11 Consumer Sales Promotion Techniques Every Business Can Use
With the rapidly increasing competition in the market, brands have become more conscious about attracting and retaining their potential customers. The marketing strategies of businesses are not just limited to advertising now, but they also use different sales promotion techniques to achieve their objectives. Studies have shown that most consumers try a new product only when they see an offer running on that. This is how powerful consumer promotions can be. Many consumers would have never tried a product if they didn’t get an offer on it. You might be missing out on many potential customers if you don’t run a sales promotion offer.
What is Consumer Sales Promotion?
Consumer sales promotions are the marketing strategies businesses use to boost their sales and achieve other short-term business goals in a limited time frame. The goal of a sales promotion program can be to increase sales, improve customer engagement, boost brand awareness, or anything that benefits a business in any manner. Almost every brand now uses sales promotion strategies to attract new customers and increase sales of their products. Some of the most effective consumer sales promotion techniques are listed below:
1. Free Samples
Offering free sample products especially works when your goal is to introduce a new product in the market or to promote a less popular product. It is a great way to make your potential customers try your products by eliminating the risk. Consumers are often afraid of spending their hard-earned money on something that they are not very sure about. This is why offering free samples or free trials is the best way to make them try a product that they might have never considered otherwise.
2. Early Bird Discounts
Early bird offers are the discounts that brands provide their customers on making a purchase or booking in advance. This sales promotion strategy is generally used by airlines, premium hotels, and other travel-based companies. These are very short-term offers under which a brand offers an additional discount on booking a flight or a hotel in advance.
Even e-commerce businesses can run early bird discount offers by providing additional discounts on specific purchases in the first few days of an offer. For example, if you are running a 20% discount offer for a month, you can provide a 30% discount to those customers who make a purchase (above a certain amount) within the first 5 days of the offer.
3. Gift Coupons
Offering gift discount coupons for future purchases is another sales promotion technique that doesn’t only help you boost sales, but is also effective in retaining customers. After your customer makes a purchase, you can send them a discount coupon code via email, text message, or you can even give it to them physically. The percentage of discounts may vary depending on the amount your customers spend. The more a customer spends now, the higher discount they will receive for their next purchase. Make sure that you keep these discount coupons’ validity short to make your customers come back more often.
4. Gift Products
Another great idea is to gift free products to your customers on making purchases above a certain amount. This strategy is most widely used by supermarkets where customers get free products on achieving the required spending threshold. The higher a customer spends, the more valuable free product they receive. For example, you can offer a product worth Rs. 100 free on purchases above Rs. 1,000, a product worth Rs. 500 free on purchases above Rs. 5,000, and so on. This sales promotion technique is not only effective in motivating customers to spend more but also allows you to make your customers try less popular products from your store.
5. Lucky Draws
This is a less popular, but highly effective sales promotion strategy to boost your sales or increase brand awareness in a short span of time. Launch a lucky draw offer and make as many customers as possible aware of it before the offer starting date. In such offers, a brand generally comes up with a minimum spend threshold that the customers need to achieve in order to enter the lucky draw contest. Out of all the participants, winners (generally three, five, or ten) are randomly selected and offered premium gifts.
For example, you can run a lucky draw contest with specific conditions, such as a minimum spend of Rs. 10,000, a short pre-specified offer period, a limited number of winners, and a prize for each winner. Every customer who spends above Rs. 10,000 within the offer period becomes eligible for the lucky draw. If running a lucky draw contest, make sure that you select winners randomly through a transparent process.
6. Happy Hour Sales
Happy hour sales are very often run by e-commerce businesses. These are flash sales valid only for a short duration, generally a few hours. Under a happy hour sale, you can offer specific products at heavy discounts for a short duration. When an offer is valid for a short period, it creates a sense of urgency among your customers. No customer wants to miss such a great deal and hence, they are motivated to make a purchase before the offer ends. When running happy hour sales, you must ensure that you offer really good discounts that can encourage your customers to make a quick decision without having a second thought in mind.
7. Cashback
Cashback-based sales promotions are one of the most traditional yet successful strategies to keep your customers coming back. When you offer your customers some cashback after every purchase, they feel like they are receiving something in return for their purchase. Getting something, even if it’s a little amount, is always better than getting nothing. So, if you are offering a small percentage of cashback on all the purchases your customers make, you are giving them a reason to prefer your brand over your competitors. You can even offer cashback in the form of store credits that they can use against future purchases.
8. Free Shipping & Returns
By offering free shipping and returns on your products, you can encourage your customers to buy your products at zero risk. If they don’t like it, they can always return it (though within the pre-specified time period only). However, only a few consumers return a product after purchasing it. By offering free returns, you can eliminate your customers’ fear of wasting their money on a new product.
