Beyond discounts: 5 acquisition strategies to protect retail profit margins
Offers and discounts are everywhere in online retail. In fact, discounting is the number one strategy brands are using to attract and retain customers.
However, poor discount management erodes the perceived value of your products and your brand. And that’s not to mention the negative impact of untargeted, blanket discounts on customer loyalty. As soon as a competitor comes with a lower price, you lose hold over your customer.
Updated on 2 May 2024
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In this blog, we discuss the benefits of a data-driven, tailored discounting plan before exploring five other powerful and effective customer acquisition and customer retention strategies you can use to grow your business.
The benefits of tailoring discounts to your customers
Yes, discounting works. But only when done to increase customer loyalty—by tailoring discounts to your customers. To achieve that, you need to start with a full 360-degree view of your customers, including their behaviors, preferences, past purchases, and more.
Once you have this 360-degree view, you can leverage that data for targeted marketing and to implement personalized recommendations and offers.
For example, only offer discounts on shoes that are the right size and in a similar style to some the customer already purchased. Or, offer 10% off the next purchase as a thank you for the first.
With some customers, you don’t need to offer discounts, meaning you can save money by limiting offers to special moments when they make sense.
Using a personalized, data-driven strategy leads to:
- Improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Higher conversion rates because tailored offers convert faster than blanket discounts.
- Additional data and insights on your customers’ activities, especially when you combine discounts with gamification and ask people to enter their data to claim a discount as a prize.
- Optimized marketing spend because tailored discounts are only sent to high-value segments.
Download our ebook: The ultimate digital growth guide for retail and ecommerce marketers for more insights.
5 retail marketing strategies to engage and retain new customers
The world’s leading retail brands, including Adidas, Philips, and Samsung partner with Insider to build personalized shopping experiences and maximize profit margins. Insider is the omnichannel customer journey platform powering personalized shopping experiences for retail and ecommerce customers worldwide. So, yes, we know a thing or two about profitable customer acquisition and retention strategies.
Here are five strategies every marketer needs to know:
- Increasing product discovery with smart recommendations
When it comes to engaging new customers and turning browsers into buyers, increasing the discoverability of your products gives you a huge advantage.
When prospects visit your website, they don’t want to waste time. They want to see if you have what they need at the right price. The sooner you direct them to a relevant product page, the more likely you’ll get their business.
Insider’s Smart Recommender solution leverages advanced recommendation algorithms such as “Frequently purchased together,” “Shop similar items,” ‘Best sellers, and “Trending products” to help visitors discover relevant products even on their first visit—and encourage customers to add more to their basket.
“Insider’s growth experts suggested exactly which tools to use to achieve our objectives. We implemented personalized product recommendations on the homepage, which helped us generate a 13% increase in conversion rate in one month.”
– Senior Ecommerce Manager at Adidas
2. Building trust with social proof
An incredible 99% of customers rely on reviews when making purchases, so Insider offers brands multiple social proof solutions to help build trust and drive more sales.
Three popular solutions include:
- Showing real-time stock information and catalog availability to create FOMO and stimulate more purchases.
- Highlighting trending products and bestsellers that reflect users’ preferences and onsite behaviors to encourage more sales.
- Displaying reviews and ratings across homepages and product pages to show customers how much other people love your products.
International electronics retailer, Philips, increased its AOV by 4% and conversions by 13% by displaying star ratings and reviews across its products.
Discover the full success story in our latest ebook: The ultimate digital growth guide for retail and ecommerce marketers.
3. Increasing app stickiness with App Suite
AppsFlyer found that 53% of users uninstall an app within 30 days of downloading it. There’s nothing worse than spending valuable resources to launch a new app only for it to sit unused on your downloaders’ fifth app page.
With Insider’s App Suite, you can send relevant, personalized push notifications based on user behavior, increasing app stickiness right from the point of download.
You can also use the solution to send real-time alerts when items are back in stock (or about to sell out) and remind customers of products sitting in their wishlists.
With everyone glued to their phones, Insider’s App solution is one of the most effective ways to stay front of mind with prospects and potential customers with relevant, contextual notifications.
“Insider’s App Push notifications have been highly effective in helping us realize our revenue goals and improving the retention of our mobile app users.”
—Ecommerce Business Analytics Manager at DeFacto
For more strategies and insights, download our ebook: The ultimate digital growth guide for retail and ecommerce marketers today.
4. Increasing AOV with personalized search experiences
Personalizing the search experience is a valuable way to increase customer loyalty. The deeper, more precise customer experiences you can offer, the more your customers will return–and the more they’ll spend with you when they do.
With Insider’s AI-powered site search solution, Eureka, brands can make recommendations tailored to each customer’s behaviors and actions. This increases the likelihood of customers adding relevant, contextual products to their basket and increases AOV.
Eureka enables brands to re-order search listings instantly using algorithms and dynamic product scoring to show the most relevant products aligned with individual preferences, including favorite brands, products, colors, and more.
Boost your sales by providing recommendations that are too good to resist and perfectly match your customer’s wants and needs.
“We love the feature of predicting search terms and displaying search results unique to each user’s purchase history and behavior. It is one of the coolest features on our website, which helps reduce bounce rates and stand apart from our competition.”
– Ecommerce Director at Multi Brand Retailer
5. Engaging VIP customers on WhatsApp
As the world’s most popular messaging app, with a 99% open rate and more than 2 billion active users, using WhatsApp to engage your most loyal customers feels like a no-brainer.
Insider’s WhatsApp solution empowers marketers to create interactive purchasing experiences for customers directly within their most frequented channel. Users can discover, research, purchase, and complete payments seamlessly within the app.
Online retailer VogaCloset used Insider’s WhatsApp Commerce solution to leverage end-to-end conversational buying experiences with personalized product recommendations and notifications. Incorporating WhatsApp into its cross-channel customer journeys achieved 30X ROI for the brand.
Insider in action: How Slazenger gained 49X ROI in 8 weeks with Insider’s omnichannel marketing solution
Leading sports retailer, Slazenger, wanted to improve customer engagement. The company used Insider’s cross-channel journey orchestration solution, Architect, to engage shoppers with contextual messaging about products they’d already expressed interest in.
By sending price drop notifications and cart reminders about these products, Slazenger increased customer acquisition by 700% and achieved 49X ROI within just eight weeks.
“Insider enabled us to build relevant and timely campaigns across nearly 30 customer segments. We built personalized, multi-channel user experiences, which helped us gain a 700% increase in customer acquisition and 49X ROI within just two months thanks to Insider.”
— Ecommerce Director at Slazenger
Discover how other leading brands, including global electronics retailer, Philips, transformed their marketing efforts with Insider in our ebook: The ultimate digital growth guide for retail and eCommerce marketers.
There’s far more to acquisition than discounts
There’s no question that discounting can work. But it’s equally true that most discounting is counterproductive in today’s hyper-competitive ecommerce and online retail market.
Insider provides hundreds of solutions, templates, and tools that brands can leverage to achieve their business objectives and drive revenue without compromising profit margins.
Download the ebook to find out more
For more inspiration and strategies and to discover how other global retail brands are driving growth with Insider, download our ebook: The ultimate digital growth guide for retail and eCommerce marketers today.
About Insider
Insider—a single platform for building individualized, cross-channel experiences—enables enterprise marketers to connect customer data across channels and systems, predict their future behavior with an AI intent engine, and build individualized customer experiences. Marketers use Insider’s platform to deliver consistent and engaging experiences across Web, App, Web Push, Email, SMS, WhatsApp Commerce, and more.
