Contests
A favourite of ecommerce websites for a while, contests capture your audience’s attention in a more potent way, leveraging the tantalising prospect of being a “winner” as a means of drawing in new customers and further engaging repeat visitors. People love a competition of some kind, so it makes sense to bring a sense of urgency and high stakes to your products as well.
Done correctly, competitions are a great chance to show off your products. Perhaps you select what the winner receives based on the number of entries, which will hopefully have the effect of ratcheting up the stakes, and therefore the number of visitors looking at the products on your website.
Bundle Deals
Another classic, bundle offers serve as an extremely powerful promotional tactic for retail stores to increase overall product awareness as well as increasing their average order value. The logic is rather simple, really: just take a series of small disparate products and package them together as a “bundle deal” with a collective price that, to the customer, will seem like a bargain.
However, you must be careful with how you structure bundle deals, or else they will not make obvious sense to the customer. Each individual item, for instance, has to be attractive as a standalone purchase. Ideally, the customer gets to the bundle deal by accessing a singular item first. At the same time, of course, the bundle has to be considerably cheaper than purchasing each product individually in order to instil in the mind of the customer that they are deriving a tangible benefit from this deal.
Discounts
While bundling is one successful example of a discount, there are so many ways in which your ecommerce website can sprinkle discounts around its online shop. The two most popular ways of deploying discounts, for instance, are of course seasonal discounts, taking advantage of a prevailing mood of consumption, as well as first-time discounts, which are a great way of keeping first-time customers coming back.
But then there are the rarer discount ideas, ones that really grab a customer’s attention. This could range from a mailing list discount, saving customers money for the little price of entering some personal data, to something more obscure like anniversary discount, credit card discount, or maybe pre-order discount. The options are vast. Make sure you don’t fall behind your competition when it comes to inventive discounts.
Loyalty Programmes
Almost all successful ecommerce websites started out by creating a mailing list – an ever-growing group of personal inboxes into which you send offers, updates, and so on. It is a powerful tool in the ecommerce sphere, and you can use the same logic of bulk mailing lists to create loyalty programmes for a select group of customers.
If someone frequently buys your products, they are probably members of your mailing lists. You can analyse this list and create an exclusive loyalty programme for your faithful customers, rewarding their continued custom with great deals. Promotions are often about acquiring new customers; using them to consolidate existing customers, however, is a wise move for