EPISODE 62 OF WHAT WOULD THEY DO? THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE PODCAST FOR SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS
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Ever feel like your audience only buys when there’s a discount, countdown timer, or last-minute panic email?
You might unintentionally have trained them to do exactly that.
In this episode, I unpack the uncomfortable truth behind discount-driven sales cycles and why your audience isn’t unpredictable, but simply responding to the patterns you’ve created.
This episode dives into the concept of rewarded behaviour in your business and how to shift from reactive, pressure-based sales to intentional, sustainable buying patterns.
What we cover:
How you’re unintentionally training your audience’s buying behaviour
The psychology behind waiting, disengaging, and last-minute buying
Why discounts create long-term problems (even if they “work”)
What behaviours you should be rewarding instead
How to build a business people don’t learn to “game”
Soundbites:
“We love maximum reward with minimum effort. So if waiting longer means you get a better deal, we’re gonna wait. If disengaging and passively consuming means you’re showing me more attention, then I’m going to do that and wait until you pop up. And if urgency is the only trigger, then we’re going to wait for that trigger.”
“It’s a matter of aligning your rewards with the behavior that you want to encourage, sarting with an analysis: “Who is most valuable to you, and who spends the most money in your business?” And then you reward people who buy early, and rewarding engagement. Reward those people who clearly resonate with what you do and make sure they stick around and get rewarded for it.”
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Episode Transcript:
Nadine Nethery (00:00)
Hello, hello and welcome back to What Would They Do? I am super glad to have you today and we’re to get stuck right in. The question we are going to look at today is the following. Why do my customers only seem to buy when there’s a discount or deadline attached to an offer? Yep, very familiar right?
we are always slapping on discounts with a deadline timer to make people buy. Is it working? Sometimes. Is it potentially dangerous? Absolutely.
So what I need you to know is that every business, yours and mine, rewards behavior in some shape or form, whether that’s intentional or not. And the big problem with that is that most of us are unintentionally rewarding the exact behaviors that we do not want more of. So people only buying when there’s pressure, people only buying when there’s scarcity.
And yeah, having to constantly push a hard sell to get people to make up their mind. often that looks like this. You run a promotion with deadline timer, with discount, you name it. You make sales and you see a huge spike and things feel great in that moment, But as soon as that discount and the timer disappear,
things return to normal and people stop buying. So what if every time you do that, you are actually quietly teaching your audience and training them when not to buy. Your audience knows that you are running live launches all the time. There is going to be a special discount. Why would they pay full price? Why would they buy now when in two weeks time,
they can get a better deal and a bargain. Personally, I’m in Australia, Cotton On is one of those brands, Bonds as well, that have trained me to absolutely wait for a promotion. I know without a fail every few weeks they’re running a huge sale. So if I need anything, if my kids need anything, whether it’s undies, socks, staples, I am just going to wait simply because what
they’re offering is not urgent enough for me to buy at full price. So every few weeks I get an email from them 30 % off store-wide, 40 % off store-wide and that’s exactly when I buy. So Cotton On, Bonds, all these brands have perfectly trained me to buy only during their regular, very regular sales periods. And the same goes for online businesses, right? If you have a quick think about your inbox,
Certain online businesses constantly run a sale. So you know that if you are eyeing off a course, a program, et cetera, it’s not that urgent. You are going to wait, right? And this is exactly what we’re trying to avoid. So that invisible training loop that you are entering your audience into means that every email offer, launch,
ultimately is training your audience like you’re training your dog. They pick up patterns, they look for the signals and they eventually my dog anyway, he’s a Kelpie. He’s very smart. They anticipate what I’m going to do simply based on my, repeat behavior, the patterns, the signals that I’m sending him on repeat and people and dogs learn very quickly.
so your audience is not unpredictable they are responding perfectly to the patterns that you have created and
It is a huge trap in your online business, but it’s not impossible to turn around. And I’m going to get into that now. So let’s start with the things that you might be unconsciously rewarding. So some customers just love a good discount. I’m one of them, right? So they only show up when there’s a sale. Then there are last minute buyers, for example, who ignore
your 20 launch emails until that countdown timer pops up in the last 24 hours, 48 hours, right?
