In early days of my life me and my mom waits for the Christmas sales to have some discount and we do a lot a lot of shopping from Christmas sale. I remember I used to save a portion of my pocket money to avail discounts in Christmas.

But as I mention in very beginning that those were early days of my life, now it’s been more than 30 years. Now we are living in the world of technology, whole world is now just in the finger tips of every individual. Every industry and market is growing electronically that’s the competition has gone very dense.

A manufacturer of same product to yours in some other corner of the world was never considered as your competitor, but now it is!

Whoever is offering same quality product is less price is just a winner and market leader in the world regardless of boundaries, so the concept of discount, its phenomenon and its needs we are going to discuss. So without further do, lets begin the topic

The term discount is very common and we use it very frequently in our daily life, almost all of us know what a discount is?

Even a 10 year old kid can tell us when we buy something by paying a little less amount than original one, the difference is called discount!

But there are more facts attached with the term & concepts “discount”

Like why the shop keeper or retailer is giving us discount?

Why he is losing his earning or money?

When shop keeper gives a discount? Is there any special occasion for it?

Who has asked him to offer the discount?

 

Now! Rather than diving straight into the pool lets understand discount types.

In How many ways a discount can be offered?

3,4,5? No! there are several ways in which a retailer or a shopkeeper or even an online store is offering discount:

 

1. Discount Code, Coupon Code or Voucher Code

A discount code, coupon code, voucher code is a specific and fixed reduction value either be in percentage or in amount. It usually has terms and conditions & limitations with it, which limits user to buy from specific segment or range of product.

   

Within coupon codes or promo codes, there is a special type which is called site wide coupons here is an example of a Sitewide coupon

 

The most interesting part of Sitewide coupon is that it has no condition, limitation or terms in it. that means whatever u want to buy from a hook to hole store, this mentioned discount code will reduce the price of your total bill as per mentioned on the coupon.

There are further types within the coupons:

2. Online coupons

The phenomenon applied here, a discount code or reduction is applied or given when a customer order online.

Now! Most of us know where can we get online coupons? But still for knowledge sharing

There are a bunch of websites like Retailmenot, RetailReduction, offers.com, Savesbest etc. who are working really well in offering voucher codes & promo Codes.

 

3. Printable Coupons

As mentioned above a there are a bunch of websites who are offering online coupons but very few are offering printable coupons which you can use in store while shopping physically in store, al you have to do is just print that coupon and bring it with you. Discount will be offered to you as per conditions and limitations.

Now come to the second type of discount

 

4. Sale

A word which wakes up our sub conscious mind and our nerves start behaving hyper-actively.

 

So, What Is a Sale and what is its phenomenon?

Sale is special type of discount offered to the people, a greater discount value is offered for a limited period of time. Because of it buyers can get much value to their money and this is the most popular and famous type of discount in shopping plat forms either it is physically or on online.

There are further categories into sale which we are going to discuss

 

5. Seasonal Sale

Continuing the concept sale is something when a huge discount offered to the customers within a limited period of time or for a specific stock

 

When the time period (season) becomes a reason then the sale is called seasonal sale.

The basic purpose of Seasonal Sale is to boom up your sales even while stepping-in in the market.

Like you are in the early summer days and captured 50% of the market share by decreasing the profit margin, while other have the rest distributed 50% market share while having normal or average profit margin.

“You set up sale for a few days buy you make customers for whole life”

When a customer is succeeded in buying something in the lowest price and no one else in his society had, he feels like he has won the Olympic!

This winning feeling is more than enough to make him remember your store or brand in his whole life. And whenever he or someone else in his surrounding wants to buy again your brand name will be in the top of the list.

 

6. Occasional or Festival Sale

Occasional sales are very popular and usually the biggest discount in whole year is offered in this particular type of sale.

A few examples of these sales are Christmas Halloween, Black Friday sale, Boxing Day sale, Labor day sale etc.. Most of people stop their regular shopping 3-4 months before these sales.

 

7. Early Bird Sale

Early Bird sale or pre booking sale is the sale on new stock or new variety, this discount or sale is available on pre bookings or in regular ways. This is a smarter way to promote and sell the new arrival stock in a couple of days by just offering a little amount of sale.

These sales are not dependent on any season, month or occasion it is totally the decision of the brand when it wants to be happen and how to be happen.

Remember in mind by offering any kind of discount either is in the form of sale or coupon, a retailer or whole seller is never going into loss. They just decrease their profit margin to capture more customer volume.

Next type of sale is:

 

8. Clearance Sale

You Might have an idea about Clearance Sale!

