How to Incentivize Your Customers

A brand’s success in ecommerce takes more than strong marketing and consistent site traffic. When providing products and services directly to consumers it’s difficult for many people to follow through with the purchase without sufficient reason.

The lack of a reason often results in abandoned carts, bounces, and low sales. This is what makes customer incentives crucial to generating sales and moving products.

For some brands, their product is the driving force to purchase, but unfortunately, we can’t all be this lucky. For those who don’t sell essential products, you need to devise alternative ways of enticing customers to buy.

If you’re looking for tips to increase your sales, check out our article below:

Now, incentives can come in different forms, many of which you’ve seen before, like BOGOs, discounts, or bundles. Anything that has you hovering over the “buy now” option is often a form of incentivization on behalf of the brand.

Here are the top 9 ways brands incentivize customers to purchase.

1. BOGOs

Buy one, get one deals are a very effective way to incentivize a purchase. Despite their name, they can also come in a variety of different forms. From the typical buy x number of items, get y free, to buy x number of items, get y at a discount. The specifics of the BOGO will vary depending on what is trying to be sold.

BOGO deals are exceptionally effective when trying to increase order values or when trying to move certain products that may not be selling very well.

2. Bundles

Bundles are similar to BOGOs in that they both bring different items together at a discounted price. However, bundles tend to have a much more specific purpose in mind and may only match certain products together based on function. For instance, bundling shampoo with conditioner, a loofa with body wash, a dish set with silverware, or even a grill with select cleaning equipment.

3. Post Purchase Incentives

Post purchase incentives are a great way of reengaging with your customers after they have completed checkout to encourage them to purchase again in the future. An example of this is a survey at the bottom of a receipt that, when completed will give you a discount on your next order.

The main goal with post purchase incentives is engagement and offering further reasons for them to continue doing business with you.

4. Upsells

Upsells are almost exclusively geared toward increasing average cart value (AOV) and providing customers with more value before they checkout. You may have seen something like this the last time you looked at Amazon. Often times there are products that will have a “Frequently bought together” section that will recommend products that other shoppers bought alongside the one you are looking at.

Upsells can improve the customer experience by providing more value to their products and introducing items that may pair well or they just hadn’t thought of.

5. Discounts

Discounts are the good ol’ tried and true method of incentivizing your customers. Regardless of whether it’s in the form of a percent or dollar amount a good discount is all it takes for someone to go from on the fence to hitting that checkout button. However, it is always good to know when to use a percent discount and when to use a dollar amount. While on paper they may seem like the same thing, in reality, a 30% discount off $100 may be perceived as a better deal than $30.

6. Gifts

Everyone loves a good gift, and your customers are no exception. Gifts are just a way of rewarding your customers for shopping with you. It serves as a reliable and simple way of reaching specific order numbers, and order value, or just simply getting rid of products that may not sell on their own. Gifts are an overall great way to invite your customers to spend more with your business.

7. Goals

This one is less of an inventive by itself, but more of a style of incentive. Goals are a way for you to display how close your customers are to receiving various things, like free shipping or discounts on their purchases. This not only provides an incentive to purchase more but also helps you maintain a certain AOV.

8. Volume

If your brand often sells large numbers of certain products then consider providing volume discounts. Volume discounts are just that, discounts on certain volumes of items. Instead of the customer paying full price for all of the shirts, they would have a percentage knocked off the top for surpassing the arbitrary threshold you’ve set. Similar to goals this would incentivize customers to purchase more products to get that discount. Resulting in higher AOV and more products sold.

9. Bulk

Finally, you have bulk discounts. Similar to volume, bulk discounts serve to reduce costs for customers looking to buy large batches of items. However, unlike volume, bulk discounts are aimed more at larger purchases like those a large business would make. For example, you would use volume discounts for purchases that would come from a football coach looking for 100 shirts and shorts but use bulk discounts for a retailer looking to buy 500-1,000 for its store.

Read more about these discount types below:

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Ecommerce is always changing and to ensure you stay on top of the game you’ve got to evolve too. Below are some tools to help step up your promotional game and increase your sales.