Deals and promotions: are they worth it for your business?

There are times of the year when email inboxes and Main Street storefronts shout much louder to push discount sales, promotions and giveaways. November is one such time, as it ushers in the Christmas and End-of-Year spending bonanza. In fact, 44% of French consumers said they’d start their Christmas shopping earlier this year, starting from November or even October (source: Channel Factory).

But as a small business, it can be difficult to make your voice heard over the likes of the corporate big guns with their millions of daily website visitors, economies of scale and army of marketeers. Euro-for-Euro, how do you compete?

Here we look at whether proposing deals, discounts and promotions is worth it to your business in the first place and, if it is, when and how it might be done.

There are those businesses for whom seasonal discount deals and promotions serve no purpose, or are even damaging.

• If you sell a top-end product to high-end customers, you may not want to ‘cheapen’ the perception of your brand.
• If your profit margins are already wafer thin, slashing your prices may do you more harm than good; plus the last thing you need is a price war with your competitors.
• If you offer too many discounts and freebies, your clientele may never want to pay full price again, knowing the next promotion is just around the corner.
• You might have other priorities; increasing your production capacity to meet existing demand, recruitment or seeking investment may be more worthy of your time than the many marketing hours a promotional campaign demands.

All that said, if discount deals and promotions still exist, there’s a reason. Does a sales promotion ever encourage you to buy something you normally wouldn’t buy? Almost half of French consumers in a recent survey said that was the case for them (48%, source: Channel Factory).

Also, it’s not just a numbers game of direct sales. Promotional campaigns can serve several objectives: awareness of your brand, cementing relationships with your best customers or even just doing something good for society.

If you do think your business could benefit from holding a promotion, how will you do it? First, let’s think about when you’ll do it.

Any given calendar year is so full of events and anniversaries that taking part in all of them is unrealistic for smaller companies with limited resources. Better, then, to select just a few among them and pour your time and energy into making them a great success.

To know when to launch a promotional campaign, it’s important to know both your product and your customers:

• You may sell a ‘seasonal’ product that people tend to buy at particular times of year. If you design bikinis, for example, you will likely want to focus your efforts in the months immediately before the summer holidays. If you make high-end chocolates, you may want to target the weeks leading up to Easter and Christmas. Google Trends will be able to tell you exactly when people search for specific things online.

• What do your customers love, apart from your product or service, of course? What are they like? Are they hopeless romantics whose hearts flutter every Valentine’s Day? Are they middle-aged bon viveurs who make the same weight-loss resolution every January? Or parents who hold back on the holiday spending slightly so they can afford the kids’ back-to-school material? You know your customers better than anyone, so think about which occasions get them excited, inspire them or make them behave differently.

Commercial calendars are dominated by a handful of big events. The Christmas promotional period begins after Halloween and then accelerates around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, two other promotion-intense periods of the year. Easter, Mother’s Day and the summer holidays are other annual events when the battle for buyers’ attention is at its most intense.

While these dominant occasions are certainly worth participating in — or perhaps too risky to ignore entirely, given the higher global spend — there are more niche events that may bring more return on investment for small businesses. These quieter days, special to a loyal minority, are an opportunity for SMEs and micro-enterprises to address their audience directly and be heard.

Sometimes these can be relatively trivial. As this post is being published, for instance, it is also World Television Day, World Hello Day, Britain’s National Gingerbread Cookie day and even World False Confession Day. Everything has its day, which means every business has its own special 24-hour period to shine, publicize, promote and sell.

Some days, though, have a more profound significance. They can allow a business to promote not just its goods and services, but also its values.

Pick a cause that you’re passionate about, that you want your business to support. It might be equal opportunity rights, human rights, the environment, research into illnesses or animal welfare. There’s a very good chance that some of your audience will be sensitive to the same cause. It’s also quite possible that your cause has its own day in the UN’s list of international days and weeks. If so, invest your efforts in championing that day and that cause.

Your main objective in this case might not be to sell, but rather to engage a community and to raise awareness of your cause as well as your business. As such, it is a strategy that might only bear its commercial fruits in the long run but that will forge much deeper bonds with customers.

