Sooner or later every student find themselves wondering: “How is math going to help me in real life?”
Well it does help! How will they be able to calculate how much money they are saving on a £50 shirt that’s on a 25% off discount, then?
Jokes aside, we are so used to see discounts and offers as percentages we don’t even wonder how much money we are saving on them anymore.
All we know is a discount is a good thing and the higher the percentage, the better.
Discounts, however, are a powerful tool in the marketing world, since it pulls customer’s subconscious strings making them feel in debt towards us, as if they got a present from us.
This subconscious process is called Principle of Reciprocity and it is one of the strongest fixed action patterns theorized by Robert Cialdini, a worldwide famous social psychologist who owes his fame to his discoveries in the field of marketing.
This should be enough to understand that offering discounts to customers feels like honey for bees: irresistible.
I’m not telling you to implement a discount and promotions service to your store. I’ve already gone through that topic in another article of mine and the same goes for Cialdini’s Principles.
Today I want to talk about how to increase the effectiveness of this tool, how to make it sharper and more powerful.
One way to do so, as you may have learned from the title of this article, is to specify exactly how much your customers are saving thanks to one specific discount.
Getting back to the joke about students I’ve made at the beginning of this article, not all of your customers are as prepared or have the same amount of time and will to calculate percentages and understand the exact amount they would be saving.
They often react based on feedbacks: “I like that discount, it sounds convenient, I’ll get it. I’m not sure about this one, so I won’t get it…”
As you can see, it’s a very random system and as businessmen, we should avoid relying on chance as much as we can.
The best thing we can do is to show exactly how much customers would save then, even better if we display it directly in the product image on a badge (the image is the part who gets the most attention from customers and gets looked at the most)
It’s no use offering discounts and marvelous promotions if customers don’t know about them. When we visit a store we often just go through their items, then if something catches our attention, we stop and look.
But what are the advantages of this means of persuasion?
- By customizing the badge, you can display the deal’s expiration date, which will trigger one of Cialdini’s Principles, the Fixed Action Pattern of Scarcity (if something is about to end, I want it even more).
- The badge has a high visual impact, which conveys the idea of a good deal.
- Showing the exact amount of money saved on a specific deal is a welcomed feature, since customers get to realize how much money they can keep thanks to your offer.
- It increases the average transaction value, since seeing the increasing amount of money saved on specific deals raises the chance of multiple purchases.
After seeing all the benefits that come with using this service, know that you can implement this function to your WooCommerce based store by using this plugin: WooCommerce Badge Management which allows you to set different parameters and create badges to cover any of your needs.
That’s how you can exploit all the aspects of a good deals and offers system on your WooCommerce based store, customize your products and encourage customers to buy more!