As much as we may not like to admit it, most of us have those products or services that we only buy at a discount. With a few of us being avid golfers here at MHDG, we’re guilty of stocking up on golf balls, gloves, and other accessories once a year during the end of the season sales event, and we have a pretty good sense of when that takes place and when we should go looking for that sale.
While there aren’t any global statistics that indicate what percentage of shoppers are like this for a given industry, it’s something worth identifying for your business. Identifying what portion of your audience fits this category of buyers is important for a few reasons.
First, your pricing model. Is this segment buying because your general pricing is just too high to be competitive at a normal pricing level? If a significant percentage of your buyers are made up of this ‘only at a discount’ cohort, it might be time to re-think your pricing, the way you advertise your pricing, or the way you communicate your value proposition.
Second, understanding the size of this audience can help resource planning. If you end up with overstocked inventory, can you leverage this audience to help clear that inventory to get to a better cash position? Or in a service business, can you plan to increase your operations or support staff around these sale promotions?
If we take a look at this cohort from a remarketing perspective, and particularly from just the email marketing angle, what can we gather here? This is one of the areas we dive into in our email deliverability consultations. If we understand the importance of sending the right messages to the right audience, and it’s affect on deliverability and ultimately ROI, we can take one of two approaches with this cohort.
1. If we’ve collected enough data to show that there’s 15% of our customer base that only buys on discount, we can make sure to exclude them from our campaigns with soft offers or that are ancillary to the primary products or services we are selling that only our brand champions would be interested in. By doing this, we better fit our email campaigns to our subscribers, tailoring the messaging properly, and further signaling that emails that come from our brand are relevant (and that they should be opened).
2. We can attempt to offer further value to this cohort in an attempt to move them to a customer that is willing and eager to pay full price, just as we would try to nurture a lead into a customer to begin with.
Either approach has its merits, and doing one or the other is much better than hitting these ‘Only at a Discount’ buyers with endless blog digest, newsletters, or other offers that fill up their unread inbox all year. Because when you do have that big mid year sale to clear some unexpected inventory, they might just miss it.
Need some help segmenting these ‘Only at a Discount’ subscribers or tailoring your email marketing strategy?
Let’s chat.