What We Learned from Our Easter Weekend Promotion Which You Can Apply To Your Business

These Tips Can Help Make Your Promotion a Success

As they say, experience is the best teacher, and we did learn tons of valuable lessons from this experience. Here are a couple:

– Percentage off works best. This is because people could easily translate savings in their head.
– Make the buying or check out experience as smooth, easy, and as convenient as possible

Listen Here

Transcript:

What’s up, Turn on the Hustle?

So this past weekend, we did something different. We did a promotion for Easter.

Now, normally, our promotions are based around sales holidays like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas – that sort of stuff – or a New Year’s promotion because we are in that space and that niche.

But what we’re trying to do now is actually make other events promotion weekends or promotional events for our business. And our first whack at this was Easter.

So we started this promotion on Friday before Easter and it ended the Monday after Easter. So it spanned four days. Similar to Black Friday, which starts on Friday and ends on Monday.

We learned so much from this, and I wanted to share our results and takeaways with you so if you do a promotion, you can – don’t make our mistakes and also utilize what we learned during our promotional launch.

So here’s how I’m going to do this. I’m going to tell you what we did. I’m going to share with you what worked and share with you what we’ll probably do differently in the future.

So here’s how we structured our promotion.

The promotion consisted of four days: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and we segmented our list and our social media contacts a little bit differently.

So we segmented social media. From our list, we segmented non-buyers, then we segmented people who’ve purchased once, people who have purchased multiple times, and then the final segment is subscribers.

And we created a grid and a map to figure out what promotions we were going to give to each of those sub-segments over the course of four days.

Now, Jess, our CMO, has created the map of what this looks like – and I will show you right now.

So here is the promotion breakdown of what we had.

So you could see here on the left hand side, we have the dates: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and then each segment across the top.

We have social media, no purchase. So social media is anyone on our Facebook account and anyone that we want to target who’s a cold lead. Everything after social media is people on our email list. So we have people who haven’t purchased, people who’ve purchased once, people who have purchased multiple times, and subscribers: people who are on subscription.

So if you’re just joining, right now I’m giving a detailed breakdown of this past weekend’s Easter weekend promotion that we did. And I’m showing you what we did, what worked, and what we’ll do in the future.

And this is the breakdown.

So each and every one of these segments on each day gets a different promotion. To breakdown what our customers would probably mostly be interested in, and the mindset that we had behind this was to take each segment and move them over to the next segment.

So if they’re social media, let’s get them onto our list. If they’re no-purchase, let’s at least make them purchase once. If they purchase once, let’s bring them over to multi-purchase. If they’re a multi-purchaser, let’s get them on subscription so we have that repeat customer.

That was our mindset going into this.

And in each tier, we tried to increase the cart value. We want to lower the barrier to entry for social media, lower the barrier to entry for non-purchasers, and then we’ll bump that up a little bit for people who’ve already spent money with us.

They already know, like, and trust us. They’ve already spent money. Let’s see if we can have them spend a little bit more.

So that was our mindset going into this.

I have a little cheat sheet of some talking points that I’m gonna go over with you. So let me just take a glance at this and make sure I am not missing anything.

Okay.

So far, that’s the breakdown of what we’ve done. And now I’m going to share with you the takeaways of what we learned.

So there was a multitude of promotions that happened here. It either consisted of a percentage off, it consisted of free shipping, it consisted of buy one product, get one free, or buy one product, get a product half off.

Consisted of bundles, which means there were two types of bundles. There was a bundle where if you add all of these to your cart, you’re going to get something for half off or a percentage off, or for free. And then there was another bundle, if you add all of these to your cart and check out, you’ll get a discount or a flat rate for all of these.

So we tried a number of different promotions based on where that person was on the grid.

Here’s something very interesting that we found.

Here’s what worked. Here’s what worked really well across all of them – whether it was social media, non-purchase, one-time-purchase, multi-purchase, or subscription, here’s what worked the best: percentage off.

So, if we were offering 20% off, off of one product, or 20% off your entire cart, or if we were giving something away for free.

If the customer or the prospect could easily translate savings in their head quickly and easily without trying to do conversions or without trying to figure out how much that they would save, people understand percentage off or something for free.

Buy one, get one 50% off. Buy this, get X free. So if you bought a Self Journal, we’ll give you a Sidekick for free. They know, “Well, the Sidekick’s 13 bucks, I immediately am saving $13.”

20% off your entire cart. That’s easily understood into money savings. They may not know the dollar amount off the top of their head because they don’t know what they’re going to purchase, but they know that it’s going to be something that means saving money for themselves.

