Promotional Marketing: 9 Ways to Squeeze More ROI Out of Your Shopping Cart
Marketers have developed quite a bag of promotion and coupon tricks to get consumers to spend more at the checkout counter or when mailing in the order form.
The good news for online retailers is that modern e-commerce software lets them easily adapt these proven promotional marketing techniques to an online environment to lift average order sizes, revenues and profits.
Promotions are time-based discounts applied to shopping carts during the shopping experience or at checkout. They can range from a percentage or dollar amount off all the way to free shipping or even additional free or discounted products. A promotion can be linked to an individual product, a collection of products or an entire order. It can be associated with random users, groups of users or specific individuals, and can also be restricted to one transaction or unlimited.
Delivering and managing these promotional options requires an e-commerce system with a strong rules-based engine. The system should enable the website to apply different promotional offers to different products, customers and situations so innovative marketing ideas can be easily implemented throughout the website. Here are nine promotional marketing techniques that will increase your customers' shopping carts –— and your sales.
1. Free Shipping
A common offer made in direct marketing is, "order now and get free shipping." Customers would rather not pay shipping and handling charges, especially in catalog marketing and e-commerce.
Free shipping can be applied to an individual product or set of products. You may also exclude specific products from the promotion, or require a minimum order total to qualify for free shipping.
Special shipping codes allow customers to get free or discounted shipping on their orders (based on a service level of your choosing — same day, next day, standard air, ground, etc.) when the code is redeemed. The code may be limited to one per customer and/or the first order only, if desired. The retailer can select specific products that are applicable for this promotion.
