Almost every week we get asked for a discount of our product WishList Member.

In the 4 years we’ve been running this company, we’ve never given one.

Why?

Because I think it’s a mistake.  Let me explain…

Are We Becoming Discount Junkies?

Let’s face it, if you sell a product or service (of any kind), there’s a good chance that someone will ask you for a discount.

Not for any particular reason, they just feel entitled to a discount.

Our Free company gets these requests virtually every day.

Plus with the proliferation of all these “Daily Deals” sites, people are getting trained to buy – but only if it’s being discounted.  In fact, we even had a customer who told us that he doesn’t buy anything unless it’s on sale (all I can say is that I’m sure glad he’s not our customer!).

It reminds me of the old “Factory Outlet” stores.

You go there thinking you’ll get this incredible discount but the Outlet stores just mark the prices up even higher and then discount them from there.  So it looks like you’ve got a discount but at the end of the day, you’re still paying the same thing vs. buying it in a regular store.

I digress.

My point is, people are becoming trained to expect a discount.

So should you give one just because your customers asking for it?

Why I Don’t Like Giving Discounts

The most important reason to not give a discount is because I think it devalues your brand.

Here’s why…

What happens to the customers who purchased at full price?

They see that you’re now offering a discount, and they feel like a schmuck because they bought at full price (not good).

So what do you think they’ll do next time?  That’s right, they’ll wait until whatever you’re selling goes on sale.

Plus, they might also come back to you and ask for the discount – even though their purchase may have occurred months (even years) ago.

That puts you (the business owner) in an awkward position.  If you decide not to give the discount, you’re basically slapping your early adopters in the face (not good).  If cheap jerseys you decide that you should give them a discount, you’re now opening yourself up to all your other customers wanting to do the same thing – which can cause havoc on your cash flow (not good).

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Plus, they make things even worse by putting yourself in a vulnerable situation.

All to give your sales a little “bump” in the short-term.

Again, not good.

How To Deal With Discount Seekers

One of the things we do is switch the discount for a “bonus”.

What can you give people to incentivize the sale that will push them over the edge in terms of their decision to buy?

Furthermore, what can you give as a purchase incentive that you can ALSO give to your EXISTING customers?

Do you see what’s happening here?

Now you have something you can use to incentivize sales during a promotion but at the same time you’ll be rewarding your existing customers as well (so the value of their original purchase increases with each promotion).

So instead feeling like a schmuck, they feel proud that they made an early wholesale nba jerseys decision to buy – and they’ll probably tell others about it!

It’s a completely different frame of mind.

And guess what that does for future purchases?

It creates HOW a situation where people will want to buy from you EARLIER rather than later.

What To Give In Replace Of A Discount

What you give will largely depend on the number of customers you are dealing with and the amount people are spending with you.

If people are spending a large sum, you can afford to give more.

If you have a large number of customers, it can get costly to give everyone certain bonus items.

That’s why as a software company, we always look to create something of tremendous value that costs us very little cheap nba jerseys (if anything) to deliver.

Things like…

1)  Interviews– Find people of interest to your market cheap mlb jerseys and interview them.  We’ve done this with a number Your of NY Times Best-Selling authors like Gary Vaynerchuck, Chris Guillebeau and Dan Ariely.

We always ask ourselves, who would our customers want wholesale mlb jerseys to learn from but What perhaps they can’t get access to?  The “secret” is that most of the time, all it takes is a request ?  However, during the interview it’s important to be mindful of your customers.  Ask questions that would be relevant to THEM.  Your job during the interview is to pull out actionable items from person you’re interviewing so that your audience can benefit right away from the info shared.

The other thing we have done to make these interviews even more valuable is raise the “production value” by recording a video interview with multiple cameras and proper microphones.  This can get more expensive but in my opinion it raises the value and the expense is offset by the fact that it costs $0 to deliver (we provide the videos in our protected Customer Center).

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2)  Software or Plugins– Anytime you can save your customers time or money, they’ll be grateful.  So what tasks can you automate or simplify for your customers?  Then turn whatever that is into a piece of software or plugin (for WordPress).

We’ve done this by creating multiple plugins that we knew would be valuable to our customer base (anyone running membership sites).  And you might be thinking Click “yeh but Stu, you run a software company so it’s easy for you to do this”.  That is true, but you can do this as well.  Sites like vWorker.com (formally Rentacoder.com), Scriptlance.com and eLance.com are all a good place to find people available and ready for your small software projects.

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3)  Digital Goodies– One thing we tried last year which was a big hit was creating a whole bunch of icons.  In fact, we ended up creating thousands of icons for our customers and people LOVED them because they were original, professional and had immediate value (because our customers use this kind of thing all the time in their membership sites).

But even if you don’t hire someone to create a set of icons, think about things like “templates”, “spreadsheets”, “themes”, “checklists”, “summaries”, “how-to guides”, “video tutorials” or anything Albans else digital that could help your customers.  All these things again, save people time and are very useful.

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Wrap Up

The bottom line is, discounts are bad for business in the long-term.

They send the wrong message, create awkward situations and penalize your early adopters.

The better alternative is to incentivize your offers by including time limited bonuses.  However, if you can, look to reward your existing customers by giving it to them as well.

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Your Turn

What do you think is an effective bonus?

Have you used something that worked well?

If so, tell me Уход about it in the comments.