So when you’re doing a promotion, try to make it as less confusing as possible. So do things that are consistent.

So what we’re going to eliminate moving forward are probably these bundles, where it was, if you buy all of these products, all of these products will equal 100 bucks even, like flat.

The person couldn’t translate that into savings. They understood that, “If I buy this, I’m going to get a discount.”

But they were confused about what that discount actually meant to them. Also, moving forward, if we do do a bundle, what we will do in the future is create a landing page specifically for that bundle that has all the products outlined in it, and here’s what you’re going to get. And then when you click the buy button, we’re going to use a permalink which adds all of those products to the cart immediately and adds the discount immediately.

What we did in this, which was a little bit cumbersome for the customer, was we said, “Add all of these products to your cart and enter this discount code in order to get the savings.”

Well, what this consisted of was customers coming to our site, customers adding all these different products to their cart. So they would add this product, they’d get to the cart, then they’d have to get out of the cart, go back to the store, find the other product, add that to the cart, and then go back and forth.

So if there’s five products that we were giving away as a bundle, they had to do this five times. So the barrier to get them through the checkout process was extremely high.

So when we do run a bundle in the future, if we do do a bundle in the future, which we probably will, we’re going to create one landing page specifically dedicated for that bundle, where the customer can see everything that they’re gonna get – ll the benefits, all the discounts, how much they’re going to save.

And then when they click the button, we’re going to use a permalink that populates that cart with all the items immediately and includes the discount right then and there, just to reduce that barrier to entry, or that barrier to checkout.

So that’s another huge takeaway for us.

Switching over to social. One thing that we’ve realized, that entire grid for the no-purchase and the social media – mostly the social media – we posted those promos twice a day, which meant creating eight creatives across all the different platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, so on and so forth, and trying to have creative, and copy, and the discount code all in there and mapped out for the social media promotion.

And what we would do is we would actually upload those and boost those to our existing audience. The problem with that was our promotions, or our creatives, our posts, were such short-lived, maybe 10 hours max for each one because we posted twice a day – were such short-lived that those posts didn’t get enough social proof.

They didn’t get enough juice on them for Facebook to realize, “Hey, this post is important. I should show it more often to the people we think would benefit from it.”

So what would happen is we’d post, the promotion would begin, and we’d boost it, but it takes Facebook some time, the algorithm some time in order to figure out what’s working, to find the correct audience, to rinse and repeat it, and to make sure it’s optimized for whatever campaign strategy you’re trying to run.

And what we found was, by the time it was just starting to get a little bit of social proof on it, people were starting to like it and click it, and conversions were happening, and Facebook was recognizing this – Boom! – we’d have to shut it down because now we’re onto the next one, and then we’d start the next one up. None of them got any legs, really.

So what we’re going to do moving forward – say we do another four-day promotion, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. We’re going to have one weekend post, where it’s like, “The best deals all weekend long, blah, blah, blah.”

You know, “Benefit, benefit, benefit.” “Come click through this, that, blah, blah, blah.” Something really engaging.

So, that gives it time throughout the entire weekend to pick up steam, and Facebook can actually optimize it for what we’re trying to optimize it for, rather than to start it up and shut it down, start it up, shut it down.

So we’re gonna have just one or maybe a couple posts that run just the entire weekend long. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to take the call to action, whatever that URL is – thank you for the thumbs up – we’re gonna take that URL and it’s going to be a generic string that redirects to whatever we want it to.

So we have control of where that redirects. If we do change the promotion on a daily basis, all we have to do is change where that URL redirects to on our end or change the landing page that it goes to to reflect the promotion.

It’s a lot easier to do that rather than to do everything – the ads, and the landing pages, and the promotions, and this and that. So we’re just gonna keep one thing static for maximum results.

Whew, man, that’s a lot.

I think that’s it. Change the landing page, give it juice.

Also, so I hope this was helpful. That’s what we’re going to do moving forward as far as what we found works in a weekend-long promotion, what we’re going to do moving forward, and what we’re not gonna do moving forward.

And I hope you take this and apply it to whatever you have going on for the remainder of the year. And we’re gonna do several more of these.

We already lined up Mother’s Day and Memorial Day weekend as our next two promotion points, and I will tell you what works after we implement this, ’cause this is gonna be revolving, and it’s gonna be ever-changing, and I’m excited to start testing more and figuring out what works so I can share it back with you guys and you can take what we’re using for BestSelf and implement it in your business.

Thanks, everyone, for watching.

I’m Allen. And comment below if you didn’t catch this live. I’m always watching the comments and chatting with you even after the fact.

Thanks again, bye.

