Happy Sunday! I hope you enjoyed this weekend doing things that recharge your batteries. I am currently in California seeing my family, and there really is nothing better than mom’s cooking, am I right?! I hope you’re reading this from a couch, beverage in hand, and weighted blanket laid across your lap. Today’s email will go into a topic that I feel gets overlooked by younger brands: website promotional strategy, especially as we inch closer to our Super Bowl, Black Friday!
Before we dive in, did you get 40 minutes to listen to the latest episode of Limited Supply? Moiz and I played another round of “Guess that business,” and then we went deep on what regulators should change about DTC, why HBO’s rebrand was a horrible idea and innovative ways to process returns. Listen to Limited Supply wherever you get your podcasts!
By the way, if you enjoy the podcast or the newsletters, don’t be afraid to tweet me and let me know! There’s nothing that gets me more fired up than seeing people love the content. Or, if you don’t want to tweet, just reply to this email and let me know what you’re excited about this coming week!
Alright, let’s jump in…
As many of you know, holiday sales are the bread and butter of DTC. They bring your existing customers back to you in flocks, excited to make a purchase and score a deal. But throughout the year, there are a ton of these opportunities, even for brands that feel like they don’t want to “diminish brand equity” which, in my opinion, isn’t a legitimate nor a data-backed thought. With today’s newsletter, I want to walk through how I think about promotions and sales, how to run them, what to take into consideration, how to set goals, and everything in between.
If you’re spending dollars to acquire customers, or even just getting a ton of traffic to your website, you’re collecting a ton of emails and phone numbers that have probably never made a purchase with you. So in addition to existing customers, switch your thinking to realize that promotions are an incredible opportunity to get new customers too. Think about it from personal experience… when it’s October or September and you want to buy a Dyson Hair Wrap or AirPods, you’ll likely just wait until the big Black Friday sale. Now if you, someone who lives in an elite bubble, thinks this way, think about how many other people think this way too.
On January 1st of every new year, you and your team should create a rough strategy around the major moments that you will want to run promos around for your brand. You should have some ideas and concepts in mind, but also be flexible and play off what’s happening in the culture at that particular moment in time, as you work on your final offers, copy, landing pages, and ad creatives for your sales.
The typical holiday calendar in the US to pay attention to is:
- New Year's Day: January 1, 2023 (observed on January 2 if it falls on a Sunday)
- St. Patrick's Day: March 17, 2023
- Easter: April 9, 2023 (Sunday)
- Mother's Day: May 14, 2023 (always falls on the second Sunday of May)
- Memorial Day: May 29, 2023 (observed on the last Monday of May)
- Father's Day: June 18, 2023 (always falls on the third Sunday of June)
- Fourth of July: July 4, 2023
- Amazon Prime Day: Date varies each year, usually in July (official date for 2023 is not available at the moment)
- Labor Day: September 4, 2023 (observed on the first Monday of September)
- Halloween: October 31, 2023
- Black Friday: November 24, 2023 (always falls on the day after Thanksgiving)
- Cyber Monday: November 27, 2023 (always falls on the Monday after Thanksgiving)
- Christmas: December 25, 2023
- New Year's Eve: December 31, 2023
There are a few other holidays in the US that you could also consider but this is the primary list. If you are not in the US, you should use your own national holidays as a guide, but also remember the US takes every opportunity to make money, and theres a good chance some of these are celebrated internationally.
When thinking about promotions and sales, I like to think about all the puzzle pieces involved in planning and executing the promotion:
- What’s the budget to drive awareness of the promotion?
- What’s the goal (new customers, hitting monthly revenue goals, sell-through a SKU)?
- How much inventory do I need if my sales projections are correct?
- Where are we pushing the sale, and to whom?
- What does my LP look like?
- What’s my offer, copy, and ad creative?
- And what’s my email and SMS strategy/sequence pre and post purchase?
- How are we segmenting or tagging these customers after the sale?
This is what should be top of mind for every important sale campaign, regardless if it’s a holiday or not. All this information makes the execution of the promotion 10x easier when you get copywriters, designers, website merchandisers, and the ops team involved to help go live.
Additionally, if you want the recipe for how I think about building high converting landing pages, you should check out my new cookbook where I share 29 pages of recipes on exactly how to cook the perfect landing page for your brand. This is an updated version of the Landing Page Guide I put out 4 years ago.
For the goals of your campaign, you could have a few depending on what your business is trying to maximize/prioritize at that particular time.
Depending on the month and the state of your business, you could want to:
- Acquire new customers
- Re-engage lapsed customers
- Reward repeat customers
- Drive more subscriptions
- Sell more bundles
- Sell inventory that’s not moving
- Cross-sell existing customers to a new product/category
There are a bunch of potential goals, you just have to pick the one that’s most relevant for your business at the time, and design everything around it (the offer, the merchandising, the distribution channels, etc.). I think most operators know this, but email still drives 20-30% of all revenue for e-commerce brands.
Once you’ve picked the sale day, and identified the goal of the sale, you need to decide on the product merchandising (what products are you going to push) and define the offer.
As far as the product, you should think about what’s relevant during that particular season for your brand. The best brands will go above and beyond here and make custom variants or colorways or a “holiday bundle set” that is designed to go with the sale.
This holiday tea set from Vahdam India is a great example of a holiday promotion. They have a custom product with a custom offer and a custom LP designed for EOY/Holiday/Christmas and New Year sales.
Just from the product merchandising, I can assume this was probably a fantastic promotion to run to people who have tried the product once and didn’t come back, existing customers who want to try other flavors, and new customers who want an easy way to sample 24 teas at once, before deciding which to continually purchase.
