Sales

Make Your Black Friday Promotion Work For You!

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All the other companies are running Black Friday (or some other holiday) promotions – you should probably run one, too. But what are your objectives? I mean, what do you want to achieve with your sale? Here are some points to keep in mind.

Attracting new clients

A lowball price is almost always guaranteed to catch the attention of people. Ideally, you want to attract people who are either members of your target audience, or reel in current prospects. You can also do this by “bundling” – keeping your regular price, but adding in extras for people who purchase during the promotion period.

But most of the companies I see running promotions, well. . . they don’t do anything with the people who buy the offer! You need to quickly convert these folks into regulars – get them to fall in with your ways of doing things, become fans. In order to do that, you need a program for them to follow. You need to immediately start building a relationship with these new buyers, give them freebies or low-cost purchases that bring them further into your fold.

Don’t screw over existing customers

I spend a lot of effort getting my clients to develop their own customers into regulars. That is, people who return again and again for the same products/services, or who look to their company for extra products and services. New customers fill in the natural attrition of your customer list, and help it grow. But it costs a lot of money to bring in one new customer; you make most of your profit from regulars.

But many – if not most – businesses ignore existing customers. They spend all their time and effort hunting down new customers, but treat current customers like crap. They offer major discounts to new customers, but expect existing customers to “like it or lump it,” as it were. It’s a few days before Thanksgiving as I write this, and I’m watching several companies deal with severe public customer backlash. They’ve offered discounts to new customers, but expect existing customers to be happy paying a higher price.

Not cool! If I’m your customer, and I don’t get the lowball price you’re offering some schmuck off the street, you’d better give me a ton of other products and/or services for me to re-up my subscription that the newbies just don’t get.

Loyalty Programs

For people who’ve recently become aware of you, your business, your products and your services, they have no idea what to expect from you. They probably expect that, once they buy from you, you’ll ignore them at best. Somewhere in the middle ground, there are companies that simply pound people over the head for sales. At the crap end of the stick, there are companies with hostile customer service policies and employees. A handful have some kind of loyalty program, and a very few have effective loyalty programs that actually offer benefit to customers and businesses.

In brief, you need to ask customers what they want. Many won’t answer you, and some have no idea. Listen to everyone else. Then, you need to provide them with value. Most customers who want consistently low pricing aren’t looking for high quality, and people who are looking for superior products and services know they’ll have to pay a reasonable price.

A loyalty program (or member’s group, fan club – whatever you want to call yours) should allow you to collect contact info, and then use the list you’ve made to collect info, build relationships, and offer to sell products and services. Few people will stick with a loyalty program if they feel like they aren’t being listened to.

Most importantly, reserve your best deals – your lowest pricing, your best bundles of products and services – for members of your loyalty program! You spent a lot of money to get each one of those people. Is a few bucks in your pocket today worth ticking these folks off, and having them take away all your future profits? And frankly, that’s exactly why you want to develop a base of regulars – so that you can depend on their future purchases to drive your revenues and profits.

Let’s make it simple –

  1. Use Black Friday and other promotions to bring in new customers
  2. Immediately move those new customers into a loyalty program
  3. Nurture those new customers, and develop them into regulars
  4. Treat your regulars like gold, because that’s exactly what they are

Trip-over Marketing

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The lesson I repeat most often to my clients and prospects is this: put your marketing messages somewhere your own prospects will trip over you.

And by that I mean –

  • Use educational message media to
  • Target your core audience
  • In a place they don’t expect to see you, in order to
  • Demonstrate the value of your product or service

Here are just a couple examples –

  • An article by a plumber, targeted to real estate investors, on how an up-to-date plumbing system increases the value of a house.
  • Video by a board game manufacturer on a parenting website, about how playing games as a family builds relationships.

Can you think of an example on how you could use this principle? Place your comment below!

Standing Sign Backers

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I recently created some signs for a convention table and pasted them on foamcore. Of course, the board did not have any “native” way to stand, so I created these backers. Print onto 8.5″ x 11″ cardstock (makes 2 stands per sheet) and cut along the red lines. Fold inward on the blue lines, glue onto the bottom rear edge of the board, lock the two half-cut ends together, and your foamcore signs should be able to stand on their own. Tested with signs up to 15″ x 20″.

Plan Your Promotions 01

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So you want to run a promotion, huh?  Maybe an appearance, or an ad. Maybe you want to put on a mini-tradeshow, or hire a band to play outside your store.

Before you just hand off a credit card or write a check to make things happen, there are a number of things you should do before you let anyone else know that you want something to go down.

Objective:

What is your objective?  What is it that you want to have happen once the promotion or event actually happens?  Maybe you want to increase your email list by 547 names. Or maybe you want to attract 1,322 new people into your store.  I know – you’re trying to increase same-store purchasing volume by 5.3% this March as opposed to last March.

What’s with the weird numbers?  No, I’m not trying to be funny – or a jerk.  You need to be very specific about your objective.  You need to quantify it so that you can measure the results.  You should move away from thinking about adding “a lot” of new customers, or “a few more” sales this month.  “Several thousand dollars more” has no real way to be measured – how many exactly is “several?”

Cost:

What will it cost you to run this promotion or ad?  I didn’t say “price” – that’s the dollars you’ll shell out to get things rolling.  I said cost. Will you need to move employees from one task to another? Receiving attention always gets people to ask questions.  Is your customer service staff ready to field questions specific to the promotion? Will you need to keep people working longer, so they can pack more boxes, so that you can send out three shipments per day?  Will you need to be away from home longer, and miss your kids’ little league game and dance recital? All of these are costs, and you need to know that they exist, and you’re gonna have to pay them.

Plan:

What, exactly, is your plan for this promotion?  You do have one, right?  What is the promotion is going to entail, who is responsible for what?  What steps need to be carried out, and by whom? What needs to be where, and when?  What are the dates & times for each milestone? What does the cleanup procedure look like?  Do you even need a cleanup procedure?  All of this, and more, should be covered by your plan.

Statistics:

During the time that your promotional event is going on, what are you measuring?  How are you measuring? Who or what is doing the measuring? Where and how are you recording the results?  Who’s responsible for making sure all the data is being recorded? Can they fix it when – and not if – things screw up?

Results:

Data is all the information you’ve collected.  Statistics is how data set #2 – all the info you’ve just generated – compares to data set #1 – all the info you already had.  Now it’s up to you – and maybe someone else – to look at the data, look at the stats generated, and decide the results. Well, I suppose the results are what they are.  What I mean is, you’re going to be deciding if the results are good, bad, or indifferent. Maybe you measured something that isn’t worth measuring. Maybe you forgot to measure something that’s very important.  Whether your results are “good” or “bad” is subjective. How did the results measure up to the goals you wanted to hit?

Rinse & Repeat:

So, once you run your ad or event, you’ll need to decide – first of all – if you’re going to repeat this promotion.  If so, when? If not, what will you do instead, and when? If you keep this event, what will you do differently? Who will you have covering all the important action points during the event?  Who will be responsible for what during the next go-’round?

 

I know this sounds like an awful lot of questions.  It’s not that bad, really. Just taking 10 minutes to sit down and write out a simple plan will cover most of them, and put you a lot farther ahead than most folks.  I’m going to let you in on a secret – most people who run a promotion for their business, or a specific product or service, do it by the seat of their pants.

Today’s action item, which will put you ahead of at least 75% of the competition, is to build a one-page plan for your next promotional event or advertisement.  To get ahead of 99% of the competition, you have to actually use that plan!