Marketing • Business
5 Amazing Promotions We’ve Seen This Month
12 Feb 2015 • 6 min read
Diving into the new year the right way is just as important as getting your holiday promotions right. If you’re in the ecommerce space, you know your customers have already started executing plans for 2015 with new resolutions in nearly every sphere of their lives. Whether your store becomes a part of those plans will depend on the kind of promotions you can send their way.
As someone who receives hundreds of promotional emails a week – let’s call it professional curiosity of a digital marketer – I found the following to be very effective:
Think about it: how many books have you been able to finish in two days in the past? By giving you a free pass to read anything you want for two days (which were over the weekend – another smart choice as people tend to have more time to read on the weekends), there’s a good chance that you might pick a topic you really like. When you’re unable to finish it over the weekend, you’ll be tempted to at least pay for the first month to keep going and finish that book you started.
Learnable can also give you a glimpse of their immense library of material through this free pass so you know what kind of value you get when you subscribe for their service. Genius!
Taking inspiration from this, imagine a retailer giving their customers a 24 hour window in which whatever they buy comes with a 10% discount and free shipping! The important point is not the discount itself – that will vary depending on your business needs and realities of your market – but the concept of giving an attractive deal to a customer who acts right away.
It makes you engage with their brand! Customers have to answer a bunch of trivia questions to get 10% to 75% off on their books or a chance to win their new e-reader. The people more likely to win are those who are heavy readers: after all, who else would care about a literature trivial contest? This is the perfect target audience for a publisher. What’s even better: the winners walk away either having purchased Kobo’s ebooks or with a device designed to help them purchase more of Kobo’s ebooks.
Lastly, the best part about contests is that while only a few people end up winning (low cost for you), you end up grabbing the attention of a large audience with the right targeting and price. While they are engaged with your contest, you have a great opportunity for further cross promotion and sales.
LeadPages is a system designed to help you create effective landing pages easily. However, landing pages are the 2nd part in the lead conversion process. Guess what the first part is: creating effective ads to bring more people to a landing page. That’s why this promotion is amazing.
Even though Facebook ads aren’t a core LeadPages product, by helping their subscribers with this course, they ensure that interested businesses will not only learn how to create effective ads, but also want to use LeadPages to create landing pages for those ads. Readers walk away with great insights into a process that eludes many marketers, and LeadPages acquire a number of new customers who are primed to use their product as soon as they buy it.
This approach could be adopted by any number of other retail businesses. For example, if you sell computer parts and accessories, create a course on how to assemble a powerful desktop for under $500 (or any other dollar amount feasible for you).
This is an excellent promotion designed to get your existing subscribers get further invested in your ecosystem. For example, I am an Amazon Prime member so I could get expedited shipping on products. However, by offering me unlimited Photo space on the cloud and up to 90% of all textbooks (which, admittedly I don’t need at the moment – bad targeting!), I become even more entrenched in their system. If I uploaded 1,000 photos, that makes it harder for me to leave Amazon’s ecosystem (or risk either losing my photos or go through the hassle of downloading them back to my computer and finding another cloud service to store them.)
With the right targeting, this would be a great promotion that adds a lot of value for the customer and, at the same time, makes it harder for customers to leave the Prime membership.
Other retailers could do create a similar premium membership program. Target customers who spent over a certain amount (so that the benefits justify their purchase of your membership) and offer them free shipping or a fixed extra discount on all products as long as they pay subscription fees or spend over a certain amount at your store. This way, not only do you make your most loyal customers happy, but also encourage them to spend more money at your store.
Unbounce is a popular tool for creating and A/B testing landing pages. However, marketing consists of more than just creating highly-converting landing pages. It involves social media promotions, email marketing, online advertising, analytics, and much more. By creating this bundle with cloud-based products that complement one another, Unbounce has not only offered a great value for its own visitors, but also to the audiences of all the other tools participating in this bundle. Because these tools are so perfectly complementary to one another, their target audiences are essentially the same, which means by combining their efforts, they are effectively increasing their 9 times over!
These bundle promotions are a great way to offer excellent value and bring more sales, and they serve to establish strong, mutually beneficial relationships with other retailers in your space who target the same audience but do not sell competing products. For example, if you sell bikes online, create a bundle with stores that sell backpacks, trail shoes, fitness trackers, or even bike clubs.
Promotions should be about more than just sales. They should be about delighting customers in such a way that they want to spend more money at your store and refer you to their friends. Have you come across any promotions that have delighted you as a customer? Share them in the comments below!
