Hello there!

To discount or not discount…it can be surprisingly difficult to decide.

If you are not selling enough, it can be tempting to assume that price is the problem – and offer a discount - when it can actually be any number of reasons for the lack of sales.

On the other hand, many of the sales made by email marketing for ecommerce stores are driven by discounts. If those types of business didn’t offer discounts, they would sell much less.

This summer, I did some email marketing for a beauty brand. So I did some research on email marketing in that industry to get a feel for the style of emails that are sent, plus the language and images used. 

In general, the emails were very sales-driven. Lots of discounts and many ‘shop now’ buttons. Then I went along to a Marketing Meetup ecommerce workshop with a speaker from the beauty brand Dermalogica, who said they never offer any discounts at all because "we are not a discount brand".

So the approach to discounting can vary from one extreme to the other, even within the same industry!

So what should you do? It varies a lot depending on your business, but here are three top tips:

• If you do offer a discount, make sure it aligns with your business and marketing objectives. Don’t chuck in a random discount code to get attention, make sure know how it will help you get more customers or sales and how it will affect your profit.
• Have a way of tracking which discount code was used and when. For example, offer different discount codes to different groups of people or for different product ranges, or of different amounts (e.g. is that 20% any more effective than the 15% one?) That way you can use the most effective discounts in future and lose less of your profit.
• If you’ve split your mailing list down into segments you can use site-wide or business-wide discounts sparingly. This means you can use your discounts in a more tailored way, potentially saving you profits, and you can avoid training your entire list to just wait until the next site-wide discount code comes along. For example, you might like to give a relatively big discount to the group of customers who made one purchase but then didn't buy anything in 6 months to tempt them to place another order. Make a segment containing just those people and send that discount to them, not your entire email list.

Finally, if offering discounts might risk cheapening your brand, then there’s no need to do it at all. Instead, create offers by adding more value rather than dropping the price. Think Dermalogica rather than discount supermarket.

If you'd like to know more about discounting with email marketing, take a look at my latest blog post on planning your campaigns for Black Friday.

Have a good weekend,

Helen

• How to get as many people as possible reading your email - read more in my LinkedIn post
• The dangers of using your calendar as your main prompt for sending email campaigns - read more in my LinkedIn post
• If you’d like my help with how to split your list into segments so you can offer different content (or discounts) to different subscribers, stay tuned because I’ll be offering a package to help you with that - and more - very soon.