A clearance sale happen when a retailer or whole seller is clearing out his stuck inventory or dead inventory, or under-performing inventory.

He usually he sell it to the price on which he bought it with minimum or no margin because these deaf stuff Is a headache for him, he can use that space for some well performing products.

Clearance sale also occurs in season changing days. Like; you might have seen that summer clearance sale in the beginning days of winter.

A good shop keeper always tries to get the full potential from his brand or shop

For the purpose of all these activities is to be active in market and move step by step with the market trends.

 

Above mentioned all types of discount were that you are already familiar of, now let’s discuss some other types which might be quite interesting for you!

Come on let’s Explore some hidden common discounts which are mostly available on every online Store:

9. Sign up or first user discount

You have seen signup or subscription pop up on every online store or e-commerce.

Online stores provide signup discount, whoever creates an account on their store can avail a fixed valued discount on his first order.

For customer discount is more important than his details. For brand or store customer and his details are more important.

When you signup anywhere the first thing you have to provide is your email address while other things can be optional like; phone number, address, full name, card details etc. which you have to provide at the time of purchasing.

You get the value of your money or discount. And store got your details, whenever any sale or next discount season is coming up, new inventory, new collection arrives the store keeper sends an email to his entire customers list.

According to a research, impressions to the target customers have the conversion rate of 17.8%.

So if he sends email to 100 customers he can get an average of additional customers which is at the end of the day increasing his sales. So this is how all it works.

 

10. Referral discount

The term speaks about half of the phenomenon what you have to do is just to refer a friend and for your that action a benefit will be offered to you, and sometimes to your customers.

 

Everyone wants to grow his business and who don’t? So this is the greatest trick among all.

Those days are gone that people hire a full time sales person to work in specific time of a day and you have to bare his salary and allowances and still sales graph does not goes straight up.

In the modern means of marketing you make customer work for you, like you can see in the image above the brand is offering 20% discount to refer his friend and not only for referring there is also a interest factor for the fried who has been referred, he will also receive 20% discount on his first shopping.

 

11. Loyalty points

You might have heard about loyalty points. This stage comes after meeting the customer satisfaction level. These loyalty points are very popular in travel tourism & hospitality industry.

 

Loyalty points is a very smart way to retain your own customer and don’t let anyone steal your customer.

The idea behind loyalty point is, they set an estimate of amount of their service used equal to some points the more the customers use the service or product more his points get increased.

When these points reach to a certain numbers a loyal user can take the benefit of his/her points

For example a free hotel room after 100 points, a free 100 miles on 1000 points.

The reward value against points will never be more than 3%-5% of a onetime use of service, but all mindset of customer is changed and he became loyal to you just seeking that loyalty reward.

 

12. Promotional Offers or bundle offers

In departmental stores you may have seen that some products are on promotion like buy 1 & get 1 free, bundle offer of 3-4 products in pretty fewer amounts than that of original

 

As you can see in image, there are 5 items are available in a bundle offer and in a discounted price, usually items in a bundle are of same category or inter related, like KFC “make it meal” offer is also a bundle offer.

Seller know the requirements of his customers and then make a bundle which a user will buy after buying the main product so they make a bundle and sell 5 products instead of one with a just little lower profit margin.

 

13. Free Shipping

The most common and available offer on every second store is free delivery or free Shipping.

It’s just a interest free service to the customers which get customer rid of paying additional amount from the total bill of the cart this is the real discount I think because you are getting a valued service free. 

14. Cash back and Rebate Offers

Cash back and rebate offer is a trick to clear out the stock. Retailer does It so to complete their targets given by the dealers, to make their performance better in market or for some incentives against the sale target.

Retailer clears his entire stock in the same price and offers a 5% or some amount return after a period of time. In this way customer gets what it wants, retailer sellout all his stock in less time, the dealer and the company increased their sale.

 

So, guys these we discussed 14 types of discount my little information about discounts and coupons, in the world of digital marketing the competition is very tough and it’s became very tough to sustain apposition of a market leader in any industry.

That’s why the concept of coupon, coupon codes, promo codes, discount codes, voucher codes, promotional deals & offers sales, cash back, rebate offers, free add on services are just to attract customers.

You might be wondering some times that after offering 60% discount what the retailer is earning.

So the fact is, everyone is earning after all discounts and no one is going in loss.

A product which has a selling price of $100, mention its price on tags $110 and offer a 10% discount code in market. The product was $100 and you are now selling it at $99 which is not a big deal infect, you got triple sized sales volume against that $1 is a pretty amazing deal!

 

 

That’s all for this topic! Hope you like the information,

See you in next topics!