What's your experience with offering giveaways/discounts/deals?
I am curious to know who has experimented with giveaways or discounts or deals, and what your experience was. Did you unlock lots more sales? Did you lose money because the deal wasn't correctly calculated? Did nothing happen?
Does it even make sense to offer deals, or should you just try to nail your pricing?
Please share your stories!
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I think whatever experience someone else has with giveaways will not necessarily mirror onto your business. The most important part is to find a way to determine if giveaways/discounts make sense for you.
How I did this with one of my past businesses was using Google analytics and connecting it to one of my links to my discounts. I could then record the conversion rate and amount of views that came from the link that mentioned the discounts.
I think discounts can increase sales definitely if done correctly, but giveaways are like feeding pigeons: as soon as you run out of food the pigeons leave.
Likewise, as soon as you stop the giveaway the interest in your product drops off.
However, I think giveaways are great for brand awareness and can indirectly increase you sales in a way that cannot be measured. I find they're best for growing a community or encouraging others to promote your product.
For example, you could enter anyone who tags your product on Twitter into a draw for a chance to win a free product. This has the benefit if getting more eyeballs on your product, so you're essentially paying for informal marketing.
Do this somewhat frequently and build a community around it, and you've got a strong brand that can significantly increase your sales.
As an example, my product (an A.I. API for developers) is pay per use. So we plan on offering some free credits to any developer that uses our API in their project and tags us on social media.
This won't be sustainable forever, but it will give us a good initial boost when we launch.
You can check out more of my project here if you're interested: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/evoke
Nail the pricing. 100% nail the pricing.
Deals just complicate things. Figure out your product. Solve the problem well. Charge more than you think you should. Adjust the pricing to maximize revenue and reduce churn from people who actually use the product.
I definitely am influenced by discounts. If I can save a little money, I think that's good. And it seems like it would make a lot of sense to lose a little money during the acquisition of the customer if the lifetime value of the customer is going to be high.
At the same time, if someone is not willing to pay full price for your product or service now, what are the odds that they'll be willing to pay full price when the discount ends?
Perhaps the lesson here is that you shouldn't target cheapskates like me as your customer base!