Discount strategies in Ignition

Offering discounts is a common sales strategy that can be used to attract new clients, increase sales, and close deals faster. 

Let’s look at the different reasons and ways which you can create discounts in your Ignition proposals. 

1. To attract new customers:

Offering a discount to new clients can be a great way to get your foot in the door and establish a relationship. This could mean the difference if a potential client is deciding between you and a competitor.

2. To increase sales:

Offering a discount on a larger purchase can be a great way to increase the size of the sale. You could use this for both new and existing clients to upsell them onto a higher level of service either at the start or later on in their journey with you. 

This can be very effective if the customer is on the fence - especially if you are providing recurring work.

3. To close deals faster:

Offering a discount can be a great way to close a deal faster by giving your client an incentive to act now. This is effective if your client is in a hurry to make a decision.

4. To build customer loyalty:

Offering discounts to existing customers can be a great way to build customer loyalty and encourage repeat business. You could also consider providing an increasing discount the longer clients stay with you. 

You can discount specific services and showcase them as an incentive for any of the reasons listed above.

Examples:

• $200 off clean up work 
• $100 off recurring services for 6 months

You can also set up a proposal with a discount and add a note in the Service Description that the discount expires after X number of days.

Then, if the client hasn’t signed by then, revoke the proposal, remove the discount and re-send the edited proposal to your client.

If you are having trouble with debtors or wish to consolidate all of your billing, you could provide a small discount for paying upfront via Ignition. Collecting your client’s payment details at the time they sign the proposal guarantees you’ll get paid.

This allows you to have one single source of payment and you can take advantage of Ignition’s automatic invoicing and reconciliation, too.

Note: You do not need to offer discounts to incentivise collecting your clients payment details. If you have had clear communications regarding the proposal and payment collection, most clients will accept your proposal and provide payment details anyway.

If you wish to upsell your clients to higher packages, you could make use of proposal options.

We currently cannot apply a discount to a specific proposal option, but you can guide your clients to achieve this via creating and duplicating two or more separate proposals.

To do this, first create your initial proposal as normal without using proposal options.

Then duplicate the proposal and add more services to that proposal and remember to include any discounts you’d like. 

You can repeat this step depending on how many options you would like to offer.

After you have created the separate proposals, move all the proposals to an Awaiting Acceptance status to generate an active proposal URL.

Link each proposal to your client with the relevant proposal URL’s in an email. Remember to highlight the discount for choosing and accepting the higher tier option.

You can also build discounts into your proposal templates if you intend to use them across your business and client relationships.

Examples:

• New proposal templates = flat discount for first 6 months
• Existing customer renewal proposals = 5% discount for clients in their 2nd year of business 

If you choose to use discounts in Ignition, it is important to do so strategically. Here are a few tips:

• Make sure your discounts are meaningful. The discount should be significant enough to entice the customer to take action, but not so large that it eats into your profit margin.
   
• Target your discounts to the right customers. Not all customers are created equal. Some customers are more likely to be swayed by discounts than others. Target your discounts to the customers who are most likely to respond. You may want to only offer discounts for new customers, for example.
   
• Use discounts sparingly. Discounts should not be used all the time. If you offer discounts too often, customers will start to expect them and they will lose their effectiveness.
   
• Track your results. It is important to track the results of your discounting efforts so that you can see what’s working, what’s not and the overall effect it has on your profit margins in the long term. 

Learn how to apply a discount in Ignition here.