In this article, we will look at some strategies different companies apply to drive more sales. These strategies are used to help convince visitors to the store that the product is more valuable if they purchase it on your website or to give them the sense of a limited-time offer only they know about.

Hopefully, these strategies inspire you to think about different ways to increase sales and to grow your business to its full potential.

Strategies

So here is a breakdown of some strategies you can apply.

The Permanent sale

The permanent sale is a simple tactic to make the visitor think that the product they are thinking about buying is worth a lot more, although when applying this tactic please ensure it is worth something closer to the price found elsewhere, otherwise, this tactic will not work.

So basically this involves having a sale for a product that never ends, normally these sales update every few months, but they give a sense of importance and urgency to a visitor who is comparing multiple websites for the same product.

If you were selling a blender, for example, it could be at the cost of 200$, but your sale could list it at 120$ for example. Even though the blender was a lot cheaper for you, there is still a good markup to make on the product along with an increase in the urgency of the sale.

To enforce this you can do some experimentation with a number of your products and watch the impact of sales vs price reduction, and overtime tweak the pricing and original price to further increase the effectiveness.

Limited edition

A limited editor strategy involves you selling something of great importance for a limited amount of time or a certain amount of stock. This works great if your product is a unique color you will never sell again or if the product is a marker for something important around your brand, depending on the number of followers you may have.

Bigger brands can easily do this along with charging more for the limited edition product. It works also nicely if you number the order along with the product, for example, if you only sold 100 of the product, the customer could receive product number 32, which would increase its importance and value, and most importantly make the product something unique, which depending on the product, customers would be willing to spend more and even bargain for a chance to own it.

Buy one get one free

This strategy is perhaps the most popular and one you'll see in any supermarket or in any store where they have a lot of customers.

The trick with this strategy is to ensure the customer spends more to cover the expense of the products but has the impression of spending less so they feel like they are gaining more. In some stores if a buy one get one free (BOGO) offer is applied, normally the total cost is a little higher, for example, if you buy one, it may be 10$, but if you apply the BOGO offer it may be 12$. The company is making 12$ for the two products, but the cost may cover the costs of both products while allowing some room for a profit.

This is a simple strategy to get a customer to buy more in your store, but also to attract them in the first place where they may most likely buy something else or tell their friends or family about the store and the offer.

Applying a coupon

Coupons are great and are very related to the strategy mentioned above, they help give the impression to people of something exclusive and it helps drive excitement around your brand, depending on what you sell.

With coupons you can provide a limited-time discount to drive more customers to convert and purchase more, then you can provide an exclusive coupon to them as a thank you that they can then give to a friend, this helps spread your brand to new potential customers while driving more sales.

On top of the effect of coupons, they are also a simple way to track your advertising campaigns, by providing them to advert networks, influencers, or YouTube channels, you can get some analytics to see what source is working the best and then double down on your advertising efforts to pull in more potential customers.

Social proofing for urgency

Some platforms have managed to drive a lot of sales successfully using social proofing, this is giving the impression that other people are looking at the same product at the same time, this gives a strong sense of urgency and ignites a feeling of not wanting to miss out on a potential opportunity, especially when you say there are only 2 left in your inventory and there are 10 people on the webpage right now looking at the same product.

Some great examples of this are done by Booking.com and Amazon.com, they do a great job giving this impression and apply optimized techniques that work. Although it may not be true that those people are there, it's quite difficult to prove if it's true or not. So be aware if you decide to apply this strategy.

Strong product reviews

Product reviews are one of the strongest strategies in this list, the best way to clarify the fear of a sale is to show potential customers a large number of happy customers who have gone out of their way to leave a review on how great the product is.

We are very social creatures, and reviews enforce the follower psychology of our brains to say that it's ok and safe, other people have already decided that this was a good idea.

So when you have a sale, we recommend sending an automated email after a few days to your customer on the order. This is important so you get some valuable feedback if the experience was not good to learn how to improve the experience you are providing along with the product.

