8 Powerful Marketing Incentives To Generate More Sales

Everybody loves a screaming deal. Including me and your audience you are marketing to.

Just yesterday I received another 20% Off email promo code valid for 24-hrs from one of my favorite online supplement stores at https://vitacost.com  Now, VitaCost did not stop with that sending me that one promo, no, no, no… they continue to send me a variety of time-limited promotions about 25 times a month! You’re probably thinking…dang, that’s an insane amount of email being sent out from one company, and you’re right. Why would I like receiving so much email promos from them in a given month? The answer has everything to do with two things:

1. I love the quality and affordable products they sell on their site.
2. Their promos incentivize me to buy various products I like and even products I might not have even considered at all had they not told me about them.

Here’s a glance at the the emails VitaCost has sent me this month already:

Now, think for a moment about the type of loyal buyer I am for VitaCost. How many of these types of buyers do you have right now for your business? Do you have a plan to attract and engage and convert buyers into loyal, consistent buyers?

If you don’t have many loyal customers for any reason, or you want more loyal customers purchasing higher volumes of products from you more often then offering incentives can help.

In this article today I’ll share with you 8 powerful marketing incentives you can implement in your marketing so you can generate consistent daily sales! That’s vital. Let’s first talk about what incentives are in the first place.

What are sales incentives?

Incentives in general are simply rewards you give your audience in exchange for taking action right now. That action could be a sale, or it could be something else such as giving you a name/email in exchange for something valuable. From there they arrive on your email list where you can communicate with them and market even more incentive based communication.

Over time, if you use incentives properly you can inspire explosive engagement and convert that one-time visitor into a frequent and loyal customer who buy more and more from you. So the bottom line here is if you incentivize your audience well enough your sales can sky rocket consistently over time!

The 8 sales incentives I’ll discuss today are:

1. Time-based coupon codes
2. Pricing discounts
3. Gamification systems
4. Gift cards
5. Loyalty programs
6. Affiliate programs
7. Contests
8. Sales & Holiday Specials

1- Time-based coupon codes

In general promoting time-sensitive coupon codes work really well for a few reasons. First, it plays upon the fear of loss. The thinking usually goes like this…”If I don’t take action now I will miss out on the deal and I don’t know when that exact same coupon discount deal will come again, so I’m going to act now.”

The second reason time-based coupon discount emails work so well is because it puts your products and brand in front of your audience more often. Have you ever heard of the saying “out of site, out of mind”? Well, it’s true. For the most part people will have a much greater chance of buying from you each month if you send them valuable emails, promotions, deals, etc about 8 times or more a month instead of once or twice.

People usually do not buy what they cannot see and are not reminded of. Makes sense. So the question for you is…How often are you getting your products and brand in front of your target audience each month?

2- The price drops the more you shop

This is a great rewards-based incentive that inspires your audience to spend more money with you. The name basically says it all. The more they buy from you the lower their price becomes to a certain point. You could consider offering this for one product or your entire site or anything in between. To implement this kind of incentive it will usually take an act of hiring a programmer to implement this for you or finding an app or plugin for your website that will do it for you.

3- Gamification

We can learn allot from children. One of those things we can learn from them is why they love to play games. Games keep them engaged, entertained and focused on something productive. In our case with drop shipping, gamification can help your audience have fun paying you for more and more products. Three great gamification strategies you can consider using in your dropship ecommerce store are:

• earning/redeeming points for a reward of any type (ex: discounts, downloads, training, consultations, and anything else of value)
• social competitions with other members
• create a literal game out of the ecommerce business you operate such as “Play House” or “Design a Room” if you run a home decor business. They could play a game using the furniture you sell. As they do so they could earn points the more products they use to arrange their plan online and then ultimately get more points to redeem for discounts or other value by downloading their plan and/or purchasing the products they used to arrange their decor plan.

Gamification is all designed around the principle of engagement. The more you can engage your audience the higher likelihood they will buy from you as long as you offer them something to buy within the context of the rules of the gamification system you’re offering. Gamification can make buying from you fun and almost addictive! As with anything gamification has to be implemented properly for it to work for you.

