3 Discount Marketing Examples of How to Make More Money
Amado Aguilar
Building a product marketing business as a one person startup | Ghostwriter for product articles and online courses
I struggled to make any sales when I first started my business. It felt like I was buried underneath a mountain of other creators, sellers, freelancers, and businesses. No one cared who I was, or what I offered, which made me want to quit sometimes, but I didn’t. I kept pushing, kept improving, kept learning, practicing, failing and improving again, and again.
It takes a long time to learn on your own. It can take some tough skin, and lots of patience. Waking up every day, staring at the mirror, wondering if you’re doing the right thing. If there’s a better way. If this is even for you.
I can tell you, after several years of practice, that I have far better results now, than I had in the first two years of business. I can create a website in a few hours, when it used to take me a whole month. Four 60-hour weeks, because I was terribly new at it.
It takes time to gain that experience. To get results. To get your business growing in the direction you hope it will go. But, I wish I would have grown my business faster. If only I knew, what I know today.
I learned there’s many different ways to grow a business, and the easiest one was discount marketing. Which is weird because, discount marketing is easy, yet, its much more complex than you would imagine.
Selling your products at a lower price is one way to grow a customer base, but it can also have its downsides. The trick is to create a full three step plan, that will help you achieve your goal, and transition to a mutually beneficial business with your customers. It took me a long time to figure this out, but, I’ll explain and walk you through it in this blog post.
I’ll go over how to create a three step plan that will get your business more customers and make more money,
Find the Right Discount Strategies
Before offering a discount, you should ask yourself,
In asking yourself these questions, the three main reasons to offer a discount will generally fall into these three categories
Every discount strategy should fulfill the one purpose. If the discount doesn’t fulfill the purpose of your goal, then you need to find a different strategy.
I’ll show you three examples of what I mean, and how you should think these through.
Keep in mind, that these are broad categories with goals that can be much more specific. I’ll include the most common ones in each example to best help you out.
Example 1: Build Brand Awareness
In this stage, I call the growth stage, you want more people to know who you are, or know about your brand/business. Your major goal is to increase awareness to yourself or your brand. For simplicity, I’ll just continue saying brand.
A much more specific goal would be;
Let’s say, you want more customers. You would ask yourself
Going back to the three questions I mentioned earlier.
Why offer a discount? To get more customers.
What is the goal of my strategy? To increase my business sales.
Which discount strategy should I use? Referral discounts
Now ask “Would offering referral discounts encourage people to buy from me? “
Well, let’s think why people would refer you.
If people refer you (word-of-mouth marketing), then new customers will buy from you. Word-of-mouth is the most influential form of marketing, and 90% of people are more likely to trust brands that are recommended by people they know.
Will this strategy work? Yes.
Will it work for you?
Here’s a few reasons why it won’t work for you.
This is a short list of examples of why it wouldn’t work. It’s up to you to figure out if the discount strategy will or won’t work for you. If it does work, then plan it out and launch your strategy.
Example 2: Gain Brand Reputation
At this stage, you are establishing trust and loyalty. People know who you are, and you have plenty of followers or customers. But, you want to increase your brand reputation. You know that a good reputation means your customers will come back and increase your sales. Those same customers will likely tell their friends and people they know, about your brand, further increasing your customer base.
Once again, word-of-mouth marketing will help grow your business, even when you are not directly marketing yourself.
So, what are specific goals you might look to achieve?
Going back to the three questions I mentioned earlier.
Why offer a discount? Because you want repeat customers.
What is the goal of my strategy? To increase customer loyalty.
Which discount strategy should I use? Loyalty point program.
Would offering a loyalty program encourage people to keep coming back?
Well, let’s think why people would want to keep coming back to buy again.
For this to succeed, you need a reasonable point system that seems within the customer’s reach, and a reasonable or better reward for them to obtain. Some of the most successful companies brilliantly apply point systems that generate a massive fanbase.
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Sephora uses its Beauty Insider Program which has over 34 million members. Starbucks also uses a gamification loyalty program with over 28 million active members.
Will this strategy work? Yes.
Will it work for you?
Here’s a few reasons why it won’t work for you.
