How To Promote Your Ecommerce Store The Right Way

Video Highlights

• 0:12 Introduction
• 0:25 Brick and Mortar promotions better than ecom
• 0:54 Promotions
• 1:08 Car Dealerships are great at this
• 1:58 The Reason They Do That
• 2:25 The Small Ecom Business Doesn’t Do This
• 2:46 Ecommerce Stores Should Be Using These Tactics
• 3:19 Niche Specific
• 3:35 Made Up Holidays
• 4:06 Map Out Your Calendar
• 4:26 Promotional Calendar For Online Business
• 4:58 You Should Have 3 Promotions A Month
• 5:30 Some Months Will Be Easier To Implement
• 5:47 Huge Huge Huge Win
• 6:25 Analytics Become Easier
• 6:56 This Is Something That The Offline World Does Well
• 7:12 Limiting To One Network
• 7:45 Great For Existing Customers To Come Back Again
• 7:59 Closing Remarks

Hey guys. Tanner Larsson here from Build Grow Scale. It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood right now. Just dropped my daughter off at school. I’m heading back to the office. On the drive, as I was leaving her school, I noticed a bunch of little banners going up and stores putting up some promotions and things like that. It made me think about some of the things that the brick and mortar retail world does better than the e-com world.

Kind of a fun fact or a weird fact is that in the brick and mortar world, it’s actually still cheaper to acquire a new customer than it is to acquire a customer online.

That doesn’t really have any relation to this conversation, I just thought it was a cool fact I’d throw out for you. What I really wanted to talk to you about was these promotions. The brick and mortar world, the retail world, they’ve got to continuously drive people into their stores, and once someone’s been to your store, it’s hard to get them to come back, if you don’t have something new to bring them in.

The retail world is great at, look at car dealerships. Car dealerships are amazing at this. They have a different sale every other day, it seems like. Pretty much every week, they’ve got something else going, some other kind of promotion. The Memorial Day sale, the our boss got a haircut sale, our inventory overstock sale, I want to buy a new puppy sale, whatever it is, they get the radio stations involved and they’re always running these different promotions, right? Why? Because nobody wants to go to the car dealership, and nobody’s thinking about it. They need those sales and those promotions to get people to go.

This is something that the retail world has done well for years. All these stores have this default promotions that they run every single year. They always had a Memorial Day sale, they always have an anniversary sale. Before the end of the year, they always have an overstock sale. They may have a used car blow out, all these different things.

The reason they do that is because that helps them provide consistency to their sales, their numbers, their cash flow, everything. Why doesn’t the e-commerce world do this?

The answer is, some parts of the e-commerce world does do this, and they do this very well. Some of the bigger brands do this, okay? The multinational corporations, the big companies, because they have their roots grounded more in the old retail world and they transferred it over. The smaller e-commerce brands, the mom and pop operations, the 3 to 5 to 7 million, especially the ones under 7 figures a year, the 6 figure brands, never do this. All they focus on is a Facebook ad driving traffic to their store. They never change it up until the ad gets banner blindness and then they go, “Oh, better find another ad.” That’s it.

E-commerce stores should be leveraging the same tactics in terms of default promotions. Your e-com store is not a here today gone tomorrow thing, or at least I hope it’s not. You’re going to be running this for years to come, so you should be mapping out promotions that you can use every single year over and over again with just slight edits. You should have an anniversary sale, or your stores anniversary sale. You should have a Memorial Day sale, a Cyber Monday sale, a Black Friday sale. I bet you could do a 12 days of Christmas promotion. You could do Labor Day, Presidents Day, if you are, there’s also niche specific type holidays now.

There’s almost an international day for everything. There’s world sleep day, there’s world geek day, there’s world video game day. There’s all kinds of these just basically dumb, made up holidays that are now real days that if it wasn’t for the internet we’d never know about, but now they get blasted on social media.

You can identify your brand with one of these days, or create your own, if there’s not one for your niche, be the brand that goes out there and creates it and gives yourself a reason to create a promotion. What this is going to do is it will allow you to mix up your promoting, your advertising, your marketing, so you’re not always doing the same old thing. You can have email promotions, retargeting campaigns, all geared up for this one special promotion that you’re doing.

The other thing it does is it helps you map out your calendar. I consult with a ton of e-commerce businesses. Some on an informal level, some with actual, where I’m actually the consultant for the business, and then also I have my coaching students in the Black Label Masermind members and all the people that come to our events. By and large, nobody has a promotional calendar.

In the information marketing world, everybody has a promotional calendar, because they’re all worried about JVs and webinars and stuff like that. The e-com world, their promotional calendar looks like, “Okay, this is January, this is February,” and they basically are the exact same thing every month, we’re going to run Facebook ads every day of the week and they’re not going to change unless our ads start performing less effectively. There’s nothing thought out for their email promotions or their existing customers or their follow up sequences or anything like that.

Ideally, and I’m rambling a little bit, I know guys, but there’s a whole lot of little nuggets I wanted to throw out at you. Ideally, you should be having at least 3 solid promotions a month. Every month, you should have 3 promotions. That gives you the basis of doing about 1 promotion every 10 days or so on average, right? Why?

Four promotions, it’s kind of a little heavy, it’s hard to organize, but 3 allows you to space it out, you know, 3 to 5 day promotions within that 10 day sequence and do the build up and the close outs on each of the promotions. Spacing them out by 10 days gives you 3 sold promotions of every 4 week period. Some months, things like that, are going to lend themselves better to doing this, but if you start building out this default promotion strategy that you can re-use these promotions year by year, it just gets easier every year.

Then you have less thinking to do and just more editing of the promotional stuff to get it out there. This is a huge, huge, huge win. Number 1, it drives sales, right? But number 2, it helps you map out your calendar, and what you can do is you can go back in your empirical data, look at your past sales for the past 12 months, and go, “Hey, we have a drop in January,” or maybe the past couple years, you can see every January we have a drop in sales. Every November we also have a drop.

What if we could build in some really, really sexy promotions that are just default promotions we run every year in those slow times to help raise those slow times and make them not so week. Maybe our 2nd quarter is not nearly as strong as our 1st quarter, and we need to beef up the promotions there. By doing this, and getting these documented, and getting them ready, then when you map out your promotion calendar, you just fill in the blanks with all your default promotions and then all you have to do is come back in and look at where there’s gaps.

That’s the only creativity that’s required. When there’s a gap, “Okay, what kind of promotion can I use, what can I fill in on this gap to bring us up to par?” Rather than having to look at a blank calendar and be creative on every week of every month, okay?

This is something again, that the offline world, the brick and mortar retail world has done beautifully well, and they do it well because they have to. It’s the only way for them to survive. In the online space, we’ve gotten spoiled with being able to run a Facebook ad and just thinking that’s good enough.

Running just a Facebook ad, not leveraging your email campaigns, your re-targeting, running multiple different campaigns on multiple different networks, you’re basically limiting yourself to 1 monorail track, very, very skinny vision of your customer base. There’s a whole lot more out there. Your company could grow by leaps and bounds and become way more profitable, if you only broadened your advertising reach and approached them on multiple levels and gave them consistent advertising with consistent promotions and different promotions to keep you top of mind in their minds, so that when they’re ready to buy, when they’re interested in what you have, you’re going to be person they think of, they’re going to come back to you and they’re going to purchase.

These promotions are also great for getting your existing customers to come back and buy again, because it’s reminding them that you’re relevant. Okay, guys, so there’s my ramble on advertising and default promotions. I’m just about to pull into the office here, right now, and I’ve got a couple videos to shoot, so I’m going to sign off, and I’ll see you later.