Preparing to sell

Sales promotion examples

Guide

You can use promotion to encourage sales of your product or service.

Sales promotions are often original and creative and there are many popular options, for example:

  • Buy-One-Get-One-Free
  • incentives such as bonus points, vouchers, money-off coupons, competitions and prize draws
  • time-sensitive incentives can be used to encourage customers to buy right away
  • point-of-sale materials and product demonstrations
  • free gifts and loyalty points
  • discounted prices
  • joint promotions - between brands owned by the same company or with a brand from another company
  • free samples
  • fair-trade and cause-related products such as those which help charities
  • finance deals - no or low finance, or buy now pay later
  • special deals for first-time customers to turn them from browsers into purchasers
  • online coupons for customers who have registered for an account or subscribed to a newslette

It is important to ensure that any promotions and offers will still make you a profit even if very successful and taken up by lots of customers.

Pricing

Strategically, pricing is very important as it is part of product positioning. It affects other marketing elements such as product features, distribution and promotion.

There are many ways to price a product, for example:

  • premium pricing - a high price for unique products or services
  • penetration pricing - an artificially low price to gain market share before increasing the price
  • economy pricing - no-frills low price usually associated with economy brands
  • promotional pricing

For further information see price your product or service.