Happy Sunday! This was a really busy, but eventful week that just went by. Thank you to everyone who tweets about this newsletter, forwards it, encourages friends to sign up, and talks about it. It means so much to me 🥺. There's a new easy link to subscribe: nik.co/subscribe
ShopPay announced a really ✨fast✨ checkout path with Instagram and Facebook. I did a 30 min interview with Garry Tan for his YouTube channel. Bumble went public! VC's began shooting their shot on Clubhouse. My friend Joma broke down how to make it on any social platform. You can now pick my brain here. Snif launched a limited-edition scent for the launch of Harry Hudson's album. My friend @ModernMachines dropped yet another incredible DJ mix since he can't play at Madison Square Garden right now.
Please note: We are now looking for a sponsor for this newsletter. If you're interested, just reply to this email!
Before we get started, please reply to this email: are you a HOT coffee person, or a COLD coffee person... I'm currently having an intense debate about this.
Ok, today, I wanted to go back to something VERY tactical and something that you can walk away with and DO. So in that hope, we're going to walk through running promotions, and everything about them.
So, what are promotions?
Have you ever gotten an email for a sale, either randomly or maybe centered around a holiday like Valentine's Day? That's the kind of promotion we're going to chat about today. This is separate from the promotional acquisition offer that I talk about in my deck. This should be a "deal" or a "sale" for a limited-time, not evergreen.
The purpose of these promotions is to do 4 things:
- Add incremental revenue on top of your existing acquisition, replenishment, and cross/up-sell funnels.
- Extend the LTV (lifetime value) of your existing customers. Why spend another $50 to acquire a customer when you can create a promotion to bring them back and purchase via email (maybe a 10 cent cost per order)?
- Re-engage lapsed customers/subscribers who may have deferred their purchase due to price sensitivity (this is usually always a big bucket of people).
- Sell-through inventory that you need to get rid of due to expiration, it's going to be out of season, or some other logistical reason.
What does a promotion look like?
I could sit here and write all about what a promotion looks like, but let me just give you some ideas you can implement yourself. Of course, change the numbers to what makes sense for your business:
- Sitewide: 15% off + FREE Shipping
- Spend $99 & get a $15 gift card
- Spend $99 & we will donate $15 to XX organization
- Buy X and get Y for 50% off
- Bundle Up: Pick any 3 cases & save 15%
- Bundle Up: Buy this bundle & save 15%
- Gift with Purchase: Buy X & get Y for free
- Tiered: Spend $50, get 10% off. Spend $100 get 20% off. Spend $250 get 30% off.
- Variant/Style/Flavor/Scent of the month — Save 20%
- Flash Sale: Free shipping this weekend!
- Flash Sale: 3x loyalty points this weekend only!
Ideally your offer is:
- High AOV
- A discount that you don't normally offer
- Narrow, vs too wide (see why here)
- Includes variety, to encourage sampling
What are the deliverables you want to have for a promo?
In my opinion, you should run promotions in as many places as you can. If you can just do email, that's cool. If you can get your affiliates involved or affiliate publishers to include you in roundups like this or this, that's even better!
Because you're going to be driving from mostly owned/organic channels, you want to use proper UTM parameters when tracking links to see what sales come from social vs email vs SMS, etc. You can use this free UTM builder here.
This is what we use as a baseline for promotions when working with clients at Sharma Brands:
A homepage hero banner and call out.
Think of this as your "campaign" style spot. Your hero copy, image to depict/show the offer, and a CTA to get you to the landing page, the offer, or collections page.
A Landing Page.
This should be an easy way to shop your offer. Here is an example of an easy JUDY Valentine's Day LP. You'll notice this page talks to you less like you're a new customer, and more like someone who knows the brand/products. Why? Because this is going to your customer base.
Organic Social.
You should 100% be posting this on stories, ideally also leaving a highlight maybe even showing what's on sale during the promo while it goes on. If the sale is for a longer time than 48 hours, I would also recommend creating a quick video to run in-feed. If your audience is big enough, you can retarget these very video viewers who saw the post about a sale but haven't purchased yet.
Email/SMS.
Take your copy, creative, and offer and put them into fun emails or texts to send to your owned CRM. Notify everyone, whether or not they've purchased before. If they have, there's a good chance they've told someone about your product and this email might be what gets forwarded to whomever they were talking to! You can see some good sale emails here.
If you're sending a text, I highly recommend crafting a proper MMS (it is more expensive than a plain text) to really catch the eye. I like to use GIFs, emojis, but at the same time keep the copy straight-forward and simple.
I always recommend Klaviyo for email, and PostScript for SMS.
Influencer.
I am surprised more brands don't do this. I've written before how you can drop your customer acquisition cost by 40% using influencers. You can also do the same with influencers, but organically. Pick a handful of creators you regularly work with (not just randoms with large followings), and see if they'd like to post in exchange for $$ or product.
If you're able to lock it in, then give them a custom landing page like this one, and a custom coupon code. The clickthrough rates from the page into the cart will stay high, and it feels like a more put-together customer journey.
Affiliate.
Similar to influencers, if you're able to activate your affiliates for your promotions, you should do your best to do so. The Insider Picks and BuzzFeed links above are great examples of why it is a win-win (they make money for every sale they drive you), but you can also include any of your other affiliates like:
- Ambassadors
- Brand superfans (if you use a product like Fluence)
- Bloggers
- Coupon sites
Even if it doesn't generate much revenue, it's all performance driven revenue, so you don't lose anything by making bets on affiliates, unless you're buying affiliate placements with companies like TheSkimm where there's a minimum fee associated with the buy.
When should you run promotions?
Not too often. You want to run them around holidays, calendar holidays (like Valentine's Day), or if you're in need for a quick revenue bump. You'd be surprised how much a quick promotion can help bump up revenues.
Onto some fun stuff...
Software/App of the Week:
Fluence — Turn everyday customers into affiliates.
I've been following this teams journey for months and they're now about to open up a beta for a select group of brands. Their platform is the most easy-to-use ambassador program for your everyday customers.
When you've recognized a segment of customers who are your "Whales" or high-frequency purchasers, they're likely good prospects for a platform like Fluence.
Sign up on Fluence's site
Brand of the Week:
I found this brand watching Shark Tank the other night. I ordered it, and immediately saw the post-purchase page had Co-Op Commerce on it (an obvious sign of a good brand).
The product was really, really tasty. Not like LaCroix, where it tastes like a strawberry is screaming from the other room, and it also doesn't have an aftertaste. As the water guy, I highly recommend Aura Bora!
Hope you enjoyed this email. Most likely, this is the last plain-text email you'll get from me on a Sunday. I'm so thrilled that 9,000 of you have signed up for this email from me, and I couldn't be more excited for the next few things I am creating to give y'all for free, including some new apps.
Hope you have a great week, enjoy tomorrow off (drink some hot or cold coffee), and get those 9 hours of sleep!