Buy One Get One is such a common promotion that even shoppers now recognize the meaning of BOGO. (It’s also sometimes referred to as BOGOF, for Buy One Get One Free, but that sounds a bit like an insect repellant, doesn’t it?)  If you are thinking of marking something down to half price, but want move a large quantity, a BOGO sale is a great way to do so. Instead of one walking out the door, customers take two!

For a store-wide BOGO sale, why not consider the vintage retailing concept of a Penny Sale?  As an alternative to offering the second item for free, you offer it for one cent. Advertise a list of the items you wish to promote, and say that during the sale period customers can get a second one of each for only a penny. If you want to do the promotion on Facebook, you could introduce your Penny Sale items one by one over a course of a few days, encouraging customers to check your page often for the next Penny Sale offer.

Staples runs a version of the Penny Sale in which customers can select from a group of items for a penny with a $5.00 purchase.   These penny items are all clearly ones that cost Staples very little, but by offering a wide selection they increase the consumer’s enjoyment of the promotion. 

If you have two products that are related, and similar in price, you could do a Penny Sale in which the customer buys one product (a box of three soaps) and gets another one (a matching glass soap dish) for a penny. One way of phrasing this would be “Glass Soap Dish for 1¢ with Purchase of Any Set of 3 Soaps”.

We recently ran a buy one, get one for half price sale on a $29.95 “Try Me” 7” fry pan from Swiss Diamond. Because we realize that not everyone needs two 7” pans, we allowed customers to either take the second pan for half price, which would be $15 off, or to apply this $15 savings to any other Swiss Diamond pan. This increased our sales considerably, because many customers used the discount on a much larger pan instead of getting two small ones.

Customers are a bit jaded when the see the word SALE today.  A penny sale or other creative promotion can achieve the same goal of bringing in shoppers and moving merchandise,  and will help set your shop apart from the crowd.

Happy Retailing,

Carol “Orange” Schroeder