8 Proven and Effective Ways to Boost Sales

Marketers use many different techniques to draw and retain customers. Nowadays, customers hardly buy anything without a promotion. While many offline marketing campaigns can be costly, there are many little ways you can work around instead of spending heavily on advertising. By adjusting product pricing and introducing various promotional events or campaigns, you may be surprised with the sales result. While doing this may boost sales performance, we also need to be careful about the overall profit margin, or you may end up operating a charitable organization instead.

Below are various ways that you can consider to promote your online business:

1) Offer a discount for certain category of products/services

It doesn't make sense if you offer a 20% discount for all the items on your website. By doing so, you are just cutting your own profit margin and disturb the overall market price if the promotion last for a long time.  Instead, you may offer a discount for certain category of products/services only. These promotional items will attract your customers to visit your online store. In fact, most end up buying many other non promotional items as well.

2) Provide a Free Trial or Demo

If you are selling a product, especially software online, it is indeed necessary to provide a free trial if possible. This gives the customer an assurance that the purchase is a good one and the product is useful for them. The free trial process also helps you to build rapport with your customers.  Some companies may also collect email addresses of those visitors requesting for a free trial. This may generate a large list of email addresses that can be used for newsletter campaign later.

3) Money Back Guarantee Policy

Having a money back guarantee practice is not uncommon. However, this is not easy for services company because services itself is the manhour which cannot be reused again like a product that is sold and returned. Depending on what kind of products, normally a 50% or 100% money back guarantee can be provided to ensure total customer satisfaction. For example, a web hosting company which provides web hosting service may offer a 100% money back guarantee. If the customer is not happy with the web hosting service, he/she can cancel the service and the hosting company does not incur any loss at all since there is no shipping or physical product cost involved.

4) Customer Loyalty Program

Offering regular customer discount will be very good for you to retain your existing customers. It cost 5 times more to attract a new customer compared to retaining an existing customer. This alone is enough reason for you to implement a customer loyalty program and offer incentives for your customers to stay with you.

5) Buy 1 Get 1 Free Promotion

Promotions can come in various forms. Buy 1 GET 1 Free is a great way for you to push volume and especially useful when you intend to clear stock for certain product range. Sometimes, you may also offer a small gift, voucher or other small items for each product sale.

6) Offer Free gifts / Free products

This is very effective in online marketing. Many things online are free and there are millions of web surfers looking for free stuffs online. If you can offer something low cost for free, you attract millions of eye balls to your website. This has a viral effect and considered the basis of viral marketing. In fact, Hotmail.com is successful and considered one of the earliest website that implemented viral marketing successfully.

7) Festive Season promotions / events 

Consumers spend much more than you think during the festive seasons. Certain products such as gifts and flowers sell especially well on these occassions. Having a festive season promotion helps to attract more customers and impress your existing customers that your business is vibrant and not like so many others.

8) Organize a contest to win great prizes

Especially useful in Singapore, you may organize some contests to attract new customers sign up and getting your old customers to participate as well. You may then see a large number of visitors coming to your website because many people will be talking about the contest and the attractive prizes to be won.

An example of a promotion on web design services.