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Hey everybody, this is Drew Sanocki, nerdmarketing.com and we’re talking about discount ladders on the podcast. One thing I want to do today was give you a number of examples of good discount ladders or usage of discount ladders so you kind of get the idea of what the hell I am talking about. Without further ado, we’re going to go to the screenflow here and I’m going to walk you through some discount ladders.
First, a great example of…or great opportunity where you can use discount ladders is in winback emails. Winback emails are the ones that are sent out to customers who haven’t bought from you forever in an attempt to sort of win them back into the fold. I Google winback emails and you’re going to see a lot of examples here.
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Here’s one from Eventbrite with their winback and here’s one from Social Sprout and Postagram and, like, everybody does a winback, right? You know? What can we do to win you back? Where you been? Yada yada yada … Dropbox does one.
My issue with these is they leave money on the table. Maybe they are not awesome because they’re a single email. If you take everything we’ve learned about a discount ladder and make the single email into a series, you’re just going to do that much better at capturing or recapturing that customer.
For example, here’s one I built out for a fairly big online retailer. It is a winback, I am trying to win back everybody who has purchased one time and has not purchased a second time, I’m trying to get that second purchase. What I’ve done is, I’ve figured out that these customers for this retailer order roughly every thirty days so if thirty days has come and gone and they have not ordered they’re not likely to order from us again. Perfect opportunity for what’s called an anti-defection discount ladder.
You can see I’m using Klaviyo here to set up this automated campaign, in Klaviyo it’s called a flow. My first email goes out thirty days after purchase and it only goes out to people who have not purchased in the last thirty days and it’s a simple ten percent off offer. We’re now going to think in terms of our ladder.
What do you do with the ladder? You increase the promo over time, so if someone takes this bait and buys, they fall out of the sequence. Otherwise, at sixty days, a month later, they’re going to get a fifteen percent off offer, right here, right? Then, again, I could make this ladder go as high and as far as I want but I find that after ninety days it’s pretty much done. If they’re not going to take the bait by ninety days, they’re not going to take the bait, but ninety days is my best offer, it’s a twenty percent off your next order.
The details are not as important here, but let me show you what one of these looks like. Important thing to note is unlike these, “awesome examples”, the awesomer example is a sequence, it’s not just a singular email and … boom. In this case, I’m actually testing two variations for every ladder, every rung of my ladder. Half are going to receive ten percent, half are going to receive twenty percent, that helps me determine which ones I ultimately should lock in. It’s like, “Hey, we miss you. Here’s ten percent off.” It’s not rocket science and super easy to set up. Klaviyo makes it incredibly easy but with some chops you could even do this in MailChimp, you can even do it manually if you have to.
One thing I want to convey here is that people always think about email because of the ease with which you can implement these things, but remarketing is like a stone’s throw away from email. It’s basically, you want to go out to customers and touch them over time and in one case, in the email case, they’ve opted into your list and the remarketing case they haven’t.
Really you take the same mentality and you’ll see here in our Facebook campaign, I’ve got the same three rungs of my … oh sorry, they’re slightly different but rungs of my discount ladder. I’ve got a sixty day rung, a ninety day rung and a hundred and twenty day rung and again, I’ve got increasing promos. These are custom audience lists. The lists, amazingly, incredibly, are synced with Klaviyo lists, so I create lists of our customers in our CRM, which is Klaviyo, it syncs it with Facebook so I don’t have to export and import lists of customers that fit this criteria every week. They’re automatically updated and then you can see they’re all producing conversions in the last month.
If I click through to just show you what the deal is here, the offer is basically, you know, I’m making like five hundred dollars a day on this, and the offer is essentially the same offer that I am giving to those who are subscribed to my list. Whether you get the list when you log into Facebook, oh sorry, whether you get the offer when you log into Facebook or whether you get it in your inbox, it’s going to be the same offer and that’s how it should be. It should be based on your behavior. Here’s an example of the ad, here’s your ten percent off discount code.
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What I wanted to do today was show you some examples of discount ladders and how they can be used to do not only email marketing but also Facebook ads. Really, all sorts of different kinds of marketing but hopefully those examples give you a good idea of where to start and how easy they can be to set up.
If you have any questions, email me at nerdmarketing.com and have a great week, thanks.
