First Step Marketing

Give-Aways

Online merchants have been using a variation of this idea for years—give something free, then sell something. Although this idea is not new to commerce (businesses have been using loss leaders for decades—selling products below cost to get shoppers into a store) it’s the right formula for the Internet.

A good example of this strategy is the free virtual bouquet that many flower sites offer visitors. Come to their site, send a free virtual bouquet via email and perhaps become a paying customer of real flowers in the future. In a similar vein, you can send a virtual greeting card to anyone on the Net by using many of the greeting card sites. Their hope is to have you buy their real greeting cards at some later date. Another example is the search engine optimization services. They will give you a free report on where your site appears in different search engine search results in hopes of selling you their search engine optimization service after you see how badly your site ranks against your competitors.

Give-aways also provide an opportunity to cross-promote with other noncompeting Web stores. You can offer one of your products or a compatible service free to other Web stores. For example, if a site sells auto accessories, and you sell insurance products, you might offer a free comparison insurance quote. Or if a site sells running shoes, you might offer a free pair of athletic socks with each purchase. The trick here is to get the customer from the other site to visit your site to get the free product or service. The partner Web store gets the sale and you get additional visitors.

Besides giving away a product, information, or service, offering discount coupons is another strategy to attract shoppers to your Web store. At first you think of coupons as used only in the real world. And, yes, you can offer coupons on your site that can be printed off and used in your real-world store.

Shopper Services

“Stickiness” is all the rage these days with eCommerce, and for good reason. Constant advertising can get expensive, and as a small to medium-sized eBusiness, you need to continuously find ways to keep shoppers returning to your site—that’s called stickiness. Three of the best are

• Reminder services Gift registries
• Gift certificates

Web consumers are a busy lot. They have a lot to think about and more to remember. That’s why Web-based reminder services are so popular. Your Web store can share in this popularity if you place a reminder service on your site.

The most popular kinds of reminder services are those that send out email messages alerting a consumer about an upcoming event such as family birthdays, anniversaries, seasonal gift-giving reminders, and special one-time events such as baby showers and weddings. The best way to offer a reminder service is via email. Set up a page on your site where consumers can fill out a form listing the different days, times, and events that they would like to be reminded of. Capture this information in a database and send out email reminders a week ahead of time. In the email, inform them of the event they wanted to be reminded of and—if you can—suggest a product or service you offer on your Web store that fills their need.

But a reminder service need not be limited to these events. If you sell automobile accessories, you can attract consumers to your site offering an oil change reminder service. If you sell jazz CDs, alert subscribers to your service when new Jazz CDs are released. If you sell movies, offer a service to alert shoppers when new releases are due. And if you sell outdoor supplies to hunters, remind them of when certain hunting seasons begin. If you think a little, you can find a reason for a reminder service for any product or service that you offer.

In addition to increasing sales, a gift registry can help you make future inventory predictions based on how many people add your products to their wish list.

Finally, why not print your own private-labeled currency? That’s what gift certificates are because they can be spent only at your store. Gift certificates can be offered directly from your site or can be sent by your visitors to anyone they want via email. And here’s an idea. Many times shoppers cannot spend the full amount of the gift certificate. In that case, offer to donate the remainder after the sale to charity. Makes them feel good and your store look good.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Online Business Smart Give Aways and Gift Certificate ideas

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 16th, 2008 at 2:36 am and is filed under Ecommerce, Marketing, Promotion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.