Promotion is an action that can improve your sales. It is not enough to let customers know your products. The ultimate purpose is to convert visitors into buyers.
The sequence of O2O retail to develop customers is as follows: Attract consumers – Search for the product – Good shopping experience – Becoming loyal customers – Promotion by word of mouth. As a result, “Promotion” must be based on good products. Otherwise, we will lose many customers even if we got them from the promotion. The following promotion methods may not be resultful. It depends on how we can appropriately make use of them.
1. Promotion channels of the O2O Retail
Generally speaking, there are 4 kinds of promotion channels: paid advertising, resources around us, self-promotion and system promotion. We can make use of our advantages to choose a way as following examples:
- Paid advertising: Video, CPC, Body advertisement, Billboard.
- Resources around us: Bundle ads in products, Exchange ads with our partners.
- Self-promotion: Reward best selling staffs, Give coupons to customers.
- System promotion: Cooperate with delivery guys or community. Set up commission system.
2. How to motivate initial purchase
Normally, people are doubt about strange things or products. It is hard to motivate customers before initial purchase. Even the service or products really benefit us, it will still take a long time before we accept them.
Some consumptions are one-offs. For example traveling or TV shopping. Others need repeated consumptions. O2O retail belongs to the latter. Cost per new customers should be divided into more times. That means we can get our money back after they purchase many times. Based on that, there are some non-conventional tactics may help you:
1) Gimmick discount. If our promotion topic is “200RMB coupons for new registration”, the coupon can be divided into many parts such as 10RMB. And we only can use one of them per time.
2) Hunger marketing. At first, we can lose money on some products which are limited to purchase. People are keen on panic buying.
3) Publish coupons which include a code. After customer type the code in your website they’ll get a gift or discount.
4) Give commission to small offline shop owners and let them help you with the promotion.
3. How to guide repeated consumption
It is difficult to change user habits but easy to keep them. As riding a bicycle, it is hard to move at first, once it starts with a speed, it will be easy to hold. Generally, it takes three times shopping to develop a habit. We can use the following tips:
1) Send messages once a week. The content could be a coupon. If they can re-login and finish shopping after 10 or more days, we can give them a gift as a present.
2) Use Wechat games. Some Q&A games are easy to develop. If customers are able to finish the game and get a high score, we can also send them a coupon or a gift.
3) Brainwashed marketing. We need to place ads everywhere focusing on certain areas. Remind that entrance is the most important thing for O2O.
4. How to optimize the promotion
1) Keep Track of the results. As we mentioned before about sending coupons, we should calculate how many coupons we send and how many of them are used. Then we can calculate how much we spend to get one new customer.
2) Try small-scale experiments if we can not guarantee the result. It will help us to avoid problems which might come up.
TMO Group is a technology and consulting company in China. Our service includes O2O solutions. We can help to build an efficient O2O system. More details please leave a message on our website.
