As part of your marketing efforts, be sure to offer discounts and sales. People love them and it’s a great way to create cash flow. You can use incentives to entice new people to try your services/products. Sales are also a powerful tool to encourage past customers to come back to your company if they’ve drifted away.

Here are some pointers to help you with your sales:

1. Offer a trial discount: If you want to get people to try a program or product you are launching, you can have a pre-release sale or a trial membership like I offered for my Maven Success Circle. You can also offer an early-bird discount for a seminar or workshop.

2. Create pre-launch sales excitement: For the best example of this, review the buzz that was created around the newest versions of the iPhone and the iPod. Steve Jobs is a master. You can do this same thing prior to the release of your next product or service. Generate excitement in your ezine, your blog, and have pre-launch teleseminars.

3. Try discounting to groups: If you provide services or products to large companies or associations, you can offer a discount if a group signs up together. This can encourage more participation. You can also offer incentives to organizers to bring a group - for example, bring a group of 5 or more people and the leader can register for free.

4. Tell-A-Friend incentive: This is an effective promotional tool and can be used in a number of ways. For instance, a postcard mailing could promote “Register for XYZ program and register your friend for 5o% off with this postcard” or “Two registrations for the price of one with this coupon” and so on.

5. Make a reason for your sale: You can hold a sa1e because of a special event like Mother’s Day or your birthday or the anniversary of your business. Promote it to your customers in a way that gets them excited and be sure to let them know the offer is good for a limited time only!

6. Send out multiple reminders: Whether you are promoting your sale via e-mail, direct mail, or your ezine (or in all three), it’s important that you remind people several times about your sa1e. Why? Because all of us are bombarded by lots of information and it’s easy to miss a single notice about something.

7. Expect orders right before the deadline: Make sure to send out a reminder on the day of the deadline. Don’t be surprised if 50% or more of your orders come in at the 11th hour. Many of us are procrastinators and will put in the order at the last minute. But, if you don’t send a reminder…you probably won’t get the order at all.

The key is to avoid using any one discounting or sales strategy too often. Pull it out of your marketing tool box a few times a year. And mix up the types of offers you are making. Otherwise it can seem like you are simply inflating the original price and then you devalue your services/products. But when you need a cash infusion or are launching a new product…go for it!

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