Looking for effective ways to boost your WooCommerce store’s sales and revenue? Discounts are a proven strategy to attract customers and increase purchases. In this blog post, we will share a variety of discount ideas for WooCommerce that you can use to drive more sales and grow your business.
WooCommerce store promotions are big conversion drivers, both in online and offline stores. Even users without purchase intent end up buying products if you offer competitive pricing/discounts.
In addition to the increase in sales, offers are an arsenal to improve customer loyalty. However, discounts are not always viable, especially if you have a thin profit margin.
It is therefore essential to be on the lookout for feasible promotion strategies that can improve your store performance significantly without hurting your profit or your brand.
10 Most Effective Discount Strategies For Your Store
Here is a collection of some promotional ideas that you can incorporate into your store to improve customer loyalty and conversions. And, also how to most effectively use them.
1. BOGO
BOGO coupons, aka Buy One, Get One Off, is a time-tested promotion strategy that is sure to make an impact on your sales growth.
In addition to the growth in sales, BOGO also helps you in getting rid of your old inventory. How you ask? Well…offer the products that you want out as reward for buying others. This is a win-win situation for both you and your customers.
Moreover, BOGO doesn’t always have to be Buy One Get One. There are many other BOGO offer alternatives such as
- Buy for at least $X and get $Y off, for example: buy items worth $300 and get $50 off.
- Buy 1 get 1 at 50% off, for example: buy 1 shirt and get a tie at half price.
Explore all available options and make a decision based on what is right for you and your store.
2. Holiday/Seasonal Discounts
Who would hate somebody that offers you promotions during holidays and festivals?
Seasonal discounts in WooCommerce are a simple, trouble-free, and effective way to promote your business, brand, and products to users. Well-timed holiday discounts not only help you in attracting new customers but also in increasing average cart value – because people love to BUY during holidays.
One thing to note about these holiday discounts is that people not only purchase for themselves, but they also do it for others too, as gifts. For example, a person buying a pair of jeans may next buy toys for kids. So market your products effectively, show users everything that they might want, and let them decide for themselves.
3. Abandoned Cart Recovery Discounts
Cart abandonment is not a fully bypassable event, however hard you try. You can manage it by analyzing your purchase funnel. You can also control it to an extent by managing delivery and other miscellaneous fees charged during checkout.
However, a good way to get back the customers who have left you is by offering discounts. Cart abandonment discounts are customer behavior-driven discounts that often result in purchase/customer retrieval.
How does it work? When a customer abandons a cart and does not come back in a pre-fixed amount of time, special discount coupons personalized for the users are automatically generated and will be emailed to them. They can claim this discount while completing the previously initiated purchase.
4. Sign-Up Offers
First impressions are the best impression!
People are always hesitant to trust an unfamiliar brand, especially a new one. So it is important that you create a good impression on your potential audience with special offers and discounts.
Sign-up discounts and other first-time shopper offers are a good way to bridge the differences between you can your customer. These offers often encourage customers to give you a chance over your competitors.
Nevertheless, always make sure to provide your customers, old or new, a good shopping experience. For example, do not delay the shipment initiation. This often builds brand loyalty which results in repeated purchases.
5. Free Delivery
Free delivery is a ladder to success.
Free shipping in WooCommerce is an increasingly popular marketing tactic employed by almost every leading business in the town. Free delivery is one of the best ways to improve the average number of orders and even average cart value.
Additional charges like the delivery fees added during the end of the purchase funnel are often the main culprits for cart abandonment. Dropping such a charge can have a highly positive impact on your business.
Moreover free delivery doesn’t have to be just free delivery! It can also be ‘free delivery over a fixed cart subtotal’. This not only helps to improve sales but also reduces the impact of having to provide free services from limited profit.
6. Minimum Purchase Discount
Improve the cart quality with minimum purchase discounts.
Minimum purchase discounts can either be minimum order subtotal or a minimum number of products that should be purchased to avail of a discount.
