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How to Execute Killer Holiday/BFCM Promos
Turkey Day is right around the corner (YES, in the marketing world it is!), so it’s time to start preparing a killer Black Friday, Cyber Monday (BFCM) marketing plan. That’s right – it’s not too late to improve upon any existing plans you have in the queue or start a campaign from scratch.
And instead of winging it, we want to make it easy for you. We’re going to walk (or Turkey Trot) you through step-by-step on how to decide on your promo offer AND how to execute it.
Let’s get right into it!
How to decide on your promo offer:
Step 1: Test promo offers ahead of time for big sales seasons
- Don’t start with a Black Friday promo offer cold turkey! We don’t recommend testing new offers on Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Testing a new offer can be a hit or miss, so do it ahead of time! For example, if you want to run a tiered offer for BFCM, we’d highly recommend testing a smaller threshold offer during a different holiday sale (for example: Labor Day) to determine which tiers would work best. Then, you can replicate the offer later on with different pricing thresholds.
- If you have a new business and don’t have much sales data to work off of, you can start with building email leads and test segmenting offers. To determine what’s going to work with your audience you can run an email A/B test with a % off offer vs. a $ off offer. The winner of this test can help you determine which type of offer would be good to move forward with.
Step 2: Determine your Promo Profit
- In order to give your customers a juicy discount, you’ll need to determine your Gross Profit Margin first. To get this, use the formula: (Net Sales – COGS) / Net Sales. Then, you’ll need to pull your average order value (AOV). Once you know your Gross Profit Margin and AOV, you can play with various offers such as percentages or dollars off and see which offer will fit within your profit margins.
- If you don’t have a true idea of what your AOV is, you can instead base this profit margin off of COGS alone to help determine what’s doable for your brand.
How to execute:
Step 1: Set clear goals (and debrief from last year’s promos)
- It’s so important to look back at your previous promos (if you ran them) to see how they performed and what you can improve on. During debrief from last year’s promos, we found that our top performing promos are:
- Tiered
- Bundles
- Free gift w/ purchase
- Seasonal, small-batch, and limited edition offerings
- We set primary goals of a percentage increase in YoY sales and secondary + tertiary goals (that help us reach our primary goal) of:
- Increased AOV % via ads
- Increased ROAS % via ads
- Increased email revenue %
- Increased email CTR %
Step 2: Make an irresistible offer
- Don’t forget a vital step BEFORE you deliver your irresistible offer… SERVE your audience!! Give them value, establish trust, and provide the best user experience possible, not just once, but in the months leading up to your big promos. Then you can hit ‘em with that juicy promo! (See Step 1 for promo ideas!)
- Consider an early bird campaign because:
- 1. People love feeling like they’re VIP/getting something exclusive and
- 2. Get those sales in before folks get picky with where they’re spending their money.
- Research and decide on your web stack or web apps that you’ll need for the promo.
- Examples: an announcement bar, a cart upsell app, a sales page builder, etc.
- If you’re running a tiered discount, try this helpful Shopfiy app: Tiered Discounts– it does operate using codes but it applies it to the cart automatically and stacks to create awesome tiered discounts.
- We’ve found that the mid-tier code usually gets the most redemptions and the higher and lower tier codes aren’t used as much – this can help with AOV if your pricing thresholds are set higher!
- For bundle discounts, we like to use Bundler – this allows you to create mix & match bundles AND stack discounts on top of them.
- If you’re running a tiered discount, try this helpful Shopfiy app: Tiered Discounts– it does operate using codes but it applies it to the cart automatically and stacks to create awesome tiered discounts.
- Examples: an announcement bar, a cart upsell app, a sales page builder, etc.
Step 3: Create scroll-stopping content
- Give someone a reason to stop and read/watch your content! Use bold colors and clear headlines that detail the main reasons why someone would want to take advantage of the offer.
- Draft up several emails, social posts, and social ads to support the promo campaign (the amount of each will vary depending on your audience size and what you’re currently doing).
- Another thing to consider is how the offer is presented. This can make or break the potential of getting a sale. For some, 15% off is less attractive than a $ off offer! Testing, like we mentioned, will help you determine what your audience responds best to.
- Creating a sense of urgency is also the tur-KEY (When will we stop with these? It’s hard to say.) to your promo messaging! Someone is more enticed to buy if they know a sale ends in 24 hours vs. a week long sale. Keep hyping that scarcity and time limit until the sale is gone for good!
- An app like Countdown Timer Ultimate can really get the message across that this sale is ending SOON! Add this to your main website page, cart, and product pages to create that sense of urgency.
Step 4: Test everything!
- Ensure that your website is optimized, and fast! You can run a speed test (for free with Google’s PageSpeed Insights) and install an app, like Lucky Orange, to see if there are any site issues that could bring down your conversion rate.
- Audit your email automations, ad campaigns, and social to ensure that everything is firing correctly & email deliverability is good, ads are optimized, and social bio descriptions are optimized for search and clicks to website.
- Make sure your promos are SIMPLE and CLEAR!
- Provide your audience with promo details when applicable (start and end date, codes needed, products included, etc.) Try to utilize automatic discounts or sitewide sales at a static discount to avoid the probable misspelling or user error that comes along with using promo codes.
- Test the checkout flow and press GOOOO!
By implementing the strategies above, we increased sales 80% YoY for a beauty brand we work with and we’re looking to make some more gravy this year!
If you’re looking for even more tips and tricks to make your holiday promos the best ever, our *new* BFCM Kit makes it easier for your business to have its most profitable holiday promo yet! The BFCM Kit includes social, ads, and email templates, promo checklists, and a total BFCM execution plan.
Let’s make Q4 the best sales quarter yet (without all the stress)!
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