4 min read
Over the last three months, majority of Pakistan’s online stores have held more than 1 major sale event and most have left customers disappointed. During sales online stores attract thousands of new customers and if you cannot offer something compelling enough to the customers they will never return. The customer will end up feeling that if you don’t have anything worth buying on such a hyped-about day, what will you be able to offer on a normal day. I believe one of the most important reason for the failure of all these sales has been that they have not been customer-centric enough. Online stores start focusing more on the ideology behind the sale and ridiculous things like black and white Friday. At the end of the day all the customers cares about is what discounts you are offering them and how easy they are to avail. To make your sale more customer-centric here are a few things you should keep in mind:
1. Are There Products The Customers Want?
In Pakistan we have a habit of only offloading the junk stock in the hopes that customers will happily buy it at a lower price. Just because it is a sale does not mean a customer will buy something he or she does not want to buy. If you are spending so much money on getting people to visit your website for the sale its important to ensure there is something for them to buy. Online stores have a tendency to put on winter clothes once summer is here and then complain that no one is buying anything.
2. Are You Catering To Enough Customers?
It is understandable that any online store can not offer unlimited quantities of its top deals. Most top deals sell out in a few minutes but after that it is important to have enough good deals for the remaining customers. Not all customers will visit your website at the specified time and will visit over the course of the day so it is important to have some deals everyone can avail.
3. Can You Handle The Customers?
One of the biggest mistakes online stores make is they don’t prepare for the orders and customers that come during the sale. It’s important to make sure that you are prepared. Your website should be able to handle the traffic. On Black Friday, we canceled our sale event but all other websites hosting sales crashed and this led to a large number of customers coming to us and we got a large number of orders simply by being the only operational online store. Once you take the orders you should also have the inventory and workforce to ship them on time. For example, when we did our #bytesvr giveaway we had started getting orders prepared 2 days before the event.
4. Are You Spending On The Correct Things?
Time and time again companies will spend a large amount of money on marketing the sale and leave very little budget for actual discounts. If your deals are really good you can count on the news spreading by word of mouth. So its usually better to allocate majority of the budget on actual discounts.
5. Timing is Everything
You can’t have a sale at any time of the year and expect it to succeed. You need to time it perfectly and make sure the consumers have enough disposable income to spend. For example, have a winter sale in mid-winter so that customers can still derive some utility from the products. If you are having a video game sale don’t have it in when children are having exams.
A sale is a first impression for a large number of your customers. Make sure you do it right and you will be able to grow your customer base like never before.
