Have You Planned Your Holiday Promotions and KPIs?

Food for Thought Thursday: Winter Is Coming Series

Week 2 Extras

Last week on the Drummergirl Marketing social media channels the #FoodforThoughtThursday #WinterIsComing series was launched. In addition to the social media posts, there will be an accompanying blog.

Today’s #FoodforThoughtThursday #WinterIsComing series focuses on Holiday promotions and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs help you measure how your campaign is doing. Common KPIs may include revenue growth, social media post engagement, profit margin, client retention rate, and customer satisfaction. The goal here is to track how successful your promotion or marketing efforts are in different sectors. For example, you can have great engagement on a social media post promoting a new t-shirt line; however, website visits and sales could be low. That tells you that you might need a stronger call-to-action on your post and/or consumers are having difficulty completing the purchase on your website… Things you should figure out before huge promotions.

If your business is running a Holiday promotion from early November through the end of the year, you will need to make sure you have enough time before the start of your desired promotional campaign. The average campaign for a small business can take roughly 8-12 weeks depending on how long it takes to secure shipments, build landing pages, hire out to complete certain campaign elements, etc. Small businesses and solopreneurs may need to start in September for reasons such as planning on having custom Holiday shirts for employees, adding new products to your ecommerce website, accounting for store closures or lack of access to a working space due to national holidays or weather, or onboarding new or temporary employees for the possible Holiday rush.

Let’s say DM Retail Shop sells drums, art, and custom goods from local creatives and is planning on running a few Holiday promotions. Those promotions are % off discounts and exclusive DM Retail Shop stickers for Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday, and a choice of a free gift with purchase or gift wrapping when a customer spends over $75 from November 1st – December 24th.  The desired preparation timeline would be from about August 15^th – October 31^st with focuses on the following:

% off and exclusive DM Retail Shop stickers from Black Friday through Cyber Monday

• Stickers are designed, printed, and prepared to be given away Thanksgiving weekend
• Will these stickers be free? For DM Retail Shop, yes and will be placed at the register as a free giveaway exclusive to that weekend
• Make sure the POS system has the discount programed in and can process the discount (would this be a good opportunity for a coupon code for better tracking? Yes)
• Design and print a coupon that will also be shared on social media (DM Retail Shop can only afford a 15% discount on all purchases that weekend)
• Create and schedule email marketing blast about the promotion
• Create and schedule social media posts about the promotion (go live no later than November 1^st)

Choice of a free gift or gift wrapping when a customer spends $75 or more

• Determine what the free gift will be – Brand drumsticks for DM Retail Shop (may take a couple of weeks to arrive)
• Add the giveaway to the POS system to track the how many pairs of drumsticks were given away with every purchase
• Acquire gift boxes, bags, and wrapping paper – Will these items be branded? No
• Add gift wrapping service to POS system for promotion and charge $5 if the purchase is under $75 before tax (this can be optional)
• Review the promotion with employees and how to ring up the promotions
• Create and schedule email blasts about the promotion
• Promote gift on social media starting no later than November 1st

The KPIs for DM Retail Shop would be:

• # of times the coupon code was used
• # of free gift with purchase items given away
• Email open rate
• Email click rate
• Revenue from Black Friday, Small Business Friday, and Cyber Monday individually
• Revenue from Thanksgiving weekend

This is DM Retail Store’s first year doing any Holiday promotions so I may want to also look at how many sales were in-person versus online, how much referral traffic came from social media or email marketing campaigns.

For a smooth campaign implementation during a busy Holiday season, preparation is necessary. Keep a look out for next week’s Food for Thought Thursday topic to help your business prepare as #WinterIsComing

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