This article has been contributed by Rodney Laws.

Once upon a time, brand identity stemmed almost exclusively from company-defining products. Apple’s design ethos would never have become such a selling point had it not struck gold with the iPod and iPhone. Coca-Cola may have had various hit ads concerning the holidays, but they all rose with the fizzing carbonation of the eponymous soda.

There are some notable exceptions, of course. Nike had no idea when it launched its “Just Do It” campaign that its punchy slogan would come to encapsulate its brand philosophy for years to come. It already had a lot of success with various products, but not one product represents it at this point. If you can make a case for just doing something, then Nike fits.

Overall, though, there was a clear proposition at work. If you want to have a memorable brand, produce a memorable product. But things have changed.

Now that businesses of all shapes and sizes have moved online and become their own distributors, there are so many more brands trying to set themselves apart, and fewer ways in which they can do it. Viral stunts, conversational marketing, hybrid retail…

If you don’t happen to have a generational product in your back pocket, how else can you create a positive public image?

Well, there are various alternatives, one of which is using offers. So how can online businesses use offers to shape a notable brand? Let’s get it into it.

1. Use Offers to Demonstrate Brand Values

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck and businesses began to struggle, many SaaS brands like Adobe promoted their brand profile by offering discounts for new and existing customers.

This ultimately constituted a classic win-win arrangement. Those companies sold many more subscriptions and licenses, raising their profits, and their new customers were able to adjust to a new standard of distance working without paying rates they could no longer afford.

The win for the companies didn’t just come in the form of more sales, though. It also saw their reputations develop quite significantly, leading people to view them much more positively.

Through their actions, they’d made it clear that they didn’t solely care about the money they made. Not all the offers will have directly been revenue drivers, even if they were valuable on the whole, and pointedly sacrificing even some short-term profit isn’t incredibly common.

Zoom, which notably suspended the limits on its free version for many people (and the entirety of China) when things were getting bad, has now become a staple — and it continues to earn plaudits for supporting people through similar offers (see below). It might not otherwise have done quite so well.

So yes, Zoom and many similar companies made money from their offers in the end – that isn’t disputed. But it was also about getting involved with a good cause – connecting people during the isolation caused by the pandemic.

So, if there are causes you want to champion, you can do so through making products and/or services available at cheaper rates where appropriate.

The vital thing with this approach is to follow up on the early discounts with superlative service that reinforces the earned goodwill. That means pulling out all the stops: having clear terms, hiring effective support assistants, implementing convenient live chat (through platforms like Crisp), and — crucially — showing that you’re semi-frequently willing to bend your rules if it means making a valued customer happy.

If you can smoothly transition back to normal prices while maintaining the perception of generosity, it’ll prove massively helpful to your brand in the long run.

Keep in mind that occasionally renewing that pricing as a reward will help with this — and having touched upon using offers as rewards, let’s get more into that option.

2. Use Offers to Cement Your Brand Niche

An online business may offer a broad range of products but it probably has special expertise in a specific area. And while it can certainly put emphasis on that preference through how it promotes its wares, it can also use the provision of extra offers to make it abundantly clear where its priorities lie. Prospects will naturally gravitate towards those areas with added value, of course.

When you arrive on an unfamiliar website, your gaze will initially fix upon the hero images and paragraphs: those displayed prominently in the all-important above-the-fold position for maximum visibility. And while anything can be selected for any reason, no matter how arbitrary, it’s standard practice to feature offers there. Shoppers expect to see them and will assume that highlighted products — unless it’s stated otherwise — have been temporarily discounted.

Now, you might wonder why a business wouldn’t simply provide those wares at lower price points on a permanent basis. Well, the explanation is straightforward: offers don’t need to be profitable because they’re limited-term.

When you’re trying to get people to invest in a product range, for instance, cutting prices for a couple of weeks can bring in orders that won’t make much money but will get buyers attached to that range.

If you just cut the price for something on a lasting basis, you cause three significant problems.

1. You damage your profitability: the lowered cost that could be fine for a short while might not be so viable in the long run.
2. You devalue the item in a serious sense, getting people used to a new lower price: if you want to put the price back up later on, it will feel overpriced to people accustomed to the previous price.
3. You lose out on the great power of FOMO (fear of missing out). Temporary discounts are all the more appealing because they don’t last, lending an air of exclusivity to the notion of buying immediately. If a shopper thinks they can simply wait and buy something many months later, they won’t feel pushed to commit right away. Amazon’s lightning deals use this to great persuasive effect (see above).

What’s more, if you’re trying to pivot your company from one area to another, you can mark that change with a battery of offers to acknowledge that it’s an unexpected transition and encourage existing customers to accept it and move ahead. In the end, money makes all the difference.