And then there are those one-time buyers, which is where all our retention strategies that we’re exploring in this podcast come in. They need an incentive and a reason to come back.
And ultimately…
it might appear that you’re actually incentivising action with those discounts, know, the sales timers, the special offers, but You’re rewarding them for not paying attention and not buying at normal times. And it becomes this vicious circle.
So the consumer psychology behind all of this is that We love maximum reward with minimum effort. So if waiting longer means you get a better deal, well, we’re gonna wait. If disengaging and passively consuming means you’re showing me more attention.
then that means I’m going to totally do that. I’m gonna disengage and wait until you pop up.
people are responding to things that are constantly rewarded, whether it’s waiting, disengaging, or waiting for that final countdown timer. And that’s why I personally love running an automated reward system in my business to counteract that effect. So I have an automated
set up right inside my email platform that rewards the right behavior. So if people engage with my emails, if they click, if they hop over to my website, they’re responding to emails, you know, they’re showing the right signals and they’re engaging. I reward that behavior. If people are buying from me, I also reward that behavior. So a purchase triggers a bonus down the tracks to
show them that if you keep buying, there’s good things on the other end of that purchase. And that whole process, the approach, is something I share inside Retention Lab.
It actually isn’t rocket science. It’s just a matter of being intentional and yeah, taking action and slowly but surely retraining your people. So this is where we come to that reflective moment. How do you find out what steps you need to take and where you even start to retrain your people? So ask yourself what behavior actually leads
to rewards in your business currently. are people literally rewarded by discounts every three months? I talked about that pattern. are you rewarding in action with a discount down the track? Also who in your business actually gets the best experience? Are you rewarding new buyers? Are you rewarding…
people who don’t take any action with extra love and extra care so they know to just ignore you because it leads to good things. Or are you actually rewarding those loyal and engaged customers, which ultimately is what you want to do. Shower those loyal, engaged customers with love and they’re going to return the favor with more purchases and word of mouth and referrals, all the goodness.
if your most loyal customers are paying full price,
while everyone else waits for that deal and acts at the last minute, what signals are you actually sending those most loyal or most engaged customers? And are you actually building a business that people want to be a part of or a business that they’ve learned how to game? So this ultimately, before you go on, Nadine hates discounts, is not
about removing all discounts, removing life launches and never promoting anything. It simply is a matter of aligning your rewards with the behavior that you want to encourage. starting with an analysis, who is most valuable to you? and who spends the most?
money in your business ultimately because we all need to make money. And then it’s a matter of rewarding, early actions, people who buy early who are fast action takers, rewarding engagement. So training people to actually open your emails, click your emails, hit reply, click those links, check out your offers, rewarding loyalty. So people who
buy for the 10th time, people who have been in your membership for six months or more, reward those people who clearly resonate with what you do and make sure they stick around and get rewarded for it.
customer retention and that trained behavior is not about what happens after the sale. You can totally reward people who have never bought from you before. It’s about the long-term path that you’re picturing for those people in your universe. So training them early, really impressing them and rewarding that right behavior before the first purchase. So when they finally invest,
they know they’re going to get looked after. So if you want to do one thing today after this episode, I highly recommend taking a step back and examining how you’re currently making the bulk of your sales and what that says about your trained behavior and whether it’s actually working for you. So have a look at those sales patterns. When are people buying?
Do you see that huge sales spike during a promotion and then there’s literally crickets? How are people engaging with your emails? How are you reacting if people are unengaged? What does that look like in your business and what are the behaviors that are worth turning around so you can start rewarding the behavior you want to see long-term in your customers and in your audience?
So hopefully this has been eye opening for you today. What I feel often happens in online businesses is that when things get quiet
the quickest and easiest thing to do seems to be discounting your offers and putting that deadline on that promotion. So have a think about how you can prevent this from happening. So implementing long-term processes within your business that run on autopilot,
So you are training people to buy at all times rather than just when you’re running that panic mode promotion. Yes, that’s it this week. I’m going to be back in your AirPods next week. Thank you so much for tuning in, for coming on this thought-provoking journey with me. I appreciate you and I can’t wait to connect with you again next week.
