How to Increase Conversions with Promotions?

Every coupon or discount that is unable to reach its target is pointless. Looking for field-tested tips, we asked digital marketing experts, entrepreneurs, and business owners to share their insights. In this post, we'll try to put them together into an effective strategy for sharing promotions with end customers.

‍Which marketing channels do you recommend and why for sharing promotional messages?

‍The marketing channels that you use to send your offers need to be based on the channels that are most often frequented by your core buyer personas. Your most important kinds of ideal clients must be the ones who dictate how you allocate your resources for sending offers. Joshua Feinberg, president of the Data Center Sales & Marketing Institute

‍This popular statement, amongst all our answers, isn’t surprising. To every marketing team, tests are crucial for finding tactics that go along with the uniqueness of their business. Uncovering promotion channels suitable for your customers requires time and of course, resources.

‍A majority of our experts pointed to social media, content marketing, and emails as their favorite channels. They are not only effective but also relatively easy to manage. We confronted these choices with a recent large-scale marketing survey run by Ascend2. The report confirms high performance accompanied by respectively low difficulty of these channels. Such low-hanging fruits can be a cost-effective start or a redesign of the way you share promotional messages.

Tests in marketing are a never-ending story, or at least, they should be. You need to know how your messages interact with customers at every stage of the funnel. Moreover, you need to learn how to provide an omnichannel journey for your users. Tests can show you how to connect new and existing channels into a seamless workflow. They are also the only reliable way of leading to improvements. In the case of promotions, it's no different; the way you design your promotional messages, in detail, impacts the outcome.

‍How do you test marketing channels and the accompanying promotion strategies?

‍One of the core elements of every promotional message is an incentive. You need to be sure that the one you send carries tangible value for a customer.

My #1 tip for small businesses sharing promotional offers is to offer something highly valuable to your audience with Facebook Ads to grow your customer base. We recently ran a campaign for one of our chiropractic clinics giving away a free chiropractic adjustment - our highly valuable offer. As a result, we generated 21 new leads in only 7 days. When you give value out to your audience, you’ll get value back in return. Andrew Schutt, CEO of Elevated Web Marketing

‍Well-converting incentives are easy to define once you gather and analyze sales data. Orders history and customer tracking give the best overview of your market value.

I would say one big mistake entrepreneurs make when starting a new business is their failure to understand their value proposition. What is it about their product, service, and offer that compels people to say yes? Until they know this, any marketing efforts or spending in any channels will be like pouring gasoline on wet leaves. Zach Hendrix, Co-founder of GreenPal

‍The way to perfection takes time. Tests need to verify every layer of the message. After a channel and incentive are in place, it’s good to examine details like images, headlines, and subject lines.

Run a campaign with 3 different copy or 3 different images and see which one performs the best. If you keep at this regularly, you will start to see clear insights into what is converting your target market into paying consumers and advocates. Caitlin Strempel, Owner & Founder of CRS Digital Marketing

‍If you use emails, tests of subject lines and headlines are critical to grab attention and get the best chance for conversion.

I love using goal-based and problem-based headlines. There have been numerous studies of psychology that show us that the powers of approach and avoidance are the central drivers of motivation. Here's an example of B2B companies. Use the format for your promotional offer headline: How to [INSERT GOAL] without [INSERT PROBLEM]. George Schildge, CEO of Matrix Marketing Group

‍The promotion must be tailored to the preferences of your clients.

The most essential aspect would be to develop clarity about the core message we want to convey. This core message should also highlight why this promotion is useful for the customer. Which customer need or pain-point does it address? Every promotion should be addressing a customer need. The more pressing the need, the greater the urgency your promotion offer can create! Priyanka Dalal, Business Growth Marketeer, Author of the free business growth email course

‍It requires dividing your audience in step with their expectations and needs. Tests may help you out with defining core attributes for efficient customer segmentation. To start with, you can use ideas claimed by digital entrepreneurs and figure out if they fit your strategy.

Always split your customers by what service they use, how long do they use the service, what plan do they use, etc. Also, it is best to split your target prospects into groups by what stage of your purchase funnel they are in (awareness, interest, desire, and action) and design your message for each of them. Simon Rodgers, Marketing Expert at WebSitePulse

‍Right next to the targeting, we have to mention marketing personalization. Even in times of an overwhelming privacy hiccup, when it comes to sales, consumers are still looking for personalized offers;

“43% of consumers agreed that they would exchange personal data with companies to save money through personalized promotions, discounts or deals”

This is something you can’t ignore in your promotions.

Segmentation and personalization are no longer luxuries; they're necessities to be taken seriously. In order to design promotional messages that increase conversion rates, be sure to take into account each buyer persona's preferences, apply segmentation and personalization very aggressively, and always be running experiments while you watch your key performance indicators. Joshua Feinberg, President of the Data Center Sales & Marketing Institute

‍Personalization and segmentation may be the reason why emails are still one of the marketing greats; more than 50% of the quoted experts mentioned emails.

I think that users are used to receiving a lot of discount, sale and other such offers via email. So that helps increase response. Also, email allows great segmentation and personalization opportunities - these can help greatly in creating better promotion offers. Priyanka Dalal, Business Growth Marketeer

‍If trying to send out a promo or an offer, email is gold. It's not difficult to manage, you have a somewhat captive audience, and it's something you know people check multiple times a day. Ken Marshall, Chief Search Strategist at Doorbell Digital Marketing

‍Keeping that in mind, we dropped some free promotional email templates at the end of this article.

‍Pulling it together…

...by Andrew Sumitani, SEO expert at TINYpulse

‍Here’s a 3-point guide to great offers:

• "Get to the point. State your offer. And be brief about it. There’s nothing worse than experiencing marketing that takes forever.
  

• State the benefit. People don’t care about what you’re offering. They don’t. They care about what they can do with your offer. Don’t offer a microwave. Offer fast, hot food.
  

• Call to action. Ask and you will receive. Customers won’t do anything with your offer unless you ask them to. Whether it’s signing up to learn more, making a purchase, or calling you now, never forget to include a call-to-action."
  

Emails, social media, and content marketing can be your trump card in 2018. Personalized emails build 1:1 relationships with your customers. Omnipresent social media provide enormous outreach, and consistent content marketing demands lead generation. Remember that regardless of channel or technology, personalization and customized incentives are a must.