Every ecommerce business has one critical tool in their back pocket – coupons and discounts. But understanding when and how to deploy this tactic is critical for successfully boosting sales and gaining customer loyalty and trust. Here are some of the top ways to make sure your discounts and offers will be successful.
Consider Your Strategy
Your discounts work best as a part of an integrated marketing and brand strategy. No one-off discounts just to meet the month’s sales goals. Offers like those without an integrated approach can eventually do damage to your brand. When considering using discounts and offers, take the time to see how they fit into your brand’s overall sales and marketing strategy and whether or not they would be a good fit for you.
Set Goals
If you have nothing in place to measure, you won’t know whether or not your discounts were successful. But keep in mind that, while sales goals are important, there can be other ways of measuring the success of an offer. Several other metrics to consider are:
- New customers
- Repeat customers
- Email subscribers added
- Growth of social media following
The way you design your offer changes the way you can track its overall success.
Cross-Channel Deployment
Now that you have a strategy for your offer, it’s time to send it out into the world. Since this offer is now a part of your overall strategy, consider how you will promote this offer so that it reaches your target audience. While some of your traditional channels may be obvious, consider some alternatives to reach new customer groups. Reach out to bloggers to give their followers a freebie or discount. Start a retargeting campaign to reach those abandoned shopping carts. The options are endless.
Stay tuned for part 2 of this blog to lean about some of the specific offers that could work for your business. If you’re interested in learning more about using coupons and discounts for your business’s goals, reach out to us.