What to run instead of a discount

The month is short and you need something you can run this week. That constraint is real, and most advice about retention ignores it by suggesting things that pay off in six months.

So here are the options that work on the timescale a discount works on, without giving away the margin a discount gives away. Roughly in order of how much they usually return for what they cost.

1. Email the people who already bought twice and stopped

This is the cheapest revenue in most ecommerce businesses and it sits there untouched.

Pull the customers who placed two or more orders and have not bought in noticeably longer than their usual gap. Not everyone who has gone quiet, and not your one time buyers. The people who demonstrated a habit and then broke it.

They already know the product. They already decided they liked it. Something interrupted, and it was usually circumstantial rather than a decision about you.

Write to them as a person, not a campaign. Note that it has been a while, say what has changed since they last bought, and make it easy to reorder what they had before. No code, no countdown.

Cost: an hour. This is the first thing to try in a soft month, every time.

2. Add something rather than taking something off

If you need an offer, make it an addition.

A bonus item costs you its wholesale cost. A discount costs you a percentage of every order it touches. On a £40 order, a £4 extra costs you £4, while 25 percent off costs you £10. The customer often values the extra at its retail price, which makes it feel like a better deal than the one that costs you more than twice as much.

It also does not teach anybody to wait, because there is no lower price to wait for. Next month the product is still £40.

This works particularly well as a first order offer, where it replaces the acquisition discount entirely. A new customer whose first delivery contains something they were not expecting has a better first impression than one who simply paid less, and you have not established that your prices are negotiable.

Cost: the wholesale cost of the extra, on the orders that take it.

3. Offer a pause instead of a cancellation discount

If you run a subscription, this one is worth more than everything else on the list.

The most common reason people cancel is not dissatisfaction. It is a short term budget squeeze, or a cupboard with three unopened boxes in it. Both of those are temporary, and both of them get solved by cancelling because cancelling is the only button on the page.

Give them skip one month and skip two months, prominently, in the cancellation flow. You will keep a meaningful share of the people who were leaving, and you will keep them at full price.

A cancellation discount solves the same problem for one month and creates a permanent one, because a customer who got a better rate by threatening to leave now knows how to get a better rate. Do that twice and you have a segment of your base managing their price through periodic cancellation threats. How that pattern forms is worth understanding before you send the first one.

Cost: the deferred revenue from the paused months, which is not lost, just moved.

4. Sell more to the people who bought last week

Someone who received an order recently is more receptive than anyone else on your list, and most stores do nothing with that window.

Look at what your customers actually buy together, then write to recent buyers about the pairing. Lead with something useful about the thing they already own, and put the recommendation at the end rather than the top.

This raises order value without touching price, and it works because it is genuinely a service when the pairing is real. It stops working immediately if the recommendation is just the product you need to shift.

Cost: an hour, and the credibility you spend if you recommend badly.

5. Move a launch forward

If something is coming in six weeks, consider whether it can come in two.

A new product, a returning seasonal line, a new size or bundle. Novelty drives the same urgency a discount drives, from people who already like you, and it does not reset anybody’s expectation of what things cost. The revenue arrives from the same list, in the same week, at full margin.

Cost: whatever the rush actually costs in operations, which is sometimes nothing and sometimes a lot. Check before you promise it.

6. Set a free shipping threshold slightly above your average order

Customers weigh shipping cost far more heavily than its size deserves. A £4.95 delivery charge kills more baskets than a £5 price increase would.

Free shipping over a threshold costs you actual postage rather than a percentage of the order, and if the threshold sits a little above your current average order value it lifts basket size rather than simply handing margin to people who were already going to spend enough.

Set it too high and it reads as a fight rather than an offer, and you will feel that in the repeat rate rather than the conversion rate. A little above average is the range that works.

Cost: postage on the orders that cross the line.

7. Ask your best customers for a referral

Not a scheme, a message.

Take the twenty or thirty people who buy most consistently, write to them individually, and ask directly whether they know someone the product would suit. Give them something concrete to pass on.

It converts far better than a broad referral programme because it is personal, and referred customers tend to arrive with expectations already set by someone they trust, which shows up later in how long they stay.

Cost: an afternoon, and it is worth doing whether or not the month is soft.

Choosing between them

The list is ordered by cost, but the right answer depends on which part of the business is actually leaking. A soft month has a cause, and the cause tells you which option to reach for.

• If repeat purchase rate is falling, the problem is the first thirty days. Options 1 and 4.
• If churn is rising on a subscription, the problem is the cancellation flow. Option 3.
• If order value is flat, look at options 4 and 6.
• If new customer numbers are down, option 2 as a first order offer, and option 7.

If you do not know which of those it is, that is the thing to fix first, because every month you guess is a month you spend the budget on the wrong lever. Working out what a customer is worth is where that starts, and the wider case on discounting covers the four situations where a discount really is the right answer.