I just ended a small “free shipping” sale in a niche business I help run.
I took the 22 qualifying orders that came in during the promotion (I excluded orders where they didn’t use the coupon or ordered something electronic) and did some quick math.
The average order value was $61.95.
Now if you add our normal shipping charge of $6.50 to that “average” order value, the total would be $68.45.
So the average order basically got 10% off.
So we COULD have called this a 10% off sale. Except that’s not what we said… we said FREE SHIPPING.
(Granted, the smaller orders saved a larger percentage than 10% with free shipping, but that’s not really my point.)
My point is that FREE SHIPPING just SOUNDS more exciting.
There’s nothing that seems to fire off more sales in this little business than FREE SHIPPING.
It’s happened more than once. I’m not pretending to know WHY this is true, I just know it is.
I can’t imagine we would have gotten as many orders as we did if we had had a “10% off sale.”
How sexy is THAT? For some reason, that just doesn’t get my heart pumping.
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