9. BOGO Offers
Under a Buy One Get One deal, you can either offer one product for free with another product or provide one product at a discounted price with another item. When customers see a BOGO deal running, they are tempted to avail of its benefit as they don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to get two products at the price of one. You can use a BOGO deal to boost sales for a specific product or to clear out old inventory. Also, make sure to keep the offer validity short in order to create a FOMO among your customers.
10. Sweepstakes
Sweepstakes are just a different type of lucky draw contest where the winner is selected completely at random. Generally, there is no minimum spending requirement to enter a sweepstakes contest. All the customers who have made a purchase during the specified period, or simply all the registered users on an e-commerce website are eligible to participate. Any customer can be selected at random and provided with a pre-specified gift.
11. Loyalty Points
Almost every business is now having a loyalty program under which they offer a fixed percentage of loyalty points to their customers after every purchase. Customers can later redeem these loyalty points against several options available, such as discount coupons for future purchases, gift vouchers for other brands, and other products. Offering continuous loyalty points is an effective sales promotion strategy to boost brand loyalty and encourage repeat purchases in your business.
Choose RewardPort As Your Sales Promotion Partner
RewardPort, being one of the top sales promotion companies in India, can execute a consumer promotion program exclusively for your business taking every small detail into consideration. The team of marketing experts at RewardPort analyzes your business requirements carefully and comes up with a sales promotion plan that works well for your brand. With plenty of reward and redemption options, RewardPort becomes a great option to consider when looking for sales promotion companies.
Frequently Asked Questions: -
Consumer promotion is important for businesses to attract new customers and make them buy products at discounted prices. Studies suggest that many consumers like to try new products only when offered at discounts and not otherwise.
To measure the effectiveness of your consumer promotion offers, you can use several metrics, such as the profits before and after promotions, increase in sales after promotions, increase in the rate of repeat purchases, etc.
Social Media has become a powerful tool used for sales promotions by businesses. Social media platforms can be very effectively used for boosting brand awareness. The social media contests run by brands are often much more successful than other types of sales promotions.
11 Consumer Sales Promotion Tactics to Generate More Business Faster
Consumer sales promotion tactics are the strategies that businesses use to boost their sales during a particular time. The only way for a business to succeed is by gaining more customers and selling products or services. You must inform them about it and increase sales with the appropriate consumer sales promotion techniques.
Successful companies use sales promotions to boost sales, increase brand awareness, and improve customer satisfaction. All these factors are critical and ultimately drive more sales. You can find several examples of sales promotions that different businesses use. However, not all of them might be suitable for your business.
First, you can identify your business goals and plan sales promotion strategies accordingly. Here are some most effective consumers sales promotion strategies to drive more sales faster:
1. Discount Coupons
Offering products at discounted prices is one of the oldest yet most effective sales promotion techniques. The end-of-season sales are great examples of such discounts. Customers wait for end-of-season sales to purchase the products they couldn’t afford to buy during the season. Discounts are beneficial both for customers and retailers. Customers can buy more for less price, and retailers can clear their stock faster.
Apart from running seasonal discount offers, you can provide discount coupons to your customers for their next purchase. If customers have your discount coupons, they are more likely to return to your store before they expire. This is how you can drive repeat business and encourage customers to purchase more often.
2. Free shipping/returns
Consumers do consider the shipping cost while making online purchases, especially when it’s their first purchase from a brand. They are most likely to change their purchasing decision if high shipping costs are associated with a product. If your brand is charging a shipping fee on its products, you might be missing out on many potential customers.
Most customers don’t want to spend money on a product if they doubt its quality, usage, life, etc. With high shipping costs and no guaranteed returns, the overall price of the product becomes expensive, and the purchase seems riskier to the customer. Offering free shipping and guaranteed returns with a 100% refund reduces the customers’ fear of wasting money on the wrong product.
3. Contests & Giveaways
Running prize contests online or offline is one of the simplest and most efficient ways to increase brand awareness and boost sales. These contests create healthy competition among your customers, making it interesting for them to participate. Social media contests can be very powerful and bring unexpected results. Some common examples of social media contests include:
- ‘Top Spenders Offer’ under which the top spenders of the week or month are awarded. These contests aim to boost the overall business revenue.
- ‘Purchase to Win’ contests under which a brand chooses random buyers of a particular product as winners. These contests are focused on boosting the sales of the product.
- ‘Like, Comment, and Share to Win’ contests under which the participants are rewarded for sharing your brand’s official social media page with their friends. These contests are aimed at increasing brand awareness.