And if they had a great experience and loved the product you can ask them to leave a review. Ideally, in this communication you want anything negative to be sent directly to you so you can grow and improve, and anything positive to become a review, you can easily do this by having two buttons, one that says "Not what I expected", to leave feedback, and another button that says "The product was great", that will link to the review website where they can leave a review.

It's also important to ensure your product detail page clearly shows the high rating near the product title and the potential customer has easy access to the list of reviews. This is again used to enforce the decision-making of the visitor to let them know that this is a good decision and buying a product from us is a great idea.

The "As seen in" approach

Another popular strategy some stores use, if they've been lucky enough to be featured somewhere, is to highlight that their product is being used by a major recognizable company or brand. This helps potential customers give your product more trust and reliability when they think about purchasing one of your products.

It works well when you highlight where it has been seen on the homepage if you want to drive attention to your product page, and then again you can reinforce the point by mentioning it on the product detail page, maybe in the description or show the familiar logos somewhere the visitor can easily see.

The 99 cent trick

The 99 cent trick is one of the most famous strategies a lot of stores and companies choose when deciding on pricing. The core idea is that more people think that $14.99 is more attractive than a solid 15.00 dollars because the visitor will see a lower number, they think they are getting something for less.

In today's world since a lot of companies apply this, the trick is quite well known, but you do see variations of this like $14.95, so it's good to experiment with different prices to see what can drive more sales.

But even though the trick is more known, it's still valuable to apply this pricing since it still will impact the psychology of the decision making when it comes to making the purchase, the visitor still has the impression that they are getting a better deal.

The members discount

A nice way to grow your brand along with your store is to have an email list where visitors can sign up, you can incentivize them to join by providing an exclusive discount on your products. A nice way to manage this is to provide exclusive discounts on select products once a month. This will grow your brand following while also giving those subscribers a great feeling of being a part of something exclusive.

What's nice about this is you have a live feed to a growing list of potential customers to who you can provide great deals while also promoting your brand. You can also encourage them to share with their connections to provide an even greater discount for them.

Entire businesses can be made this way, some stores that use the flash sale model only sell this way, you need to be a member to get the discount. And this helps your business understand your customers in a deeper way. You can even experiment with different deals and emails with subsets of subscribers to see what works and what doesn't.

The competitor comparison

Finally, we have the competitor comparison, this is great if you sell a product that can be found in other stores, you can list your competitors and their prices. Although be prepared to compete since you need to back up your deal that it truly is better than your competitors. Some easy ways to do this is to provide the product at a decreased price or to provide something extra along with the product.

Something to note about reducing the price, don't reduce it too much otherwise your visitor may be suspicious that it's too good to be true. Normally a 10% discount is more than enough.

Conclusion

Hopefully, these strategies have been somewhat useful for you and your business, we will add new strategies over time as we revisit this article.

Also, it's important to try out and experiment until you find something that works for your business, not every strategy fits every business.

Experimenting

Not every company knows everything, when it comes to driving more sales, or even trying to discover if there is a need for a new product, we need to experiment with people, and normally you can't ask directly what they expect or what they will want. So how do we figure out if there is a need or how to increase the store sales.

This is why we experiment, experimentation allows us to try and test to see if something works or more importantly if something does not work. In the software product industry, this is called Quantitative testing. We try different pricing, we change the color of buttons or we even change the images we show for a product to see if they have a positive impact on the store's sales.

But doing this in a manual way can be really slow and really complicated to track and improve. So we use automated solutions to help tweak automatically and optimize continuously until we reach the point of maximum impact.

Now for the promotion :) This is where Embedery steps in, with Embedery we provide a solution that can help you learn who your visitors are and over time try to increase the efficiency of your store.

This is done using integrated Analytics to keep track of how visitors currently behave with your website and then changing content and proving popups in an intelligent way to transform your website into the most efficient state it can be.

For more please feel free to sign up and try out Embedery.