All businesses should run some form of discount or giveaway at some point in order to generate new sales. We explore the reasons below.
How Can Discounts, Sales and Giveaways Help Your Business?
There are many important reasons to throw a sale or offer regular giveaways as a business.
These include:
- Drawing in new customers
- Earning more sales and profit
- Getting rid of surplus inventory stock
- Connecting with customers
- Offering customers rewards for loyalty
- Drawing attention to new, exciting products
Planning Sales and Discounts
All consumers love to find sales and discounts, no matter the product. Throwing event sales and promoting discounts is an effective way to drum up more business and entice new customers.
- Understand the Different Kinds of Sales
If you’re an ecommerce site, you may want to run a limited time flash sale to gain significant sales in a short space of time. Or, you may be thinking of a longer event sale which gives consumers more time to browse stock. An alternative could also be a long-standing discount deal which exists for a long period of time, such as 3 for 2 on a particular item.
- Use Trends to Plan Your Discounts
If you’ve noticed that consumers are buying a particular product more than others, perhaps you can pair that product with another on a discount or deal basis to try and drive more sales to other products. This could be a product which complements the original in a certain way, or looks great as a pair.
Understand your consumer behavior to best target relevant discounts.
- Be Sure You Can Handle Extra
Large discounts and sales, especially those happening in a frenzy in a short space of time, may result in a large capacity of orders and inventory planning. It’s key that your business can still operate as it should with an increased demand, so plan ahead for that.
Running a Giveaway
Giveaways are particularly beneficial for social media campaigns and interaction with customers on these platforms. Giveaways help to build excitement over a product and draw in new sales and interaction with target consumers. Giveaways are also great at creating more of a bond between a business and its consumers through the interaction of a contest.
- Plan Your Goals
Your giveaway should always have a goal, so that you best understand how to create it. For example, if your prime goal is to build your customer database and email list, then within the giveaway instructions you can indicate that all participants must first follow you on social media and provide their contact email address to be in with a chance of winning.
- Choose Your Prize
The prize needs to be interesting enough to draw attention, and you need to choose this in advance. It could be a rare or exclusive version of a product you have, or perhaps a brand-new product with the winner being the first person to receive one of them.
- Spread the word
Connect with key people on social media and online to promote your giveaway, such as influencers, or key connections who can make posts about the giveaway you’re hosting, and include links to the giveaway page.