Winning a promotions war without devaluing the product
The client was in a discounting fight with a competitor running a near-identical pricing strategy and a much larger marketing budget. Matching them would have worked, briefly, and cost the brand its price integrity.
The brief
A price-sensitive market, led by someone else
The client sells niche home accessories nationally, against a competitor with a near-identical pricing strategy and significantly more marketing money behind it.
That combination produces a specific trap. The market is price sensitive, so promotion drives volume. The competitor can always go one step further, so any public discount gets matched and exceeded. Each round teaches the customer to wait, and the product is worth a little less than it was.
The brief was not to win the discount war. It was to grow orders without joining it on the competitor's terms.
What we did
Published discounts, and the other kind
The work split promotional pressure into what the market sees and what an individual customer sees, then found the discount range where margin and conversion both hold.
- Identified the ideal mix of published, visible promotional discounts against targeted, individual discounts
- Evaluated margin and cost against conversion rate at successive discount levels to define the usable discounting range
- Built behaviorally-triggered promotional flows aimed at high-potential customers showing signs of defecting to the competitor
- Anchored the calendar to the customer lifecycle rather than to the competitor's promotional schedule
The numbers
Year over year, after a full promotional cycle
| Metric | Change | Reads as |
|---|---|---|
| Conversion rate | +67.5% | Result |
| Online sales | +35% | Result |
| Average order value | Held | Guardrail |
About Gild
Gild Group is a fractional ecommerce team for mid-market Shopify brands. Performance, retention and storefront operations run by one embedded group of senior operators on a fixed monthly retainer. Charleston, South Carolina, since 2014.