Offer incentives customers actually care about

You have a lot of options when it comes to customer incentives.

Discounts are tried and true for many stores but how much? 10%, 20%, buy one get one free...

Or you can avoid discounts and give away something. That could be a product, a sample, access, partner incentive...

With so many options available it's easy to see why so many stores just mimic their competitors. They give 20% off so we give 20% off.

That's fine but not optimal. Your competitors could have just guessed or copied their incentives from another store, who copied from another, and from another.

Testing your incentives takes time but you're likely to discover new information about your customers. Perhaps they hate discounts. Perhaps some like discounts but those are bad customers. Perhaps free gifts feel like extra junk.

Decide to try a handful of incentives the rest of this year. Try one, then try another, rinse-and-repeat. If the performance feels close, try again to confirm their performance holds and wasn't a fluke.

(Or if you have the tools and traffic to A/B test, run two at once in a head-to-head. But don't let a lack of traffic prevent you from testing)

Try these tests constantly in the off-season, while always trying to beat your best incentive. Then when the busy season kicks in, use your best incentive.

This is the only way to learn which incentives your customers respond to.

An easy way to measure performance without a full funnel analysis is to promote one incentive per month and use the Cohort Report in Repeat Customer Insights to track their long-term buying behavior. Months with the better incentives should show up in the results.

This also allows you to offer incentives to existing customers and track their performance.

Eric Davis