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Special Offers can be great hooks. They can entice a user to your site and convert them into a customer. But making a Special Offer into a successful campaign requires more thought than ever. In the past retailers would have been able to reduce old stock to half price and someone, somewhere would have likely bought it, but not any longer. In this economic climate everything is on sale, all of the time, which means you may even struggle to give old stock away.

You have got to get inventive with your Special Offers, Promotions and Sales. It is no good to promoting a BOGOF (Buy One Get One Free) offer when any normal person would only want a single item (i.e. 2 toasters for the price of 1) and although discounts can be effective you often have to slash the price to a point that there is little or no profit in a sale. Big discounts can work in the form of loss leaders, i.e. getting users to your site in the hope that they will buy additional items at full list price but there is no guarantee that the all important additional sales will materialise.

Discounting - not always successful.

A potentially effective Special Offer to help you sell off old stock would be to group items into a set. Take for example the ‘old stock’ toaster, if you combine this item with a Kettle you then you have a Breakfast Set. The discount you were going to apply to the Toaster (say 50%) can now be spread across the two items (lets suggest 25% off the set). This still gives you an attractive selling price for the set but more importantly you are essentially selling a full price item (i.e. the Kettle) every time you give away a Toaster. Additionally the new ‘Breakfast Set’ is far more marketable than an old Toaster and as such would attract more attention and inevitably be more appealing.

So don’t just stick up a ‘Half Price Sale’ banner on your website in January. Get inventive with your promotions and they in turn will be more successful.