May 18th, 2016

When it comes to offering deals and promotions to spur your business’s sales, there are several tried and true methods you can take. If you’re struggling for ideas what kind of deal to offer and when, you’ve come to the right place. The kind of deal you should offer your leads and prospects is ultimately up to you, but regardless of what you decide, I believe it’s most important to keep it fresh, relevant, and timely.

Keep It Fresh:

In our current age of shortened attention spans, one deal per year (or several years) just won’t cut it. Make sure to change your deals from time to time to keep you’re offers fresh. Each time you change your deals offering, you have something new to promote to your leads and prospects. Think about the deals and offerings that you see from retailers that you shop with. What kinds of deals do they offer that appeal to you? How often do they change their deals? Consider the following examples to apply to your marketing strategy:

Guitar Center offers daily deals, “The Daily Pick”, to their email list subscribers. This deal changes each and every day and highlights a different product on sale for that day only. This promotion is in addition to whatever store sales they normally offer.

Many hotels will offer seasonal deals with catchy names such as “Spring Special”, “Sizzling Summer Special”, etc. Clothing retailers will often do the same as they roll out their inventory for the upcoming season.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention deals revolving around holidays. Pick the one’s that work for you and run with it. There are holiday’s that occur each and every month, so there’s always an opportunity for a fresh, relevant, and timely deal to celebrate the occasion.

Regardless of how often you decide to roll out your deals, changing the offering will help to convert different prospects at different times. Remember: there’s not one deal that will appeal to everybody. Consider offering a mix of these types of offers:

Types of Offers

• Percentage Based – This is the most popular way to offer discounts. You can include small incentive percentages like 5% or 10% off, to much larger percentages to drive more conversions.

• Dollar Amount Discount – This is a simple dollar amount savings from your regular, or advertised prices. With SocialOwl specifically, you can cut the price of your monthly or annual subscriptions to close a sale or “waive” your one time Social Setup & Optimization Fee.
  
  
• Free Gift or Upgrade – Everybody likes to get something for nothing. If you’re a SocialOwl licensee, consider leveraging your packaged offerings and offer a limited time free upgrade from one package to the next.

• Competitions – The great thing about running a competition is that you only have to give away one thing, but you get so much in return. If you set-up a sweepstake in your SocialOwl account, for example, you could run a competition for 3 months of free social media optimization and management. While only one person will ultimately earn the prize, you’ll get valuable data in return such as prospects names, email addresses, and phone numbers.

Leveraging Existing Clients 

Sometimes, your most valuable promotional assets can be your existing clients. Word of mouth marketing can influence your revenues and profits more than any other marketing effort or deal you put forth. Once you have clients on board and happy with the service you provide to them, offer them an incentive to refer new business to you. These incentives can take many forms. You may consider giving your client a free month of service or offer a percent or dollar amount discount for the lifetime of their subscription with your business. You can even take it a step further with a discount for both your existing clients and the referral if they end up signing up. That way, both parties have an incentive to do business with you providing you a win-win scenario. This will ultimately create the ultimate key to loyal customers – the feeling of good will.

Whatever approach you take when launching deals, always remember to keep them fresh, relevant, and timely. I hope that this has provided you with some ideas for deals and promotions that will work for you and your business.