To find an original promotion, it is also possible to start from the idea of the promotion, then to check that this idea can be applied to your activity. Here is the first part with the 80 ideas of promotions from the simplest to the most complex to help you develop your sales, find new customers
Part 1 – Promotional Offers
Promotional offers are techniques with a short-term and limited impact, which aim to make the product or service more accessible or more affordable, or simply to bring more value to the prospector to make an “irresistible” offer.
The objective is to reduce the purchasing brakes by playing on the various purchasing brakes or accelerators, by putting urgency or by simplifying the ordering procedure:
1 – Make a Direct Price Reduction
You can offer a price reduction for a limited time.
This discount can be:
- an amount (if it is significant, for example, € 10 out of € 100)
- a percentage (if it is more significant, for example, 25% for a product of 5 €).
All customers can benefit from the same discounts, so you can play on other levers such as:
- Competitive recovery, for example against a given competing product (objective of eliminating a competitor from the market), or any product (objective of recovering old dormant customers)
- More products for the same price (the giraffe product or X% more), makes it possible to sell at the same price and play on production costs. For example, it’s selling a video training course with a module, an ebook, one hour of free coaching… and more.
- Fewer products or services for a lower price is called Down-Sell. It means offering a lower price offer with fewer functions or services. This is often the case when selling training videos, we offer a full-price product with coaching & training videos & a private group at a very high price, and for those who have not ordered, we offer a version without coaching and without a private group (than videos) but at a much cheaper price because there is no more personalized help.
For example, the major national brands are increasingly using small formats to make products more accessible even to small budgets, in particular during very one-off events (eg: a family meal, a birthday, etc.).
On the other hand, when you do a “price” promotion, you have to be careful not to do too many price promotions too often, otherwise, your customers will wait for the promotions to make purchases, and those who bought at the “normal” price. ”Will be furious.
To avoid this, it is better not to just lower the prices, but to bring more added value (eg bundles, special offers…), and prepare a fallback offer for the last customers and existing customers.
Read also: 5 Steps to Increase Sales in 2021
Likewise, pay attention to the cost of “stock protection” if you have products stored at your distributors: if you change the price on the same products, they will ask you to reduce the cost of the products they have in stock ( especially if the life of the products and promotion is long). This will not be the case if you make a “special edition” with different packaging or offer;
You can also stage your various offers and promotions in order to promote sales of “premium” products on promotion.
In the example below, adding a more expensive product (a beer at $ 3.40) sells more beer at $ 2.5 (and even sell beers at $ 3.40), while at Conversely, selling a beer for $ 1.60 brings the market down:
2 – Organize a Game or A Contest
The goal of the game or the contest is either to create an “event” to decide the undecided ones, or you to gain visibility with new customers thanks to your contest. You can propose a game or a contest with your product, in order to have visibility on the points of sale, as a pretext for communication, to negotiate visibility with a partner or a distributor …
This is what we often see in supermarkets, with “promo” labels on the packaging. It is important to know that generally very few people participate in this kind of contest, and so if you put for example 2000 € of prizes in a contest on all your products, not everyone will come to claim the prizes.
With the evolution of the Law, you are no longer obliged to file the rules of your competition with a bailiff, which allows you to easily launch small competitions.
For example, I regularly organized contests to win my book Growth Hacking with just advice to send me via a form or by email. This makes it possible to create a dynamic around a product (here is my book) and to encourage the undecided to order.
3 – Give Something as A Gift
The goal is to give samples (of your products or via a partnership, i.e. a third party who offers a product to your customers in order to gain visibility), to offer a gadget (e.g. the famous bonus gift!), add a “discovery” version of one of your new products (eg: a sample of a complementary product to the main product as perfumers do in beauty brands) …
The gift can be given either directly with the product, or via a collector’s system (have X proofs of purchase), or via a certain number of purchases. These gifts can be in the effigy of your brand, with collectors, or “neutral” gifts without branding (eg: a refill offered with a product). In the field of training, it is offering to discover its other products via extracts from the complete video training.
Offer Coupons on The Second Purchase and Offer Loyalty Cards
Prospecting is good, but often the key to success is to re-order a customer. The second command is often the one that will make the prospecting efforts profitable. The lack of profitability of the first customer is linked either to a significant acquisition cost, or it is linked to a first product sold very inexpensively (lead product).
To encourage a customer to order again there are several tips:
- Promote re-purchase by offering a reduction voucher that can be used directly after the purchase on the next checkout. On a range of products or additional accessories, on a particular day of visit to the store, etc.
- Offer a loyalty card to have an immediate discount on the purchase (ex: 5 € in exchange for the phone number or email to then launch promotions). Or on the next purchase (ex: the next time you order have an additional service/premium product, after 50 € of purchases you have a 10% reduction…).
- Offer a discount after the purchase of a specific product (ex: an accessory, a partial or full refund offer on a product, etc.).
- directly give a discount on the product if you subscribe to a loyalty card (even if it has just been purchased) in order to reduce the price difference vis-à-vis the competition (e.g .: an immediate reduction of € 0.50 on the price of a branded product to fight against private labels).
- give loyalty discounts to your customers so that they feel “thanked” for trusting you. This is, for example, the case with Picard, which for a very long time refused to set up a loyalty card, and which finally put it in place because all the brands were doing the same and customers had not have the impression of being rewarded for their loyalty.