3 Unstoppable Promotional Strategies

Hidden Discounts

The most creative discount strategy I have seen used is hidden discounts. And put simply, this is just a discount in which you wait to tell users the discount until they add items in their cart. 

So you would run a promotion that says, add 4 plus items to your cart and use coupon code “x” to see what the discount is? 

This is valuable in two ways. 

1. You are making your users take action before you reveal the discount. This will require them to take all the steps required to make a purchase before revealing the discount. Unlike a typical discount where users may ignore it entirely, they are much more likely to convert given they have taken the first steps to buy.

2. There’s a long tail to this strategy. Unlike most discounts, now you have hundreds of users who have added 4+ items to their cart. So even if they don’t convert, they will (hopefully) receive an abandoned cart email (or multiple) at some point in the future increasing the chance of conversion. 

Limited Time - Tiered Discounts

One of my favorite discount models is utilizing limited time discounts - but it’s more than just providing an offer for a limited time. You want to introduce a limited time tiered discount. The basic structure is this:

20% for the first hour.

The second hour is 15% off.

The final hour is 10% off. 

With this approach, you’re introducing urgency, or forcing the hand of the consumer to act now or they will miss out. This approach dramatically increases conversion rates. 

Progressive Discounts

Put simply, the more you spend, the more you save. Progressive Discounts are the simplest way to increase average order value and customer lifetime value. 

You can tier these discounts based on the total number of items in the cart or total cart value. The basic idea is to increase the discount with the quantity and/or value.

This strategy works great with brands that have consumables. Increasing the total quantity of items ordered can lead to more being consumed, leading to more being ordered again. 

Bonus - Always extend offers. 

As a bonus, I wanted to include the fact that you should always extend your offers. Say you run your promotions on a Monday, send out an email on Wednesday to a segment of customers who have not converted in the past 48 hours saying “last chance”, providing them your best offer. 

With most of the brands with which I have worked, “last chance” emails or SMSs seem to always outperform the original emails. Consumers will typically wait until the last minute to take advantage of deals and discounts -  so always including a last chance email or SMS will boost sales for your overall campaign. 

And that’s it. Those are the three promotional strategies I recommend for growing your sales online.. 

See you next week!

As always, you can subscribe to me on YouTube to see strategies just like these in video form. Below you will find this week’s video: