If you’re working with a digital business and you’re looking to work with special offers as part of your marketing, you’re going to find yourself quickly as one voice in a sea of thousands. Without a major marketing budget behind you, odds are that you’ll have to fall back on other methods to make your offer stand out amongst the crowd. Luckily, we’ve put together a small list of offer essentials to help you out.
Meet The Needs
Here’s one of the simplest rules to follow: make sure you’re offering what customers actually want. It’s no good throwing an offer out into the world, only to find out later that no one was interested in the first place. Market research of all kinds can be a huge help here, and if you manage to nail the exact needs of your target audience with your offer, it can multiply the effect several times over.
Here’s a great example: online casinos. They’ve been perfecting the art of meeting customer needs for years. They have learned exactly what their players are looking for, and it’s the reason that free spins welcome bonus offers remain so popular, alongside deposit offers and other promotions.
Time It Right
Speaking of art forms, timing in marketing is halfway between art and science. The largest companies spend a fortune just analyzing patterns of when customers are most likely to make purchases, often down to the hour or minute in some cases. If you’re working on more of a restrictive budget, you wouldn’t be expected to take it to that level, but there are plenty of things you can still take into account.
First, start with the bigger picture. Specific days like Black Friday and Valentine’s Day are commonly leveraged, but what about the last week of the month when most people will receive their paychecks and naturally have more spending money on hand? Even just sending out your offer alerts in the mid-evening can boost their reach as people are more likely to be at home and open to messages.
Don’t Spam It
There are close to 350 billion emails sent and received around the world every day and each person is estimated to receive over 20 unrequested emails in that time. When you consider all the offers your customers may be getting bombarded with, having a flood of offers from you is not likely to win you any points.
Make sure that you focus on a small number of offers that leave an impact rather than throwing dozens at the customer and seeing what sticks. Otherwise, your messages, even to existing customers, are likely to end up getting routed straight into the junk pile or just completely ignored. In the worst case, you could easily lose customers you already had by essentially annoying them away.
Remember that marketing in business is an ongoing learning process and it takes a long time to refine your strategy. Don’t be worried if results take longer than expected; even the experts can’t guarantee success in this field.
