Three Tactics for Price Promotion Campaigns

Consumers are smart shoppers and know how to get the most out of the internet finding deals online before deciding. And they also know that there are a lot of ecommerce competing to convince them with their special offers and discounts. A third factor must be added to the two already mentioned: the importance of the price for digital buyers, since it can have a weight of up to 80% in the purchase decision, as shown in the Total Retail 2017 of Price Waterhouse Coopers and other studies.

With this settled buying behaviour, the responses of ecommerce are promotional actions, campaigns in which price is the main protagonist, but not the only one.

Special discounts

These types of campaigns are among the most used in electronic commerce. In fact, they are already well known to consumers and are widespread in the world of ecommerce. Their effectiveness is also demonstrated, since the natural behaviour of the buyers is to lean towards a product with a reduced price, because it is more attractive than another product with its usual price.

To get the maximum benefit from this type of campaigns, the key is to present to the potential buyer three key figures: the original price before the discount (preferably crossed out), the new discounted price and the discount percentage (to show how much the buyer will save). When the discount is very significant, some ecommerce even have the figure that will be saved by the consumer next to the percentage.

This type of actions are widely used by ecommerce of all types of sectors, and are usually associated with seasonality, as it is a good argument for ecommerce to present a special price. There are many examples of this type of campaigns, such as Christmas, season ends and sales, or special days such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

Volume discounts

Another way to encourage the purchase is to carry out volume discount campaigns, which are essentially those in which the price of the products decreases the more of them a consumer acquires. These types of actions are widely used in ecommerce when selling recurring consumer products, such as food, hygiene and perfumery, pet articles, etc.

Similarly, B2B ecommerce use these campaigns when the product sold is a raw material for the purchasing company, such as office supplies, print cartridges or promotional merchandising.

Promotions by amount of purchase

These types of campaigns do not focus directly on the price, but on proposing to the consumer a reward for a minimum purchase amount. These actions can take many forms, such as: free delivery, sending an additional product or gift, a discount applicable to a second purchase, a free premium service, points accumulated in loyalty programs, etc.

These types of campaigns are the ones that ecommerce launch to increase the average amount of sales and ensure a minimum profitability of each online transaction. But for these campaigns to have good results, the goal associated with the sale must be well defined, such as getting new customers or get recurring purchases from loyal customers.

In the case of new customers, all actions associated with special prices - in any form - are a good strategy. In the case of loyal customers, things change, since we are able to know their buying pattern and therefore plan customized actions for them aimed at getting recurrence. Amazon Prime is a good example of a customer-only premium service designed by this giant ecommerce to achieve customer loyalty and recurrence at the same time.