These Tips Can Help Make Your Promotion a Success

As they say, experience is the best teacher, and we did learn tons of valuable lessons from this experience. Here are a couple:

– Percentage off works best. This is because people could easily translate savings in their head. – Make the buying or check out experience as smooth, easy, and as convenient as possible More valuable insights in the video. Click play to get a breakdown of the lessons we learned and some of our big takeaways. Share this to anyone who you think would benefit from it.

Listen Here:

Transcript: What’s up, Turn on the Hustle? So this past weekend, we did something different. We did a promotion for Easter. Now, normally, our promotions are based around sales holidays like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas – that sort of stuff – or a New Year’s promotion because we are in that space and that niche. But what we’re trying to do now is actually make other events promotion weekends or promotional events for our business. And our first whack at this was Easter. So we started this promotion on Friday before Easter and it ended the Monday after Easter. So it spanned four days. Similar to Black Friday, which starts on Friday and ends on Monday. We learned so much from this, and I wanted to share our results and takeaways with you so if you do a promotion, you can – don’t make our mistakes and also utilize what we learned during our promotional launch. So here’s how I’m going to do this. I’m going to tell you what we did. I’m going to share with you what worked and share with you what we’ll probably do differently in the future. So here’s how we structured our promotion. The promotion consisted of four days: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and we segmented our list and our social media contacts a little bit differently. So we segmented social media. From our list, we segmented non-buyers, then we segmented people who’ve purchased once, people who have purchased multiple times, and then the final segment is subscribers. And we created a grid and a map to figure out what promotions we were going to give to each of those sub-segments over the course of four days. Now, Jess, our CMO, has created the map of what this looks like – and I will show you right now. So here is the promotion breakdown of what we had. So you could see here on the left hand side, we have the dates: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and then each segment across the top. We have social media, no purchase. So social media is anyone on our Facebook account and anyone that we want to target who’s a cold lead. Everything after social media is people on our email list. So we have people who haven’t purchased, people who’ve purchased once, people who have purchased multiple times, and subscribers: people who are on subscription. So if you’re just joining, right now I’m giving a detailed breakdown of this past weekend’s Easter weekend promotion that we did. And I’m showing you what we did, what worked, and what we’ll do in the future. And this is the breakdown. So each and every one of these segments on each day gets a different promotion. To breakdown what our customers would probably mostly be interested in, and the mindset that we had behind this was to take each segment and move them over to the next segment. So if they’re social media, let’s get them onto our list. If they’re no-purchase, let’s at least make them purchase once. If they purchase once, let’s bring them over to multi-purchase. If they’re a multi-purchaser, let’s get them on subscription so we have that repeat customer. That was our mindset going into this. And in each tier, we tried to increase the cart value. We want to lower the barrier to entry for social media, lower the barrier to entry for non-purchasers, and then we’ll bump that up a little bit for people who’ve already spent money with us. They already know, like, and trust us. They’ve already spent money. Let’s see if we can have them spend a little bit more. So that was our mindset going into this. I have a little cheat sheet of some talking points that I’m gonna go over with you. So let me just take a glance at this and make sure I am not missing anything. Okay. So far, that’s the breakdown of what we’ve done. And now I’m going to share with you the takeaways of what we learned. So there was a multitude of promotions that happened here. It either consisted of a percentage off, it consisted of free shipping, it consisted of buy one product, get one free, or buy one product, get a product half off. Consisted of bundles, which means there were two types of bundles. There was a bundle where if you add all of these to your cart, you’re going to get something for half off or a percentage off, or for free. And then there was another bundle, if you add all of these to your cart and check out, you’ll get a discount or a flat rate for all of these. So we tried a number of different promotions based on where that person was on the grid. Here’s something very interesting that we found. Here’s what worked. Here’s what worked really well across all of them – whether it was social media, non-purchase, one-time-purchase, multi-purchase, or subscription, here’s what worked the best: percentage off. So, if we were offering 20% off, off of one product, or 20% off your entire cart, or if we were giving something away for free. If the customer or the prospect could easily translate savings in their head quickly and easily without trying to do conversions or without trying to figure out how much that they would save, people understand percentage off or something for free. Buy one, get one 50% off. Buy this, get X free. So if you bought a Self Journal, we’ll give you a Sidekick for free. They know, “Well, the Sidekick’s 13 bucks, I immediately am saving $13.” 