10 Retail Promotion Ideas to Increase Your Sales without “Discounting”
These are ideas helpful on both an e-commerce site and a brick & mortar store:
1. Hand out a FREE sample of product with a special "2 for 1" offer - this enables your customer to get firsthand experience of your product AND the "2 for 1" offer maximizes your average transaction value
2. Hold joint promotions with other businesses. You can offer their products as FREE gifts when customers purchase at your shop and vice-versa.
3. Free gift with purchase - you could offer a FREE T-shirt valued at $25 with every $50 purchase. The value to the customer is $25 but your hard cost is a fraction of that amount so it's perceived to be more beneficial than a discount is (in the eyes of your customer) and it's much healthier on your bottom line than offering a $25 discount.
4. FREE gift for cash payments or PayPal over $xx ... instead of paying the bank merchant fees you're rewarding your customers instead. It's costing you no more, however it encourages your customers to buy from you and therefore will increase your sales volume.
5. Package your products together. Cosmetics companies are famous for this. Package some of your poorer selling products together with your most popular lines and promote them as some sort of package. Packaged products make customers feel they're getting a good deal for buying in bulk, it maximizes your average transaction value, and it helps you move slow selling items.
6. Bounce backs - it's a fact that a customer is most warm to your products and services right at the time of purchase so make a special offer to them right when they buy - something that compliments the product they've just bought.
7. Package your knowledge - create introductory reports and newsletters and package them in with their product purchase.
8. Cross-selling checklist - this is a great way to maximize the average transaction value of each sale. Either run through a checklist with the customer (i.e. "creating a gift basket" checklist listing the items they'll need) OR create it into a special "how to" guide that includes instructions and enables them to check off all the items they need. This helps customer a favor ensure they don't forget an important item while increasing your sales.
9. FREE after sales service - cleaning or maintenance of purchased product.
10. FREE design (valued at $200) - this service quite often involves your time only so it has a high perceived value but a low hard cost.