Minimum purchase discounts when combined with an effective upselling and cross-selling strategy can work wonders. Strategically, you can decide on the minimum purchase value and the discount amount by looking at your historic sales figures. Identify the mean of all the purchase values and offer discounts on orders 10 to 20% over the mean value.
Additionally, offering minimum purchase discounts on specific products or categories usually turns users’ focus on that particular stock. So if you require to improve sales of a particular collection, minimum purchase discounts are an effective solution.
7. Giveaways
Giveaway products set a foundation of trust in the brand.
Free rewards for purchases are a common practice, especially in the retail industry. Not only does this help boost sales but also helps to get rid of extra or unnecessary stock.
Giveaways can be of many types. It can be either a fixed free product for all purchases or different products based on the purchase or let the customer decide the product that they want. Select the giveaway type based on your use case.
Also, make sure to set some purchase criteria such as minimum purchase quantity, minimum purchase amount, specific products (eg: Buy a baloney pizza to get a nugget free), a specific category, etc.
8. Flash Sales
Create a sense of urgency to encourage faster conversions.
Frequent promotions create a positive brand impression on the customers. However, if you don’t have the resources or bandwidth to provide regularly scheduled promotions, sudden impromptu flash sales are a good alternative.
These time-constrained sales strategies drive sales by creating a FOMO or a ‘now or never’ sensation. You can also keep on reminding them of the decreasing stock to create a rush.
An additional tactic that you can implement is countdown timer banners for WooCommerce. Use these banners to inform customers about the end of the sale – this helps to maximize conversions over a short period of time.
9. Personalized Recommendations/Related Products
Give out recommendations based on the products they buy.
When a person buys an iPhone, they also might buy a wireless charger. Since there is a chance that the thought of buying the charger might slip the customer’s mind, it is better that you recommend buying the charger when they add the phone to the cart.
These personalized recommendations can be product upsells, cross-sells, or even down-sells. This strategy has extreme potential to generate a soar in the net average sales value.
There are several ways to upsell and cross-sell. Adding products as related products in the product pages is a common practice when it comes to personalized recommendations. Make the related product field as attractive and focus-grabbing as possible to never miss out on the extra revenue.
10. Showcase Promotions On Other Platforms
Growing your customer base is as important as retaining customers.
A simple way to explore a new audience is by expanding your store to new areas such as social media and other community platforms. You can do everything with social media – from creating simple posts about updates on your platform to offering incentives for engaging with your page.
You can even promote your sales on social media. However, the process flow of such an action is quite complicated. When a user sees a sales alert post on their socials, they will have to first manually navigate to your online store, add products to the cart and apply the coupon.
You can simplify this whole process by creating a URL for the discount coupons that you provide. Embed these URLs on all your promotion posts on the web store, socials, etc. This way, when a user clicks on the URL, they will be automatically redirected to their store cart with both the products and coupons automatically applied. All they have to do now is complete the payment. You can achieve this with the auto-apply URL coupons.
How Do I Implement These Strategies?
Well, this is the easiest part!
There are several plugins in WordPress to help you with promoting your products on your WooCommerce stores. These plugins will provide you with the configurations required for setting up all the discounts and promotions you might need for your store.
Some of the most prominent plugins among these are Smart Coupons for WooCommerce, URL Coupons for WooCommerce and Related Products for WooCommerce plugins from WebToffee. You can set up all the above-mentioned promotion strategies with just these three plugins.
Configuring promotions with these no-code plugins is a no-brainer. The easy-to-use and intuitive interface makes it easy for you to understand and implement the features in no time.
Smart Coupons and URL Coupons for WooCommerce are essentially discount coupon-related plugins. They offer everything from simple percentage coupon-based discounts to coupon URLs. Their features include auto-apply coupons, cart abandonment coupons, bulk coupon generation, sign-up coupons, store credits, URL coupons, BOGO coupons, and more.
Conclusion
Promoting your brand and your products is the right thing to do if you are looking to scale your business. Do try out the suggested promotion strategies and let us know your thoughts and comments in the comment box.
