Get Subscribers Without Offering a Discount
Ever wonder if you didn’t have to offer a discount to get subscribers to sign up for your newsletter? Are you a luxury brand that doesn’t want to dilute your reputation with a discount? Are you a small business just starting out and can’t afford to offer a discount right now? Have you been using a discount to get newsletter subscribers and want to shake things up and offer something different to stand out from your competition? I’m here to tell you that it is possible to grow your email list without ever offering a discount. Brands do this all the time and successfully grow and maintain their newsletter lists.
Here are a few ideas you can try instead of offering a discount to new subscribers:
FREE GIFT WITH PURCHASE
While this is like a discount, this can work better than a discount. A free gift with offer, is an extra bonus they recieve with a purchase. This can be based on buying a specific product or reaching an order amount, like all purchases over $150.
People love FREE STUFF.
This also helps keep your order value up. They spend $100 instead of the $80 which was a $100 purchase with a 20% discount.
Make sure the freebie is something cool, but a low cost to you. For example, a t-shirt, or sample sized product would only cost $2-$5 out of pocket and is much cheaper than a 20% discount.
This strategy works well for luxury brands. Something FREE doesn't give cheap/discount vibes, it uses perceived value to make the customer feel like they are getting MORE. A bonus.
What about FREE SHIPPING?
Free shipping is technically a free gift, and is usually offered as a stand alone offer or connected to a certain order value. Make sure it won’t hurt your profits, especially with the current high cost of shipping. This works well with small, lightweight items like beauty or jewelry that have higher margins and less costly shipping rates compared to large or hard to ship goods.
FREEBIES
Another version of FREE STUFF, cause the people love it. Get creative with this. Offer downloads, free mini-courses, printables, the newest catalog, it can be anything. Ideally, it should be something you can create once and have automatically download with each new subscriber. This should be something fun, informative, or both and works with both e-commerce companies and service based brands.
Think of your customer and what they value. Identify their desires and goals.
What do they want?
What do they need?
Can you solve a problem for them?
A skin care instructional pdf for Winter? A printable placecard set for Spring entertaining? A how-to guide to create a capsule wardrobe, linking a few pieces from your collection, of course. Sky’s the limit and is a great way to build trust, brand loyalty and engage with your customers. The perfect start to a long lasting newsletter relationship.
ACCESS ONLY
A pop-up box to get “access” to the sale, new collection, or get on the waitlist. This is just like any other pop-up but typically appears on the product page featuring the sale or collection. The idea is that they must enter their email in order to gain “access'“ to the secret pages.
Depending on your marketing strategy, you can have this page hidden from navigation, where a link that leads to it is only shared on social media and in ads. Or it lives on the site, and when they arrive, it pops up.
Either way, it isn’t complicated to set-up. I have seen a few perfectly coded access only pop-ups, which actually restrict access to the content, usually used by services or luxury brands.
What I have seen more of is a “faux” access only pop-up.
This “faux” access only pop-up gives the illusion of access only, but can be closed (top right invisible X or click outside the box) and unlocks the page, that was never actually locked to begin with. It is just like a regular newsletter pop-up, but designed to make it look like it is access only.
Easy to set-up and use on any platform. No coding needed.
When someone visits the site, they are more than likely going to sign up for the newsletter list, especially if you tell them they will get first access at the next event.
This type of pop-up helps the customer feel exclusive, part of a club, and excited for whatever is over that wall. A peek in to the newest collaboration? A chance to score the deepest discounts on best-selling products?
Chances are, they will spend more to reciprocate special access they have been granted.
Whether you choose one of the ideas above to grow your email list or just plan on offering a discount, make sure you have done the math for your profit margins. Be sure it works for your business and is sustainable. Try something new. Remember there are no rules for your business, you have to experiment to see what works for your brand.