Blurred background image from Mecadolibre (MELI) on March 6th. MELI is the biggest online e-commerce marketplace in Latin America

Value to the Customer! 4+ Ways to make your customers happy without reducing prices

"It is [therefore] important to create various ways to give customers good value. Do this, and you'll never have to worry about them returning because everyone gravitates towards value."- Akinola Odunlade

We all know how difficult price wars are- it is a tough strategy to maintain in the long run. So here are 4+ additional ways you can add value to your offering to the customer and blow your competition away!

1. Free Delivery!

I remember the first time I placed an order online — I was so disgruntled because I had to pay an additional fee for delivery. Look at me thinking the price against the product is all I had to pay ☹

Connect with the frustration of your customers!

Many customers today still think like I used to — and this is an opportunity for the online retailer to connect with the frustration of your customers! By choosing to offer free delivery for a limited period, you are removing the last level of barrier against customers buying from you. Of course, you can’t do this arbitrarily, here are three conditions you can attach.

• Offer free delivery on specific days. For instance, the second Wednesday of every month. This way you create a great reason for your customers to always come back and view your full assortment. Guess when will therefore be a perfect day to announce a new product or variant? Yes, Wednesday when you’ll have your highest traffic. You have succeeded in organically increasing your traffic while still giving value to your customer.
• Set a minimum order quantity. Have a minimum order value, for instance, 1,500. This helps ensure you are targeting useful customers as opposed to throwing money into the ocean! Of course, the minimum value will differ based on your assortment/average value. You want to target the range that already has the highest set of repeat customers.
• For N number of customers. E.g., for the first 100 customers. This also helps you stay within budget while creating a sense of urgency.

2. Exclusive Deals/ Pre-Launch Deals/Limited Offers.

Especially for FMCG companies. You could choose to offer exclusive products (to your online store) that are not available offline or that will not be available offline until a certain date(pre-launch). This could also be a product that is already scarce offline for some reason. Humans are driven by exclusivity, so play to it! “Skip the lines, get it on our official online store today” or something of the sort will have your online customers certainly excited and will convert some offline competition customers to online customers for you.

3. Bundles.

You can create bundles with complementary products much more easily online. For instance, we recently created a unique combo of a popular beverage brand with a relatively obscure cookies brand. This blew the conversion rates through the roof.

A win-win-win for all.

• Customers who order beverages also get the cookies, so extra value for money for the customer.
• The cookies brand can piggyback and get cross-introduced to thousands of new customers (who are existing customers of the beverage brand) for almost little (therefore reducing marketing costs).
• The beverage brand can use this to get an edge against their competition as customers are more likely to go with a bundled offering than a singular item.

This works for this example where a strong brand is collaborating with a smaller brand. However, imagine two strong already known brands coming together for this. Magic!

The good thing as well is that E-commerce allows you to achieve this bundling at scale with the certainty that it will reach the intended customers.

4. Unconditional availability.

I almost did not include this but for the fact that it is actually an issue for brands. No matter how fantastic your marketing is, or how exceptional your strategy is, if your customers can not buy your products when they need or want to, you have lost revenue and mind share. Availability is the anchor on which every other success factor hangs. The simple fact of having your products always available is in itself an intrinsic value to the customer.

Other ways of delivering value include

• giving out vouchers
• supporting a worthy cause selected by customers (inspiring customers to consider satisfaction beyond the value of the product). Brands can have customers suggest causes to donate a % of their earnings to.
• extended warranty/ support (for non-FMCG brands)
• having a flexible return-policy (may be tricky to implement)
• creating or sponsoring exciting content or challenges, etc.

Ultimately, it is important to always think of various ways to give customers good value and you never have to worry about them returning because everyone gravitates towards value.