The holiday season is here and that means e-commerce promotions!
Our team works with e-commerce companies to help them grow their sales. November and December are the biggest months of the year for some. Some of our clients do upwards of 1/3rd of their total annual revenue in these final two months. Needless to say, this can be a very pressure-packed time for our team. This is why we continue to improve our processes to make sure these promotions perform outstandingly. Here are a few of the key aspects we focus on ahead of these big promotional pushes:
1. Load test your website hosting setup
Bandwidth issues are the absolute last thing you want to encounter when you launch your promotion. You need to make sure you have a big enough door to accommodate all those customers at the same time. That’s one reason why we are a preferred agency partner with WP Engine. They help us deliver top quality results and experiences for our clients. We use website performance statistics to project the amount of traffic we can expect. WP Engine makes it easy for us to upgrade our client services as needed, even if we only need it for a short period of time to make sure we don’t run into any bottlenecks. No amount of planning or organization will matter if you don’t have a door big enough to handle all your customers!
2. Organize your offer details and timing
When you are managing promotions every week for many different businesses, you need to keep things organized. At FirstTracks Marketing, we use Google Apps to help with that. Google Sheets and Documents provide an easy way to centralize all the ongoing promotions. It is critical for us to be able to easily organize, track, share, review and approve all the active promotional campaigns. We can save a lot of time by not passing files back and forth to gather information and feedback for these campaigns. We are big fans of working smarter not harder.
3. Prep as much as you can in advance
There are many moving parts when it comes to launching promotional campaigns: paid advertising, email marketing, pop ups, site notifications, landing pages and coupon codes all in different combinations. These components have many moving parts of their own: custom copy, graphics, animations, and coupon configurations — just to name a few. Google Apps to the rescue again here. Creating a shared folder makes it easy to collect and share everything with the team. As long as permissions are set up, it doesn’t matter where they are or what device they are using. We can conduct reviews and share feedback for everything as needed. When launching many promotions at the same time each year, it’s imperative that everything is organized. We want to make sure everything always goes off without a hitch.
4. Test, test, test and test one more time
This almost goes without saying, but testing is something you should be sure your team or agency is doing. Test the heck out of everything! When you are dealing with more complicated promos like BOGOs, free gifts, free shipping threshold adjustments, or even more straightforward site wide discount coupons, you need to be sure everything works the way you want it to. This is especially true when you are running more than one thing at a time. Do you want the offers to stack? Can they be combined? Will they even work together at all? These are some of the questions you need to be asking yourself when testing your promotions. There are many options for these different kinds of promotions, and you don’t always get warnings when things won’t work together. You usually don’t realize there is an issue until a customer reaches out to let you know. That is the last thing you want to have happen. That’s why we always test, test and test one more time to be sure things are working.
5. Launch and track your results
Launching all these offers and campaigns can be a stressful high pressure event, particularly if you aren’t used to organizing and managing things like this on the regular. We have found an organized spreadsheet and a good analytics dashboard are invaluable tools. They are especially useful when you want quick feedback on how these things are going. We use Google Sheets to simplify collaboration on executing these offers. We also use Grow for our dashboard platform. Grow makes it easy for us to compile and summarize the sales performance data for our clients. It is a huge time saver to avoid going to three or four different places to collect that information. This allows us to share and convey the impact of these promotions efficiently. And more importantly, it lets us adjust quickly to maximize their performance.
Good luck this weekend with your promotional push!
We are all very happy and thankful this Thanksgiving season for all of our clients. We are grateful to be so busy supporting all these fantastic businesses and products. We wish you all the very best with your Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotions this year. Make this your most successful year to date. If you are looking for help in the future managing promotional pushes like this, give us a call at 603-924-1978 or fill out our short contact form.
