strong copywriting and visuals take your promotions to the next level. So utilize every resource available, such as emails, SMS,  social media, etc, and create urgency. 

After these 4 key points, analyzing results is equally important. You need to see if your strategy completed the goals that you wrote down before.

Did it reach the numbers? Where was the promotion lacking? And what can you do to improve it? The better you answer these questions, the better your future promotions will be. 

Why are Sales Promotion Effective?

Many startups believe that sales promotion is harmful to their business, as it eats up their profit.

But that’s not true at all, or otherwise, everyone would not be doing it. I am going to list a few of the benefits to get the point across. 

• Increases Lifetime Value

Promotional deals and offers are a great way to retain customers and increase their lifetime value. Customers feel appreciated and valued when offered something for being loyal and this is marked as a positive experience, which will ensure your customers come to you for future purchases rather than seeking other vendors. 

• Drive Traffic

As we mentioned above, the purpose of offering coupons, discounts, and deals to your customers is to generate buzz and attract attention. That means you also acquire new customers and increase traffic to your website. 

• Increases Sales and Revenue

Although offers and discounts are affecting your profitability, they still could result in increased sales volume in a shorter time. By creating urgency and offering time-limited discounts, you can entice customers to purchase your products and services before time runs out. In simpler words, sales promotions help in creating a sense of FOMO and thus increases sales.

• Fail-Proof 

Sales are always a good way to increase customer engagement and loyalty, and they are ALWAYS successful. As long as you devise a proper strategy, provide sales for a limited time, and achieve results, little profit loss is nothing your business can’t handle.

Top 5 Sales Promotion Strategies

Now that we have convinced you how effective sales promotion is. Let’s discuss the strategies you can apply to your store. 

1. Free Shipping

Do you know that 73% of customers decide to purchase an item if free shipping is provided? That’s how much influence the word “free” has.

Free shipping also greatly reduces the chances of cart abandonment, as when customers notice a high shipping price on the checkout page, they mostly don’t proceed with their orders. 

Although free shipping does eat up your profit and should only be applied if your business can handle it, it is still recommended to give this strategy a try.

You can also offer limited-time free shipping to gain customers, as companies with free shipping have a 20% higher conversion rate than others. Make sure to promote free shipping on all platforms to get as much out of it as possible.   

• Exit-Intent Coupons

All websites face a bounce rate, but too much, and you can hurt your website’s SEO. Marketers employ different techniques to stop their customers from abandoning their carts or leaving their websites without doing the desired action.

One such effective technique is exit-intent coupons. These coupons are offered when a customer is about to leave your site in the form of popups.

You can offer a discount, free shipping, % off, and much more, and it works beautifully. Customers feel valued and satisfied with the unexpected coupon, thus increasing the chances of a sale. 

• Make an Offer

This marketing strategy is useful for eCommerce stores that deal with exclusive items such as jewelry, pottery, antiques, or one-of-a-kind items.

With the make an offer feature, you can place a CTA button below the product instead of a price, urging customers to negotiate prices and settle with the business, thus increasing engagement.

This also provides your customers with a sense of control and both parties can come to agreeable terms about price.

Here, optimum customer service is needed to make sure your customers have a smooth shopping experience.

You can use WooCommerce Make an Offer plugins to add this feature to your site and increase trust, sales, and reliability.   

• Buy One Get One Free

With 93% of the shoppers taking advantage of BOGO deals at least one time, it’s no mystery that it is one of the most preferred sales promotions by customers. Anything with the word “free” attached to it is bound to get you more attention and sales. 

And despite contrary belief, BOGO deals are a win-win situation for both the business and the customer, because you still end up making a profit and increasing sales volume and the customers get 2 products at the price of 1. 

BOGO deals are also great for clearing stock and making space for your new collection. 

• Loyalty/Reward System

Another effective sales promotional strategy is running a loyalty program. Now the results here are not instantaneous but it does pay off.

A loyalty program not only makes your customers feel appreciated and valued but also increases their lifetime value.

There are many ways you can offer a loyalty program or a reward system. Such as you can determine certain actions on your site and set points for each.

Once a customer completes those actions, their points are added and can be redeemed in return for a free product, discount, or free shipping. 

It works because customers keep coming back for more points and rewards.

Conclusion

And that’s it. Always test any techniques you apply to your site with A/B testing, to see which version works best or if you are getting the results you want.

Sales promotion might be fool-proof, but they require planning and effort to give fruitful results.

Make sure your offers are targeted, personalized, and valuable to customers to result in increased sales and awareness.

Author’s Bio

Xaviera Khalid is the content writer at WooKeeper.com. She is an avid reader and uses her creativity to write interesting articles about WooCommerce and its related topics. She focuses on SEO-optimized content and provides factual writing.