3. Use Offers to Communicate Immense Confidence

How convinced are you that your business has what it takes to keep people coming back time and time again? That level of conviction is important, but what’s also important is that people perceive you as being unfailingly confident — regardless of what the truth is. If you have doubts, you can still bluff your way though (in other words, fake it until you make it).

Every business needs to make money, and we all understand that. When we see small discounts, we assume that there are substantial profit margins at play, ensuring that the sellers still come out ahead.

When we see modest or substantial discounts, we assume that there are mitigating circumstances: the products aren’t in demand, so we’re helping the sellers out by getting rid of them and allowing them to get something in return.

Think about how this works in the car-sales industry. If you’re looking to buy a car and the salesperson keeps throwing in extras past a certain point, it can actually make you suspicious: if you’re really getting a great deal, then where is the money being made? In services, perhaps, but you could have your car serviced elsewhere. Something seems awry.

One obvious conclusion is that the much-vaunted extras don’t actually cost that much, and the car is so heavily overpriced that the price could be dramatically slashed and still achieve a tidy profit margin for the seller.

Another possibility is that the car is so unpopular that no one wants it, and it’s taking up space that’s needed for other vehicles that are more likely to prove profitable. The dealership will happily hype it up and offload it at a reduced price, knowing that you’re not getting anything you can sell for more anywhere else.

Regardless of the specific explanation, this makes the deal seem worse, not better, by implicitly devaluing the product. Due to this, tacking on extras without seeming desperate is a balancing act. You can only go so far before you need to stop and declare your final offer: the value is high enough that you simply can’t undercut it any further.

But this isn’t how all businesses work, because we need to consider service-based companies — and that’s where everything changes. It’s understood that the regular use of a service will produce significant profit, and discounts (and deals) are invariably frontloaded (with the focus being on new customers). The more extras are on offer, the more convinced the seller is that the buyer will be sticking around for a long time.

The perfect example here is the media streaming world, which still leans heavily on free trials. Many other industries use free trials, but not with the same impact: free trials for streaming services convert at a rate not far off 50%, and that’s a huge rate of return. So when you see a service like Netflix offering you several months for free with no commitment, you know it’s very confident that it’s going to retain your custom.

If you offer small discounts to new customers, you’ll give the impression that you need every month of use to be profitable. If you offer large discounts, though, the implication will be that you’re so confident in earning long-term customers that you’re happy to wait for new customers to become profitable.

Online businesses willing to offer incredible deals upfront will usually succeed in making people believe their services are industry-leading — and once they’ve got their custom, they just need to keep meeting their needs.

4. Use Offers To Show Customer Appreciation

Lastly, but certainly not least significantly, online businesses can use offers to show that they appreciate the customers they already have. This is enormously important given the massive role that customer retention plays in light of the incredible options available to internet shoppers.

If you can keep customers around for months or even years, they’ll rise in value: they’ll spend more, be more receptive to your marketing, and drive more vital referrals.

So how does this work? Well, it’s simple enough. Once a customer has been around for a while and built up an informative purchase or activity history, the company can create unique offers specifically to cater to their preferences.

For instance, if someone has a regular order in place, the seller can offer them 20% off their next shipment — not a generic discount, but one just for that order. If they don’t use it, that’s fine, but it’s clearly available.

It might not make much of a difference, but it’s the message it sends that matters. It shows that the seller has taken notice of what they care about and presented a deal just for them even though they already had their business.

Since it’s easy for companies to take their customers for granted, people are well accustomed to looking elsewhere for tempting introductory offers to sway them, and complacency can easily lead to the loss of key buyers.

Sellers can also curate some offers based on a customer’s expressed interest in other product or service types, improving the level of service. Amazon automates this exceptionally well through its pioneering dynamic recommendation system, drawing upon purchase histories and the actions of similar buyers to come up with hyper-relevant suggestions.

Of course, shoppers readily intuit that they’re being catered to by algorithms instead of people, so there’s significant value in making it clear that a particular offer has been manually selected. One way to do this is to reach out to each prized customer with unique email copy explaining why you decided to offer them a specific discount (and pointedly opening up a dialogue so they can clarify their intentions and preferences if you’ve somehow misunderstood them).

Conclusion

We’ve looked at some core ways in which online businesses can use offers to show people various things about their operations: what exactly they’re best at, how confident they are in their abilities, what they value, and how much they appreciate their customers. If you’re looking to develop your brand, see how offers can help you.

_

About the author: Rodney Laws has more than a decade of experience providing marketing advice to online entrepreneurs and businesses. Visit EcommercePlatforms.io and follow him on @EcomPlatformsio for more articles on marketing for ecommerce.