Before we get a client, we’ve got to get someone through the door and there are many ways of doing it. One is with free giveaways or discounts.
And the other one is, or another one rather than the other one, is via paid advertising.
Now the reason I bring this particular subject up is because I’ve come across some people who refuse to give discounts. They think — “why should I? Why should I give profits away?”
And there’s other people who give too much away. So where’s the happy medium?
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Now let’s take for instance –a shoe store or someone selling running shoes for example, because one of the people I spoke to has a business doing this.
Now what I advise is that they have a special opening night with some appetizers and finger foods — something simple.
Maybe a glass of wine or two, to invite people into introduce a new range. Now on the day, I suggested that a discount should be given to anyone who makes a purchase on the day.
However this particular person was totally against it. They did not see the point why should they give discounts, giving away profits.
But what I explained is that there’s different buying cycles and people are in different positions in their buying cycle.
Now if someone absolutely definitely wants it and they know, like and trust you, they’ll come to you, they’ll buy it if you’ve got the product.
But what about those ones who are impulsive, who are not ready? You want them to make an impulsive buy from you?
You don’t want them to have to research you and then research your competitor and the next one. You want them to buy from you.
Now these people don’t buy products, they buy offers. And what you want to be thinking is not that you are giving away something.
You are getting that first sale. You are introducing them to your buying experience. Hopefully you are confident that you are giving a great service.
You can tell them all you like, but the only way the are going to find out is by actually experiencing this is by buying something. And if you have to tempt them with that initial one, go for it.
Now obviously if you’re buying stock in running shoes or something like that, you certainly don’t want to be giving away things for free — unless, it’s a free up sell in addition to something they’ve already bought, because that’s another way of doing it.
For example, I am going to make this up, but say the running shoes are $70. You can throw in something that they are likely to want with it such as a pack of socks for instance that may be $15.
You can throw that in for free. The chances are, you are making a much bigger profit on the socks but you got the sale in, encouraged them to buy the running shoes, and maybe you made $35 on those and you only had to give away, what cost you $5 or $6 to buy.
This way, your customer feels that they are getting value, they’ve got an offer. And this is the same thing I shared with the person I spoke to originally .
I told them that this should be made clear that this discount is only available at the special evenings, these are rare, they are by invite only and you only give certain discounts.
That’s different. They know that’s not going to happen again. If someone comes to you and says “Well, I got a discount on last time I booked it”, say ‘well sorry, that was then, you know that was on a particular offer’.
We all buy goods, we don’t expect the same every time. We all get special offers, we don’t expect them every time.
We don’t go asking for it, so don’t be scared. Now of course you can get your customers in through paid advertising but I’m going to guess that the paid advertising is going to cost you more.
Also, it’s not as targeted. If you give a discount to somebody who buys your product, imagine how much money you’d spend on magazine ads or yellow pages ads to try and get them to come to your store in the first place, or google ads?
And they are not even ready to buy necessarily.
The other one has got their hand in their pocket, ready to pull the wallet out and spend money.
That is cheaper than the scatter gun thing of advertising and even if its target advertising, you’re just getting them to come and look and consider.
The best one of all is to combine the two. So use paid advertising to drive people to your offer, to come into a special thing, but make it special.
Make them feel like they are getting something unique, something that they must have now. That is scarcity, it has a deadline. It’s an event. Give it a name. You’ve got black Friday.
There are others in the UK, they have Blue Cross sales and there are all sorts of excuses for a sale.
Make it unique. Make it scarce. You might think to yourself — what’s going to happen if I do it again? Black Friday is a good example.
Everyone knows that’s coming, even though they don’t necessarily do it on black Friday, but they do it on other days. Don’t join in with everyone else. Do your own thing. Have an event.
So if you have a product that’s informational, you can give it away. But you don’t have to give it away to everyone.
Perhaps you would have a webinar or a live training where you explain it, and you could say the first five people that purchase this, because we’ve got a special offer, for the first five people who purchase will get it for free.
That’s going to make people dive in. They don’t know, they can’t see if there’s a 6 or 7. First come, first serve.
You could even tell them that everyone who purchases it today, after it’s done, after this webinar, that you are going to draw five names.
If you hang on till the end, you will then take five names who have bought it, put them in a hat or put all the names rather than who’ve bought it, draw five out of the hat.
Use the website called, www.random.org for doing that virtually and you will refund all those people, if they are still on the call.
Yeah. So you can use discounts. You can use it. You are not giving away. You are getting that initial sale.
In the direct mail world, generally the aim is to get the first purchase, once someone made a purchase, they become a customer.
It’s a big difference from someone who’s browsing or looking or a potential. Once they’ve become a customer, they’ve changed the name, their description.
They are now a client, a customer. They are very very likely to buy again and direct mail companies will know the figures.
To the extent that they are quite often willing to not only give away all of the profits on that first sale. Sometimes even more than the profit of that first sale, knowing that they’ll make it on the next order.
And they’ll know, perhaps they say 20% of people who buy will buy again, and they’ll know the average spend and the average value of someone who buys again, because they know they’ll buy again.
So they can afford to give that, that is their advertising cost. That is a cost of acquisition. Yellow pages, paid advertising, google ads, it’s all part of the mix.
Free freebies, giveaways, discounts on that initial order only, are all part of the cost of acquisition, it’s something you should consider.
Don’t think you’re giving away things to ungrateful people. Remember, I make it clear, it’s just on the opening offer.
That applies by the way, pretty much to every business, if you’re wondering.
Tuesday Toolbox Tip
It’s Tuesday today and it is time for our Toolbox tip. This one is simple, it’s a free tool. It’s from our friends at Buffer.
Buffer, we’ve mentioned before, is something we use every day. But they have a second tool, called Pablo.
Don’t ask me why they call it that, but it’s an image tool. It’s not like Canva or such. It’s for creating quoteable images.
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You can either use their images or upload your own. Then you just simply add text over the top. It’s all within the tool. It’s so easy.
They describe it as the 30 second image tool because that’s all it takes. You don’t have to have any training. It’s free.
Just go to www.buffer.com/pablo. It’s great. From there you can share it on your social media and so on, or download it to whatever you like.
It’s a piece of cake. And they also, for those of you who are thinking, they have different shapes for twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.
They offer instant change shape. Check it out because honestly its free, it’s worth it. We use it. See you tomorrow.
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What could you add to bump up a sale?
