As a rule, most customers don’t have a totally fixed budget. Which means that – at least in theory – it’s possible to entice them to spend more money with you.

The trick – as with everything – is to make it seem as though it was their decision rather than you being too pushy.

These tips apply to almost any business – online or offline.

Quantity discounts

Supermarkets do this all the time – here in the UK there are near enough permanent offers if you buy a “case” (6 bottles) of wine.

And there are regular buy-one-get-one-free offers and two or three for a reduce unit price – which are the not so subtle way that they offer quantity discounts.

In other businesses, there’s usually a discount for buying a larger quantity. Sometimes this is spelled out in a price list, other times it’s only there if the customer asks.

Take out your calculator and work out which products in your range would make you more money overall (even if it’s less per unit) if you could persuade your customers to buy more at a time.

Then do a special offer on that item when they buy it.

Limited time offers

I don’t mean never ending sales – although these seem to work quite well in the furniture industry – but genuine, limited time, offers.

If there’s seasonality in the things you sell, that’s easy as price will often drop for a limited time anyway.

If the market ebbs and flows, it could be that you can get hold of something in a slightly larger quantity than you’d normally buy and pass the saving on to your customers.

If you have slack periods then you could be honest with your customers and tell them that’s the reason for the limited time offer – you’d rather take a lower amount of money than none at all.

Bonuses

In the online internet business, bonuses are used all the time, mainly because the cost of delivering an extra file is near enough zero.

If you’ve got a report that could be turned into a PDF download, you could do the same. And if you haven’t got such a report, maybe now is the time to think about creating one!

There are other bonuses you could offer depending on your industry.

It pays to think outside the box on this – check out some completely different industries or categories and work out what they’re offering, then decide how you can do something similar in your business. This has the added advantage that whatever you’re doing is likely to be unheard of in your industry and will therefore have extra impact.

And, of course, bonuses can be tied in with increased order value. Maybe by giving higher value bonuses the more people buy.

Free gifts

These are actually the same as a bonus, just with a different name.

Which should give you some more ideas – it’s well worth testing calling the same thing a slightly different name and measuring the response you get.

Human nature is weird and not always predictable, so a slight twist on an idea can make all the difference.

Almost every business has the opportunity to ethically increase sales by enticing customers to buy more.

It’s just a matter of brainstorming and testing.

And often remembering what’s worked in the past that you’ve forgotten to keep doing!