4- Gift Cards

There are all types of gift cards you can consider. This is a very popular and effective method of incentivizing your audience to buy more from you. Gift cards can come in all shapes and fashions, so it’s up to you on how you want to utilize this incentive. Here are a few ideas though for you to consider along with some website resources to check out to see which one you like best for use on either your Worpress or Shopify stores:

• Redeemable gift cards your customers can buy in advance and redeem at a later date. Your certificates could come in varying price increments such as $10, $20, $30, etc.
• Digital gift certificates/cards that have a number on them that can ben typed into their account upon checking out on your store, or inside of their members area or store account page.
• Scratch and reveal discount code as seen here.
• Gift card plugins for WordPress can be found here
• Gift card certificate apps on Shopify presented on this page

5- Loyalty programs

The longer a customer remains a customer, especially if they continually buy from you, those folks aught be rewarded where possible. After all, loyalty is an extremely prized virtue that should never be overlooked. Having a loyalty program in place helps prove to your loyal customers you really care about them and want them to remain loyal at buying only from your ecommerce store.

There are allot of approaches you can consider here with structuring your own loyalty program. Here are a few options to inspire your mind:

• Discounts given at various intervals the longer they have been with you. Ex: 1st year locked in 10% discount on all orders, 2nd year 15% discount on all orders plus a free gift bag valued at $50, etc.
• Amazon gift cards or any other type of reward you can think of given to the customer once they have been with you for any duration of time or volume of product purchased.
• Access to any other additional perks or services such as access to being paid a bounty per customer sent to you as described below in the affiliate program incentive.

6- Affiliate programs

Incentivizing other people to send you customers and paying them a commission for doing so it what affiliate marketing is all about. It’s huge!

In fact, affiliate marketing continues to be one of the best streams of passive income I enjoy myself.

You could offer your customers a way to get paid promoting your products or even consider promoting 3rd party offers to your cusomers using your affiliate links. Both ways have the potential of significantly boosting and automating your income.

These companies allow you to create your own affiliate marketing program plus have products and services you can promote also:

• https://clickbank.com
• https://cj.com (learn how to make money with cj.com watching this video)
• https://shareasale.com
• Go here to see a list of the best affiliate marketing companies in the world

7- Contest Incentives

There are plenty of creative ways you can promote to create contests to persuade your customers to take action with purchasing more product from you. For example:

• Launch a live Facebook video stream and demo your products. While doing so engage with your audience in attendance by asking questions and giving away free stuff, discounts, points, rewards, etc.
• Promote a way for your affiliate marketing customers to sale more products by a certain time and receive amazing gifts in exchange for their work. Consider creating a top 10 leaderboard of sending that out to all your affiliates to see if they can out-compete the others so they can get the free prizes or cash. This approach only works well if you offer awesome rewards. So make them good 😉

8- Sales & Holiday Specials

It’s part of human nature to have a reason to take action. If you give your audience a reason to buy, any reason, it incentivizes the mind to action. That reason could be a product liquidation sale, a holiday special, or it could be as simply and crazy as saying you’re running a sale or deal because you just got married, or your kid just graduated kindergarten. They are all valid and reasons to offer a sale or deal to your audience.

 

When it comes to offering sales in general it’s important realize that offering products for sale can be over done. What we don’t want to do is offer everything on a store for sale forever. It’s important to use a time-frame on your sale to give your sale more power. Think of offering certain products and product categories for sale for a certain time and then promoting them via email and/or through your campaigning to your audience. People love great sales deals, especially on products they love.

Wrapping it up

Now that you know the 8 powerful incentives you can consider using to promote higher and consistent sales within your dropship ecommerce business it’s time to take action.

If you want some help implementing any of the incentives above for your store book a FREE 30-minute strategy phone call with me. From there you can share your thoughts with me and I’ll be happy to point you in the right direction. We can also discuss the option of seeing if 1-on-1 mentoring would be a good fit for you. If not, at minimum you’ll walk away with answers to your questions and have more clarity into how you can use incentives to grow your business online to greater heights by making your customers happier.