Discounts are all around us, as consumers we are constantly being conditioned to not to purchase unless we are getting a great deal. When you need to drive sales, it can be tempting to jump on the discounting band wagon.

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Sometimes this is the right thing to do, especially when you are in a sales slump. But straight discounting can have an impact on your business beyond the initial sale - on your brand, on the perceived confidence in your product, and creating a bad precedent for what customers are prepared to pay for your products in the future. This can be particularly dangerous in industries where there is high competition and little differentiation between options – where discounting becomes a race to the bottom price wise.

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Sourcing a sales incentive through another third party is an alternate solution for driving sales and getting your target audience to act now. A third-party incentive is a giftcard, product or service that is sourced through another company that adds value to what you are selling.  

Taking this approach can have benefits beyond just sales, but have benefits for your business like changing perceptions of your brand and, depending on the degree to which you partner with the third-party, can give you access to channels that you otherwise could not  buy.

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Done well you can benefit from the following:

Manage Your Cost Per Acquisition Or Response: Maintain your margin in your core products, while choosing incentives that are appropriate for the value of the consumer you are acquiring or retaining.

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Drive Response: Make the action you desire rewarding, maybe it’s a sale, but depending on your industry it could be a quote or data capture that is your “ask”. Simple works best, your consumers will give up if you make them jump through hoops. Make sure you signpost the incentive through the journey and ensure that once the desired action is completed that you follow up quickly.

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Be Relevant: Want to support local? Demonstrate your environmental consciousness? Doing a campaign to target students heading to uni for the first time? When you reflect the needs and desires of your target audience through your incentives this can really help you to increase consideration, differentiate your offering and drive sales!

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Remove A Barrier To Change: Incentives can support behaviour change by removing some of the inertia in your audience and removing the financial obstacle to change.

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Enhance Your Campaign Idea: Tie the right incentive to your campaign creative to drive additional engagement and sales. This is even better when your creative is built on a robust consumer insight!

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Modify Perceptions: Aligning your brand with an incentive that is highly desirable to your target audience, this can shift their perception of you and increasing consideration.

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Allow You To Offer A Choice: Your audience may respond to different types of incentives, after all none of your other marketing initiatives assume that your audience is homogeneous.

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Learn More About Your Audience: Knowing what else your customers love could help drive better results, develop new products or help inform your future strategy?

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Here's how we can support you:

·        Building an acquisition plan aligns to you brand, values, target audience and budgets.

·        Building strategic partnerships with other brands that can help you get into the moments that will drive sales for you.

·        Developing a collaborative framework in association with your team and any brand partners.

·        Sourcing and delivering rewards, prizes, competitions or other elements as required to deliver to your plan.

·        Helping you to manage your cost per acquisition.  

·        Finding a technical platform that is appropriate for you, where required.

·        Helping you with the creative delivery and communications - either working together with your existing agency or one of our trusted suppliers.

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