An excellent example of a local business promoting itself through the promotion of its values is this award-winning campaign video by a New York hairdressing salon that got behind Movember, the month-long, mustache-growing phenomenon to promote mens’ health issues.

Once you’ve identified the dates in the calendar that will provide you with the most impactful promotional campaign, it’s time to consider the details of what that campaign will be. You can let your imagination run wild with marketing ideas and while those are almost limitless, here are five you might find helpful, especially when used in combination.

Whether it’s designed to entertain or inform, your brand content can have more impact if it’s relevant to a chosen occasion.

A self-employed accountant who chooses to focus on tax deadline day for their campaign could produce blog articles explaining what customers need to do to comply, or instructional emails with topical subject lines reminding readers of the impending deadline. For a small jewelry shop, the content could be photos or videos of a themed Easter collection of rings, bracelets and necklaces with a bunny/chick/egg twist.

Whatever the format, quality content that engages the audience can be a very useful tool for boosting lead generation, conversion rates and brand authority.

Contests can work wonders for engagement; by their very nature, they invite the audience to participate actively. People love quizzes, even when there’s no incentive, let alone when you’re offering up your product or service as a prize. Bear in mind also that contest winners may also go on to become great ambassadors for your brand.

The ‘rules’ of your contest will depend on your objective (brand or product awareness, building your social media following, generating leads etc.) but the easier it is for people to take part, the more it will be shared online.

When you ‘bundle’ your products or services, you combine several of them and sell them as one package, often at a slightly lower price than the total sum of all those items if bought separately. Usually the items in a bundle complement each other (for example shampoo, bath soaps and moisturizer). You could even invite your customers to ‘build their own bundles’ from a list that you propose.

Pop all of the items in a package and give it a themed name (”The World’s Best Mom Basket” for instance in the lead-up to Mothers’ Day), and you can increase your sales volume and shift some stock that you’d previously had trouble selling.

Bundles can sometimes be popular choices for people looking to buy gifts for others, which brings us to the next point…

Totally rebranding your packaging can be expensive, but a little creativity can soon bring those costs down. Getting new cardboard boxes printed with your logo and Merry Christmas/Happy Halloween etc. will likely be pricey. But getting custom-printed stickers or packing tape to put on your normal boxes is much more affordable. And a hand-written Thank You note is worth much, much more than the paper it’s written on.

The idea is to enrich the ‘unboxing’ experience of your customers. After all, in the experience economy, those little touches can go a long way.

Even if you sell a service and your only contact with customers is by email, customizing your email signature or your attached documents with a holiday-themed goodwill greeting is a nice little detail that can make your clients smile.

On the subject of gifts, offering gift vouchers is an oft-used tactic for increasing sales from existing customers, whilst at the same time getting the goods you’ve sold into the hands of people who don’t know them yet.

Loyal customers are the best customers. In any case, that’s one conclusion of studies showing that an increase in customer retention of just 5% increases profits by at least 25%.

Rewarding customers for coming back to you creates a feel-good factor; according to 76% of customers, a loyalty program reinforces their relationship with brands (source: Invesp).

Loyalty programs help your best customers to make savings and earn rewards. They can increase demand in slow business periods. Plus, with the data they help businesses collect, loyalty programs offer valuable insights into customer behavior and help create segmented mailing lists that, in turn, allow for better, more relevant communication with customers.

There is almost no end to the number of occasions you can promote around, nor to the ways in which you promote. The question is whether you want to do it in the first place.

Whichever strategy fits you and pleases your customers, all businesses benefit from good finance management. If you want to know how Qonto helps small businesses handle expenses, optimize spend management and get bookkeeping done fast and done well, then we would love to tell you more.

Please keep in mind that deals, discounts, giveaways and all promotional activities must be compliant with the applicable laws and regulations (in terms of transparency for the customers, type and amount of discount, content, communication channels and materials and so on). These may differ according to the country and the type of promotion you are launching. This article does not provide any legal advice in this respect and is a mere description of the marketing and communication activities that may be relevant for your activity.