4. Buy 1 Get 1 Free
BOGO deals are the most popular consumer sales promotion tactics for retail businesses. The idea of getting two items for the price of one seems amazing to the customers. Businesses generally run BOGO offers to clear the stock or to encourage customers to purchase a newly launched product.
It also increases brand awareness as many customers share the free product with their family or friends. Though it is the same as a 50% discount, calling it a BOGO deal is more impactful as freebies attract more customers.
5. Free Samples
If you allow your customers to try your product for free, most of its buyers would have never bought it without trying it. Customers don’t want to spend money on a product without knowing whether it works for them or not. You can offer free samples of the new product with a popular product that most of your target audience knows about.
This has dual benefits. It boosts the sales for your main product and introduces your new product in the market. After trying the free sample product, many customers may buy it.
6. Flash Sales
Big discount offers become more effective when combined with limited periods. The duration can be anything between 24 hours to 30 days depending on your stock availability and customer interests. Flash sales develop a fear of missing out among your customers. Under these sales, products are offered at heavy discounts for a limited duration.
You can build excitement ahead of time by announcing the sale launch date. This creates a sense of urgency, and your customers buy their favorite products as soon as the sale is live.
7. Bundle Products
Bundle products or combo offers discounts on related products when you buy them as a bundle. For example, a combo of shampoo (priced at Rs 150) and a conditioner (priced at Rs 120) can be offered at a combined price of Rs 230.
This encourages customers to buy combo packs instead of buying only one product to save some money. Bundle offers can move your inventory faster as you sell more products with a low discount.
8. Loyalty Reward/Cashback Programs
Research has shown that gaining a new customer can be five times more expensive than retaining an existing one. This is why customer loyalty is important for every business. Running a continuous loyalty program is one of the best ways to motivate customers to stay loyal to your brand.
Loyalty programs can be of different types:
- Rewards-based programs
- Cashback-based programs
- Tier-based programs
Under these programs, your customers get rewarded every time they make a purchase. For successful loyalty programs, you need to make sure that you offer interesting redemption options against these reward points. These programs can retain customers only if the rewards you offer are valuable and useful for them.
9. Referral Discount
Referral discounts help you increase your market reach by encouraging your customers to recommend your brand to their friends. You can offer discounts to your customers and their referral friends when they purchase your products. The referral program becomes more efficient when you give a higher discount for more referrals.
You can also offer them incentives for sharing their experiences with your product on social media. Consumers believe in user-generated content more than a brand promoting itself.
10. Scratch Cards
Scratch Cards are like mystery offers. You can offer scratch cards with different discounts, such as 5%, 10%, and 25% discount. The customers only know their reward after they purchase and scratch the gift card. Human minds are curious, and curiosity makes them participate in the offer to see what they get inside the scratch cards. Once they get a discount, they will most likely purchase before the discount coupon expires.
11. ‘Spin to Win’ Contests
‘Spin to Win’ contests are one of the best ways to include gamification in your sales promotion and make it interesting for your customers. You can run a ‘Spin to Win’ contest on your website or offline store. Provide your customers with an opportunity to spin the wheel once every day. You can include reward points, cashback, discounts, and a few big prizes in this wheel.
Make sure that they win something most of the time. If not discounts and rewards, they should at least get a few reward points for spinning the wheel. They can redeem these rewards once they have collected significant points.
This motivates them to visit your website at least once every day. These contests also help you increase your brand awareness through word of mouth.
How Can RewardPort Help?
RewardPort is a reward and loyalty solutions providing company. RewardPort can help you plan and run a sales promotion strategy that works for your business and aligns with your customer interests.
The marketing experts at RewardPort take every business detail into account and run sales promotions exclusively for your business. Your marketing campaigns are not restricted to one or two platforms with RewardPort but are executed on multiple platforms, including on the web, offline, SMS, etc.
Frequently Asked Questions: -
Sales promotions aim to attract potential customers by reducing the prices of products. These techniques encourage customers to purchase a product they would not have bought at their original price. Sales promotions help you acquire new customers, boost sales, retain customers, increase brand awareness, and ultimately increase gross revenue.
Some most common mistakes to avoid when implementing consumer sales promotions are:
- Not defining your target audience
- Not being consistent
- Spending a lot on promotions without proper research
- Not tracking results to optimize future campaigns
Consumer sales promotions aim to increase your sale and volume of inventory churn. You may need to use sales promotion tactics to clear old and aging inventory, move stores, renew your stock, and counter similar challenges. All these activities can result in higher revenue, however, may reduce your profit margin.