For marketing to be effective, it often includes an offer.

An offer is anything intended to get the potential buyer to act NOW, not postpone action. That is one of the major barriers to overcome in all marketing: to get immediate action.

If the prospect doesn’t act now, when he has just finished reading, seeing or hearing your pitch, what are the chances he’ll act later, after he’s cooled off, objections come to mind, his wife yelled at him, the traffic cop gave him a ticket and he just found out what happened to his stock portfolio today?

Not good. Not good at all.

How many times has a prospect told you that they wanted to think about it? And how many of those deals did you close?

So you include an offer to give the prospect a reason to act now.

That is why so many ads and marketing pieces have “buy now” limited time offers. “Employee pricing won’t last forever” “half off post-Christmas sale” “call in the next 5 minutes and also get a free tote bag”, on and on.

It’s not unusual for the entire marketing strategy of a company to be nothing more nor less than limited time discount offers. Of course you’d rather not give away part of your profit margin to get a sale, but it’s way better than NOT getting the sale. And a lot of times the discounts are built into the pricing – they raised prices 25% so they could offer 20% off.

Discounts or other kinds of special deals are by far the most common type of offer, but they aren’t the only ones. Another is the fact that the item may only be available for a limited time at any price. “Only 1000 of these commemorative Obama Inagural plates were made then the mold was destroyed.”

Another one that works specifically for businesses and charities in the U.S., is to remind people that money spent before end-of-year means paying less taxes for the year.

Offers are far more important in consumer marketing than business-to-business but they often work in business marketing as well. Look at the specials the big office supply companies (Office Depot, Staples) have every week.

Offers are so important that direct mail experts rate the offer as 40% of what makes a direct mail campaign work or not.

How do offers fit into your marketing?