20% off your entire cart. That’s easily understood into money savings. They may not know the dollar amount off the top of their head because they don’t know what they’re going to purchase, but they know that it’s going to be something that means saving money for themselves. So when you’re doing a promotion, try to make it as less confusing as possible. So do things that are consistent. So what we’re going to eliminate moving forward are probably these bundles, where it was, if you buy all of these products, all of these products will equal 100 bucks even, like flat. The person couldn’t translate that into savings. They understood that, “If I buy this, I’m going to get a discount.” But they were confused about what that discount actually meant to them. Also, moving forward, if we do do a bundle, what we will do in the future is create a landing page specifically for that bundle that has all the products outlined in it, and here’s what you’re going to get. And then when you click the buy button, we’re going to use a permalink which adds all of those products to the cart immediately and adds the discount immediately. What we did in this, which was a little bit cumbersome for the customer, was we said, “Add all of these products to your cart and enter this discount code in order to get the savings.” Well, what this consisted of was customers coming to our site, customers adding all these different products to their cart. So they would add this product, they’d get to the cart, then they’d have to get out of the cart, go back to the store, find the other product, add that to the cart, and then go back and forth. So if there’s five products that we were giving away as a bundle, they had to do this five times. So the barrier to get them through the checkout process was extremely high. So when we do run a bundle in the future, if we do do a bundle in the future, which we probably will, we’re going to create one landing page specifically dedicated for that bundle, where the customer can see everything that they’re gonna get – ll the benefits, all the discounts, how much they’re going to save. And then when they click the button, we’re going to use a permalink that populates that cart with all the items immediately and includes the discount right then and there, just to reduce that barrier to entry, or that barrier to checkout. So that’s another huge takeaway for us. Switching over to social. One thing that we’ve realized, that entire grid for the no-purchase and the social media – mostly the social media – we posted those promos twice a day, which meant creating eight creatives across all the different platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, so on and so forth, and trying to have creative, and copy, and the discount code all in there and mapped out for the social media promotion. And what we would do is we would actually upload those and boost those to our existing audience. The problem with that was our promotions, or our creatives, our posts, were such short-lived, maybe 10 hours max for each one because we posted twice a day – were such short-lived that those posts didn’t get enough social proof. They didn’t get enough juice on them for Facebook to realize, “Hey, this post is important. I should show it more often to the people we think would benefit from it.” So what would happen is we’d post, the promotion would begin, and we’d boost it, but it takes Facebook some time, the algorithm some time in order to figure out what’s working, to find the correct audience, to rinse and repeat it, and to make sure it’s optimized for whatever campaign strategy you’re trying to run. And what we found was, by the time it was just starting to get a little bit of social proof on it, people were starting to like it and click it, and conversions were happening, and Facebook was recognizing this – Boom! – we’d have to shut it down because now we’re onto the next one, and then we’d start the next one up. None of them got any legs, really. So what we’re going to do moving forward – say we do another four-day promotion, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. We’re going to have one weekend post, where it’s like, “The best deals all weekend long, blah, blah, blah.” You know, “Benefit, benefit, benefit.” “Come click through this, that, blah, blah, blah.” Something really engaging. So, that gives it time throughout the entire weekend to pick up steam, and Facebook can actually optimize it for what we’re trying to optimize it for, rather than to start it up and shut it down, start it up, shut it down. So we’re gonna have just one or maybe a couple posts that run just the entire weekend long. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to take the call to action, whatever that URL is – thank you for the thumbs up – we’re gonna take that URL and it’s going to be a generic string that redirects to whatever we want it to. So we have control of where that redirects. If we do change the promotion on a daily basis, all we have to do is change where that URL redirects to on our end or change the landing page that it goes to to reflect the promotion. It’s a lot easier to do that rather than to do everything – the ads, and the landing pages, and the promotions, and this and that. So we’re just gonna keep one thing static for maximum results. Whew, man, that’s a lot. I think that’s it. Change the landing page, give it juice. Also, so I hope this was helpful. That’s what we’re going to do moving forward as far as what we found works in a weekend-long promotion, what we’re going to do moving forward, and what we’re not gonna do moving forward. And I hope you take this and apply it to whatever you have going on for the remainder of the year. And we’re gonna do several more of these. We already lined up Mother’s Day and Memorial Day weekend as our next two promotion points, and I will tell you what works after we implement this, ’cause this is gonna be revolving, and it’s gonna be ever-changing, and I’m excited to start testing more and figuring out what works so I can share it back with you guys and you can take what we’re using for BestSelf and implement it in your business. Thanks, everyone, for watching. I’m Allen. And comment below if you didn’t catch this live. I’m always watching the comments and chatting with you even after the fact. Thanks again, bye.

What We Learned from Our Easter Weekend Promotion Which You Can Apply To Your Business