My team at HOOX designed this page and it crushed (here’s the case study where we helped them increase their CVR by 68%).
When it comes to making the offer, don’t make this too complex. Sure, you might sit at your desk and think, “We should do something really cool and innovative!” Most of the time, that’s a horrible idea. Think about how many promotional emails, texts and ads someone sees already; keep it simple (KISS), stupid. Instead of requiring someone to use their brain power to figure out your promotion, respect that you only have so much attention from someone, and use that attention to get them excited about what you have to offer. Don’t make someone spend 10 seconds trying to understand what your promotion is, or when the discount kicks in.
Here are some KISS offer structures:
- A percentage off one product, one collection, or the full site
- A gift with purchase
- Buy one get one free (BOGO)
- Buy one get one X% off
- Free expedited shipping, or free shipping if you don’t normally offer that
- A new colorway or variant
- A discounted or limited availability bundle
- Mystery box or mystery bundle ($40 box, with $100 of value)
There are many ways to go. Pick one that makes the most sense, execute, and learn.
When it comes to producing the creative that accompanies the promotion for SB clients, we like to start talking about producing the holiday sale creative 6-8 weeks before we launch a sale. The most important sale of the year is BF/CM and for those campaigns we plan 90-120 days out.
For creative, we are typically producing 3-15 variants per offer to test and learn throughout the campaign. Our media buyers watch the performance carefully and double down on the top performing variants after the first few hours of traffic and data, depending on the scale. If you’re not spending enough to do it this way, then do as good of a job as you can, to make sure you have battle-tested hooks and benefits in your copy and creative.
We also produce a mix of static and video ads. Video tends to convert the best but CPMs for static images are much less expensive so they can be attractive to use for retargeting or as ancillary promo materials to drive click through when it counts; especially when running ads to people who already know who you are.
We also triple down on email and SMS.
Ads and Inventory.
One of the hardest things to plan for is ads and inventory. If you are spending profitably, the cap on your spend is basically determined by how much inventory you have available to you at that time. If you are projecting a big holiday sale, you will need to order excess inventory in advance to prepare. This is tough since you don’t want to over-order and be stuck with piles of remnant inventory that didn’t sell.
There’s no perfect formula for knowing how much to order. In the early stages, this is a lot of gut feeling, but as you get more sophisticated, you’ll establish a baseline of traffic, conversion, and sell-through, depending on the type of offer. With Long Wknd’s Butter Bar, we sold out in 2 days, thinking we were going to be okay for 4 weeks. It sucks when you’re out of stock, but it’s a part of the ups and downs — don’t hate yourself for it, everyone goes through it.
And that’s about it for today. This outline should help you make the most of your holiday sales calendar to crush your monthly KPIs.
Also, in closing, I do think that it’s incredible that so much economic activity happens during these holiday periods. Consumers are typically off work, relaxing, and they are inspired to buy. Holiday sales (especially BFCM) are always a huge driver of topline revenue in almost every DTC brand I’ve seen. So with that in mind, don’t underestimate the impact that the right holiday sales strategy can have.
P.S. Father’s day is approaching fast, so if you are a reader, get something for your dad, and if you are brand, think about if there is an opportunity for you to run an enticing sale or campaign.
Now onto some fun stuff…
Vendor of the Week:
Tapcart — The fastest way to take your brand from online to the iOS and Google Play App Stores and drive better retention.
Generally, I am a believer that if you have a high SKU count, or a high repeat purchase rate, an app makes perfect sense for you to have. Even if it’s only the top 1% of your customers who install the app, it’s worth it.
Let’s take the food and beverage (F&B) category for example. Within F&B there are high repeat purchase rates, making your app a great spot for your top 1% to build community, drive loyalty, and track their subscriptions. You can drop new products, or cross-sell to your exsiting customer base with new products. Content wise, you can showcase recipes, how-to’s, how other customers are using the products, and more.
And my favorite part of Tapcart, especially as it relates to promotions, is the ability to send free, unlimited push notifications. Being an app on someone’s homescreen is quite a place to be. But even better is the push notification on someone’s lock screen.
If you’re curious whether you would be a good fit for Tapcart, book a demo of the platform with their team on this special link. They can walk you through pricing, timelines, what the lift looks like, and how to best grow your app’s userbase.
Click here to book a call with Tapcart!
LP of the Week:
This week’s landing page of the week is just another example of how beautiful and “brand-first” a landing page can be when you have a flushed out visual identity and style guide.
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE LANDING PAGE!
This is a paid-social-focused collections style landing page, which focuses on qualifying the cold traffic coming from paid social, and then moving people through to the actual site’s PDP. It results in a higher conversion rate and generally a higher AOV, as someone is a lot more excited and educated when they get to the site.
If you’re a brand spending at least $300k per month on customer acquisition, setup a call with us at HOOX to see if we can help you improve conversion rates with your new customer funnels. There’s no reason you should be driving cold traffic to a homepage or a PDP in 2023. Especially not when HOOX will take all the hardest parts off your plate (UX design, copywriting, UI design, development, LP ongoing iteration). Setup a call with this special link.
That's all for this week
I hope today’s email gave you 1 or 2 nuggets around running promotions and sales online. I’m itching to do a couple more deep dives for newsletters; possibly around customer experience and 3PL/logistics. Would that be interesting?
I had an awesome few days in Dallas this past week at SubSummit and got to meet a ton of people who also read the Sunday newsletter — thank you!! If you will be at GROW NY, DTCx LA, BevNet, or VidCon, holler at me and let’s fist bump.
Get those 9 hours of sleep tonight. Have an incredible upcoming week. Get a sweat in. Text someone you haven’t talked to in 3 years. Hug a dog.
Have a great upcoming week!