Everyone has been bombarded with advertisements offering huge discounts in the hopes of getting buyers to their place of business. With the size of some of these discounts it makes me wonder how businesses can stay in business.
Businesses offer discounts for several reasons:
1. to lure buying customers to their business in the hopes that they will buy more than just the discounted items
2. to lure buying customers to their business instead of a competitor’s business
3. to lure buying customers to their business with the anticipation that they can survive the discount wars, and that their competitor’s can’t.
What about businesses offering free bonuses as a reward for buying from them? Online businesses do this more than offline businesses because it could be less expensive to do. You see this in a big way when a new product launches and there appears to be a lot of big name affiliates doing the marketing.
Giving away high perceived value bonuses of information products that could be downloaded has the potential of being a very good marketing tool. After all, we crave information and the Internet has become the primary source of information. (Hint: if you want to make money on the Internet, selling information could be the best way to succeed, especially when you locate a niche that excites you and that other people search for information about.)
A third way to attract buying customers, both online and offline, would be the concept of “value exchanged”. This marketing concept hasn’t been as well-known as the other two methods and it seems to be taking hold quickly.
For example, you are selling an item for $100 and you offer your customers $100 in free groceries or gas in exchange for purchasing your $100 item. The customer will be thrilled to make this exchange because she wanted the item, just couldn’t justify buying it. Now she can justify buying it because she got it for free. After all, she “wanted” the $100 item and she “needed” the groceries. Actually in her eyes, she came out ahead.
The store owner came out ahead because he was going to discount the $100 item by 20% and the $100 in groceries only cost him $17. Plus his customer will tell others about her great steal.
As you can visualize, this concept will work just as well when you sell a $300 item and give away $100 in free groceries or gas because of the “perceived value” to the customer.
The possibilities of what the business owner can do with this “value exchange” marketing concept would be limited only by his/her imagination.
People would still be inclined to make purchases in our current depressed economy. They just need a logical way to rationalize their purchase. Now they can because they will always need groceries and gas and you have given them the perfect out to make a purchase of what they want.