Once again, if this works for you, then plan out a good loyalty program and use helpful software that would help you fulfill delivering those rewards.
Here are a few affiliated tools I recommend for fulfilling those rewards:
Sparkloop is a newsletter referral program that lets you reward subscribers. It tracks their points and automatically sends out rewards when they reach the points threshold. It works with all the major email service providers.
Sparkloop also integrates with Printful to fulfill rewards for physical items like apparel, mugs, stickers, and more.
The ConvertKit Creator Pro plan comes with a free Sparkloop subscription. This allows you to integrate both the email service provider, ConvertKit, and Sparkloop for seamless operation.
ConvertKit offers robust sequences and automation, enabling you to embed the current status of each customer. This lets them track their points and stay updated on upcoming rewards.
Get a 14-day free trial with the link above.
Beehiiv is a top-notch email service provider that includes a built-in reward system. It allows customers to track their points and view upcoming rewards. Additionally, it automatically delivers rewards once customers reach the necessary points.
Get a free 30-day trial with another three months for 20% off with my affiliate link.
Example 3: Increase Revenue
When you say you want to increase revenue, that means either get more sales, increase prices, or increase your average order value. Analyze your business and determine which of these three work best for your business model
Get more sales: In order to get more sales, you have to target reoccurring customers, or acquire more customers. If you have a variety of products, then focus on reoccurring customers. If you have only a few or less products, than focus on acquiring customers.
Increased prices: to increase prices, you need to increase your product value, or make better products. To increase the value, improve the quality of the product, add social proof, or tack on additional items in one package price. To make better products, survey your customers, read reviews, and research competitors to find new ways to make it better.
Increase AOV: to increase AOV, you have to get customers to add more to their carts, or buy more expensive products. For AOV, focus on cross-sells, upsells, and bundle deals. To sell your more expensive products, then focus on testimonials and email marketing.
So how can discount strategies help you increase revenue?
Let’s say your goal is to increase revenue by increasing product value. This would be the best option if you don’t have a lot of products, or you want to raise the price on your flagship product.
Going back to the three questions I mentioned earlier.
Why offer a discount? Because you want to increase your product value
What is the goal of my strategy? To increase your revenue per sale
Which discount strategy should I use? Testimonial incentive discounts
Now ask yourself, would offering a testimonial incentive discount increase your product value?
Well, let’s think about how testimonies increase your value
So, adding social proof through testimonials will help convert visitors to customers. It also increases trust and credibility, justifying the price tag. As you increase the value of your product by acquiring social proof, and of course a good and clear message from copywriting, then you can steadily increase the price of your product.
Will this strategy work? Yes.
Will it work for you?
Here’s a few reasons why it won’t work for you.
Once again, if this works for you, then plan out a good testimonial incentive strategy with software that can capture that for you.
Senja is my personal favorite tool for getting testimonies that I am affiliated with. It’s a testimonial tool that helps you collect, manage, and share testimonials from your customers. You can sign up for a free account and use your form to collect video and text testimonials, manage them, and share them as images, widgets of Walls of Love, without code.
What if these examples don’t work for me?
These were three different examples, of how you can use discount strategies to accomplish different purposes. It’s a reasoning system to figure out if a certain type of discount will work with your business strategy.
I used these three examples in the same order you will develop your discount marketing strategy.
Example 1: This is phase 1 in the worksheet, building brand awareness. Use example 1 as your guide to figure out which of the five strategies you can apply for this phase of your plan.
Example 2: This is phase 2 in the worksheet, building brand reputation. Use example 2 as your guide to figure out which of the five strategies you can apply for the second phase of your plan.
Example 3: This is phase 3 in the worksheet, increasing revenue. Use example 3 as your guide to figure out which of the six strategies you can apply for the third and final phase of your plan.
Conclusion
This was a basic rundown of how to plan out a successful discount marketing strategy. The point is to make a plan to go from growth, to retention, to increased value. Creating a plan that fits your business model is the most important part, but understanding what discount marketing strategies you can use to craft that plan is what I teach in my course. You can learn how exactly to use discount marketing, the tools you need, and I’ll help you put that plan together. You can check out the course here to learn more.
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