Bundles and discounts and freebies, OH MY! When it comes to planning your Q4 promotions, there are so many options, and like I talked about in last week’s biz bite episode a lot of conflicting advice on the internet. It can be pretty overwhelming.
I’m not going to go into all the details of the promos you CAN run, check out episode 74 where I talk more about this, or get your hands on the Holiday Planning Guide where I break down all the different promos you can do, and what the general outcome of those promos will be.
READ THE FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
What I really wanted to say today, was to keep it simple! You don’t need a 12 days of Christmas sale, you don’t need one offer for Black Friday and another for Cyber Monday. You don’t need discounts and bundles, and a GWP, and holiday-specific products.
If it’s getting complicated for you to think through, to set up from a tech perspective, to message in your marketing… then it’s going to be difficult for your customers to understand. And as they say, a confused mind doesn’t buy.
Simplify, simplify, simplify.
Don’t Make it Hard for Your Customer to Shop With You
Why make your customer come back to you multiple days to figure out what’s on sale. Why make them afraid to buy multiple things in one transaction because they might be able to get a better deal tomorrow, or that other item might go on sale another day. Why make them pay for shipping on multiple orders when they can just buy more at once and possibly qualify for free shipping or spend less overall.
Set them up to buy as much as possible in one shot. That doesn’t mean people won’t come back to buy again, or that you stop marketing to them altogether. Check out episode 157 for my exact Black Friday Weekend email sending schedule. It just means that you make things easy enough that can knock out all of their shopping with you at one time.
The Best Way to Run a 12 Days of Christmas Sale in Your eCommerce Business
If you’re hell-bent on doing a 12 days of Christmas promotion, treat it as a marketing ploy vs. a promotional one. Instead of having one item on sale every day, create a collection of those items and have them all be eligible for the promotion for the entire 12 days, but feature them on social and in email one at a time. This way you have lots of content to share, but the customer doesn’t have to come back every single day to take advantage. If they want to buy all 12 items, let them buy all 12 items.
And, if you’re worried about having enough content to share throughout the holiday season, grab my holiday content bundle – it’s packed with 90-holiday content prompts and 75-holiday subject lines that can be mixed and matched to create well over 165 pieces of content.
Ultimately, put yourself in the shoes of your customer and look at your promo plan and expectations from their perspective. Is it confusing? Are you asking them to make multiple trips to your store? Are you making it hard for them to just come and buy the stuff they want or need? If the answer to any of those is yes, that’s a good sign you’ll need to simplify.
