Special offers is majorly effective in terms of creating more ROI for an e-commerce or retail company. You have a sea of opportunities here, so in this post, we’ll try to guide you which way to go and show you what offers can be most effective for your business.

The holy grail of online advertising- Always make sure your offers are visible in Google Ads and Google Shopping.

Even if special offers don’t cost cash up front, they can be expensive in terms of marketing and revenue if they don’t provide a return. It’s important to not send out special offers to every customer, only the valuable ones. You need to track how your special offer is used and how it affects both revenue and customer lifetime value (CLV).

You don’t want to attract customers that would pay full price, so you need to create segmented special offers. With segmented offers, you’re able to test your personalized special offers and prove the ROI. Through this, you filter out bad offers and increase the success of the good ones.

If you would run an offline store and you have a sale, you would make sure that “sale” is clearly visible in the window. It's the same with e-commerce, but your window is typically Google Ads or Google Shopping. Make sure your well-performing sales offers clear visibility on search and shopping with a limited time offer to create a sense of urgency.

1. Offers based on high performing brands

What you always need to do, regardless of business, is to look at your data and let that guide you to set up the best possible offer. Let’s take a beauty retailer as an example. Here you have an enormous selection of products, brands, and categories. You can see in Google Ads that products from Elizabeth Arden are performing really well, and has gone up in sales by 30% – thus, it might be a good idea to create an offer for this brand.

One smart way to go about it could be to create a percentage-based discount. If your business has high-profit margins, you can afford to run a high discount, maybe up to 20%, but if your margins are a bit lower, consider an offer of maybe 5-10%.

2. Offers based on specific age groups

Another way to create smart offers for your business is to look at specific age groups. Let’s say that for the beauty retail business you see in Google Ads that women in the age group of 25-35 are performing especially well. Well, why not make this a target group and create offers specifically for them?

For this, a threshold offer might be a good idea. This entitles promotions only accessible if the cart size of a customer is higher than a certain threshold. For instance, many customers will increase their cart size if the threshold entitles them to free shipping. This is usually very beneficial for e-commerce businesses with low-profit margins.

3. Offers directed specifically to your most loyal customers

And finally, you always need to stay on top of your most loyal customers – the VIP customers, if you will. They are the ones responsible for a large portion of your sales and they keep coming back. Since they are such an integral part of your business, you want to make them feel special and valuable to your company.

This is where a rewards program can come in handy, something that loyal customers are likely to pick up on. A rewards point program is a great way to build an even stronger customer base, where your customers collect points from every purchase. 

By doing this, you are ensuring sales to a big part of your market and ensuring that a specific segmented audience will be sure-shot buyers. 

In conclusion, what you should take away with you from this post, is to only send out segmented offers to valuable customers. The offers you make should always be rooted in data, and you need to analyze how your general offers affect revenue and customer lifetime value (CLV).