Email discount strategy: when discounts help and when they train customers to wait

When do discounts actually help?

Discounts aren't the enemy. Used on purpose, they're one of the fastest ways to move someone who's on the fence.

Here's where I think they earn their place:

• The first order. Someone just signed up and has never tried your product. A first-order offer lowers the risk of trying something new. That's why welcome email #1 matters so much: across 4 consumable brands I pulled data on, it earned about $4.50 per person, compared to about $0.10 each for emails #2 to #5.
• The first subscription order. If you sell a subscription, the hardest step is the first commitment. A discount there pays you back on every order after it.
• Winning back lapsed customers. Someone who hasn't bought in months needs a nudge. In the Flow System I install, the winback offer doesn't show up until email 4 of 5.
• A few big moments a year. BFCM is the obvious one. My BFCM email strategy covers how hard to push.

The common thread: each discount has a job and an end date.

How do discounts train customers to wait?

You run a 20% off weekend because sales were slow. It works, so you do it again next month. By the end of the year, you've got a sale every couple of weeks.

They stop buying at full price because they know a code is coming.

The people who get hurt most are your best customers. They were going to reorder anyway. Now they get the same discount as someone who's never bought, and you give away margin on orders you'd have gotten for free.

Every email needs a reason to buy, not a discount

The opposite mistake is swinging to all-content emails with no offer at all.

Content warms people up, but somebody has to ask for the sale. A wellness brand I work with sent a month of all-educational emails with no offer. Campaign revenue went from $3,146 to $110, down 96.5%.

The fix isn't to bring back the code. It's to give people a reason to buy that isn't a price cut:

• A restock. When something sells out, the restock email is your biggest send of the month. A snack brand doing about $650K a month sent a restock email with the subject line "We're back baby!" It made $48,771 from 30,498 people, its best campaign ever.
• A launch. A haircare brand's new product launch email made $31,059 from 395 orders in one month.
• News. Across 7 brands and 2,821 campaigns, subject lines that shared news beat ones written in brand voice.

More on balancing the two in content emails vs promotional emails.

What should a consumable brand offer instead of a percentage off?

If you sell something people use up, your goal isn't one order. It's the second and third. So I'd shape offers around the habit, not the cart.

Here's where I'd start:

• Bundles. A bundle that lasts two months gives the customer a better price per unit and gives you a longer gap before they need to think about reordering.
• First subscription order. Put the discount on the commitment, not the one-off. In the cart and checkout flows I build, I show subscription options so a customer can save by committing to a monthly order instead of waiting for a bigger discount. For you, that's predictable, recurring revenue. Heads up if you use Klaviyo's unique coupons: Klaviyo's help center says they only work on non-recurring orders, not subscription orders like the ones from Recharge. Set subscription offers up in your subscription app.
• A free shipping threshold. Set it a little above your average order so it nudges people to add a second item. To a lot of shoppers, free shipping feels like a real win, and it doesn't reset what people think your product is worth.
• Gift with purchase or early access. Give your best customers something a regular shopper doesn't get, like first dibs on a restock or a new flavor.

Where do discounts belong in your flows?

Flows are where discounts do the least damage, because each one is tied to a specific behavior. Every core flow in the system I install carries an offer, with one rule that keeps it from training people to wait. People who haven't bought yet get the same offer the welcome series gave them, in every flow, never a bigger one. Customers get a slightly upgraded version, an offer to buy more, or a subscription offer.

• Welcome. Six emails over 7 days. The offer goes in email #1, because email #1 carries most of the money: about 30x emails #2 to #5 per person in my four-brand data. The rest of the week builds trust, and the offer expires on day 7.
• Cart and checkout abandonment. Both open with a plain reminder and no offer. The checkout email goes out 35 minutes after someone leaves, while it's fresh. The offer comes in through the sequence, and the final reminder carries it until it expires with the last email. Customers who order in large quantities are usually kept out of these flows. Cart email #5 still earned about $0.25 per person in my data, the same as email #3, so the late emails pull their weight.
• Browse, collection and site abandonment. Same rule: the welcome offer for non-customers, the customer offer for customers.
• Winback. It waits 45 days after an order, then sends 5 emails between day 45 and day 60. It opens with a restock reminder, then benefits and use cases. The offer only shows up at email 4, and anyone who reorders exits. Winback email #3 earned about 2x email #1 in my data ($0.23 vs $0.11 per person). More in how long should a winback flow be.
• Post-purchase. It splits by order count and ends each branch with a soft nudge to buy again or restock. That nudge is where the customer offer goes.

How do you run a sale without every email feeling like one?

When I plan a campaign calendar, I treat the offer as a conversion layer, not always the main idea. Not every email should feel like a sale, even when a sale is live.

Here's how loud the offer gets by email type:

• Educational and product benefit emails: a soft mention near the button.
• Lifestyle emails: soft to medium.
• Gift guides: medium.
• The promo email: the offer is the main message.
• The final reminder: the offer and the deadline are the whole email.

How do you keep discount codes from leaking?

A static code like WELCOME15 can end up on coupon sites fast.

Klaviyo's unique coupons for Shopify fix most of that. Each person gets a single-use code, and you can set codes to expire. In campaigns, add enough codes for every recipient before you schedule, or extra recipients get skipped.

How do you know if your discounts are working?

Don't judge a discount by the day it ran.

• Revenue per person and clicks, not totals and opens. Across the same 4 brands, click rate tracked revenue at 0.65 and open rate at 0.32.
• Full-price share. If the share of orders placed with a code keeps climbing every month, you're training people to wait.
• What first-time buyers do next. Compare the second-order rate of customers who came in on a big discount with those who didn't. That tells you whether the discount bought a customer or just an order.

Where these numbers come from

The pooled numbers come from 4 consumable brands I work with: 2,897 campaigns and $17.7M in email revenue. The subject line finding comes from 7 brands and 2,821 campaigns. Both are small samples, so read them as directional. Single-brand numbers are from individual client accounts.

FAQ

WRITTEN BY Jack White

Founder of Bardown Digital, a Chicago-based Klaviyo email and retention agency for Shopify brands. He's worked with brands doing $500K to $100M a year, with $100M+ in email-attributed revenue across them.

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