For the full episode show notes visit catherinelangman.com/episode-129
Well hello there! Catherine Langman here, back with another episode of the Productpreneur Success Podcast where we’re all about sharing useful tips and tricks as well as inspirational stories to help you grow your eCommerce brand!
A few weeks ago I published a couple of episodes that turned out to be some of the most popular on the show yet. Thousands of people have listened to my episode 121 about how you can succeed and grow your business during a recession, along with my episode 123 which walked you through the process of creating a goal-crushing marketing plan.
It seems as though many of you are looking to soak up as much information as you can about how you can keep growing and building your business and creating long-term sustainable success.
I know how hard it is to keep coming up with new and different ideas to promote your business, and how incredibly difficult it is to maintain a confident mindset and motivation when things aren’t working or getting results as fast as you’d like, or perhaps things that used to work aren’t working anymore and you have to try something new without allowing yourself to sink into a negative mindset that your business is broken and you should just give up…
Don’t do that. I know it’s easier said than done sometimes, and i suppose my one thing that helps me through those moments is to allow myself a short period of time where I have my little pity party, and then I put those thoughts and feelings aside, put my head down and start working on something new.
This is always the cycle of business and of growth anyway. Nothing in business stays the same forever. We just cannot control every variable in the market that we operate in, especially when that market is online.
Reaching a point of acceptance about that can be helpful because it frees you up mentall and emotionally to then start looking for new ideas and inspiration.
Which is hopefully why you’re here listening to this podcast!
I remember many years ago, a mentor i was working with in my first business was talking me off a ledge in just such a situation, and he said to me, ‘Catherine – you always need to have some new news to share so that you always give customers a reason to buy’.
By new news, this could be a new product, or a themed promotion – like our client French Soda, which is a children’s outdoor rainwear brand who recently ran a ‘Messy Play May’ promotion designed to inspire kids to play outside in the wet winter weather, or a clearance or stocktake sale which is the kind of promotion we’re seeing a lot of here in Australia right now given it’s our end of financial year.
So today on the show, I decided to do something a little bit different and do a breakdown analysis of a really successful promotion run by a hugely successful eCommerce brand – True Protein.
This was their version of an end of financial year sale, but they did several really clever things that I think we can all take on board and be inspired by, especially if you are really keen to grow a premium brand that doesn’t do a whole lot of discounting.
Now – I can’t give you any metrics on this promotion that they ran, because I’m just a customer of theirs, but given the size of their range and the type of marketing they do I can say with certainty that they are not a start-up or early stage business. They are at scale and running a very successful venture.
If you are listening to the audio version only of this podcast – I am going to be recording a screen video to showcase what this brand has done so successfully, so if you want to check that out you can head to my podcast shownotes page. You should find it at catherinelangman.com/episode-129 – or you can search me up on Youtube if you like.
But I will also do my very best to describe what I’m looking at on screen in detail so that you don’t miss anything just by listening to the audio.
OK – without further ado – let’s dive in.
- It’s necessary to set the scene for you and give you a bit of background about this brand so you appreciate why their clearance sale was so successful.
True Protein almost never offer discounts. They’ve built up an incredibly loyal customer base because their products are amazing, they have a large product range that is relevant to their target audience of fitness-fanatics, plus they’re really fast at fulfilling orders (meeting our desire for ‘instant gratification’).
So customers are accustomed to paying full price for this brand. And it is still great value at full price, as it’s cheaper than what you’d pay for a comparable product in a supermarket.
Instead of running discount promotions on a regular basis, they typically run regular monthly value-add type promotions. They use strategies like gifts with purchase, volume discounts and free merchandise when you reach certain order value thresholds.
But because they rarely run discount promotions, they get an amazing response when they do run one.
So the top tip here is: use clearance sales sparingly and you’ll enjoy much greater returns.
2. They started to hype this clearance sale in advance, particularly to their existing warm audiences.
They actually sent an email to their list the week before the sale with a heads-up about the coming promo and an invitation to sign up for email notification when the sale would go live.
They also used Facebook ads to get in front of their audience to get them on the list.
Why would a business show ads to their existing subscribers?
It’s a useful strategy to employ, perhaps once a year. The act of getting a subscriber to re-opt-in to a list says to the email service provider that the contact REALLY wants to receive emails from that brand.
This, then, helps to improve email deliverability rates, meaning more of your emails will land in the recipients’ inboxes, which in turn increases the email open rates, click through rates and conversion rates. Additionally, whilst letting your audience know in advance that the sale is coming is likely to temporarily slow down your sales, it IS also going to mean your customers will be ready to buy when the announcement is made that the sale is live.
3. Their website has been updated with a new homepage banner image promoting the sale, and also a sale collection in the menu, making it super easy to navigate and find all the items on sale.
Additional strategies they used on their website included a countdown timer in the announcement bar that sits permanently at the top of the website, a countdown timer on the sale collection page, and another one on the product add-to-cart page.
They also used a popup at the cart stage with a tracker that shows you how close you are to the spend threshold to receive the next freebie.
4. They announced their sale via email, sending multiple emails over the sale period, and also using Facebook ads and producing heaps of great video content for social media, their own plus working with brand reps to collect UGC.
I particularly loved seeing the videos on their socials, such as fitness professionals doing unboxing videos and showing what they’d bought and sharing which products were their favourites.
Their emails and advertisements started out with content announcing the sale was live, and then later in the promotion week they shifted to images and content with an ‘ends soon’ message.
Emphasising the scarcity angle helps to trigger the FOMO response in your audience, which will always increase your conversions on the last day or two of the promotion.
5. They’re using multiple staggered offers to incentivise higher order values.
So the products themselves might only have 10-20% discount on them, but then if you purchase over a certain threshold you can get free shipping, another threshold gets you a free mystery product, and another threshold gets you a free box of snack bars, which is worth quite a bit.
And they show this really cool tracker whilst you’re on the website which is a really effective tool to get the customer motivated to find something else they might need just to qualify for the freebies.
I can tell you now that this tactic worked a treat on me!!
At the end of the day – none of the marketing True Protein used in this promotion was out of reach of even the smallest of start-up brands.
You can execute a promotion like this one by True Protein quite simply if you’re using Shopify, Klaviyo and perhaps an app by Bold to enable the popup spend tracker to incentivise your customers to reach the order value threshold to qualify for the free gift or whatever other incentives you’re giving.
That’s it for today’s episode. I hope this has given you some insight and inspiration around how you can plan a really successful promotion for your own business.
I do actually have a more in depth training bundle all about this topic – in fact I have a short course that might be relevant for you if you want to dive a bit deeper into planning and executing your marketing and promotions.
My Product Launch and Promotion bundle is designed to help you to plan and implement a promotional campaign that hits your sales targets. It’s just $197, and you can find out more about them or purchase it for yourself by heading to http://www.productpreneuracademy.com/short-courses
Or, if you’re keen for some help with this stuff, please just give us a shout! Whether you’re looking for coaching to help you to learn and implement these things, or if you’re looking for a team of experts to outsource to, just head over to https://www.productpreneurmarketing.com and you can book in for a free strategy session with us.