Tired of running promotions that feel like they’re falling flat? In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on the little-known strategies that can transform your next campaign from “meh” to mind-blowing. And here’s the kicker: it’s simpler than you think.
What you’ll uncover:
- The One Step Most Businesses Skip—and how it’s costing them BIG during the holiday rush.
- Why Your Promotions Might Be Working Against You: Hint—it’s not about how often you promote but how you structure them.
- The Holiday Hustle Hack: My insider formula to crush Black Friday and Cyber Monday without breaking a sweat (or your budget).
- Your Customers Are Telling You Everything: How to decode what they really want without spending hours in spreadsheets.
- Quick Wins You Can Implement Today: Simple shifts that get your emails opened, your products flying off the shelves, and your team laser-focused.
This isn’t about boring, soul-sucking data; it’s about finding the magic in your promotions and giving you the tools to keep the momentum going.
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Measuring Holiday Promotion Success 0:00
Establishing Promotional Goals 2:05
Using Historical and Industry Benchmarks 2:39
Segmenting and Analyzing Data 3:40
Setting Up Regular Reporting 4:55
Actionable Insights from Data 6:08
Full article: https://salenaknight.com/make-your-holiday-promotions-more-successful-doing-this/
Hey there, and welcome to today's episode of the Bringing Business to Retail podcast. Well, it's finally here, the biggest money-making weekend of the entire year. Now, last year on Shopify Alone, merchants hit a record-breaking $9.3 billion in sales, and that was a 24% increase on 2022. Now, I'm not sure, and I don't think anybody is quite sure how this Black Friday is going to pan out with all of the interest rates and the cost of living, crisis, all of these things are going to affect how much people are spending, but it can go one of two ways. It could increase because people are looking for bargains, and it could decrease, because people don't have as much money to spend. So, as you know from my Black Friday series, the experts, we're all still a little bit unsure as to what's going to happen. But my hope for you, if you've chosen to participate, is that your inbox is full of orders, and your cash register is ringing, even if it's a digital cash register, which means you're busy. So I have kept this episode short and sweet. You're likely to have a bunch of promotions on the go, so this week's Bite Size episode includes my tips to making sure that those campaigns bring in the money and don't lose you customers. And as much as it can feel like you are too busy to do this, trust me when I say putting aside a few minutes a day to revise this will significantly impact your results. All right, let's jump in to this Bite Size episode. Number four is about measuring your results, because you know that I am a firm believer that most of your problems, in fact, nearly all problems can be fixed by looking at the data. Measuring your results isn't just a nice to have. It is a must-have for business success. So here is how I approach it. Every promotion that you will do should have an end goal. Now, it is not always about sales. Some of the things we talked about is doing a promotion to build your customer database or doing a promotion to maybe re-engage your existing customers. Remember, the point of mapping out your promotions is so that your customers aren't being bombarded. You have to have that promotional pulsing in place. Keep your customers interested without overwhelming them. In order to do that, we need to establish a baseline. Before your promotions even kick off, have baseline metrics and all of your KPIs, because this is going to give you the comparison to measure your holiday performance against. And you can do this by looking at your historical data, but what I like to do is couple that with industry benchmarks. So places like Shopify and Clavio, they will have industry benchmarks for pretty much everything. And they will have industry benchmarks for the holiday season as well. So looking at what are other people in your niche doing? What are other people in the beauty industry doing? What are other people in the pet industry doing? What are these numbers that you should be basing your KPIs off and putting those targets in place with? So once you've had that, work out what's important. So this all ties back to why you are running the promotion. A customer acquisition promotion is going to have very different metrics that are important to a product launch promotion. The information you need might be the customer acquisition cost is way more important for a customer acquisition promotion than your car abandonment rate. But if you're running a product launch, you might want to know your car abandonment rate. That would be key, but it's not key to something like a, well, it may be key, but it's not going to be top of mind for a customer acquisition strategy. So know what is important. Don't just collect data for the sake of collecting data. And speaking of data, make sure that you segment your data. Don't just look at the overall performance. Break down your data by, let's just take those examples. If you're doing a product launch, you might want to look at which sizes or which colors or which shapes sold best. If you are looking at a product launch, maybe you might want to look at which of your customer segments spent the most amount of money or which of your customer segments were the most engaged? Was it the new customers who were brand new to your brand? Or was it the customers who have been around for a long time? Was it the customers that spend more versus the customers that don't spend more? Where did they come from? Was it organic? Was it paid? Was it email? Was it social? How did they shop? Was it on mobile? Was it on desktop? This granular view can give you the insights that you need and things that you would otherwise miss. And when you have all of this data, when you have, remember, the important data, not just all the data, there's no point having data if it's not useful or if you're not going to look at it. But when you have this data, it will help you realign where you're spending your money. It will help you adjust what you're posting on socials and the messaging in your promotions moving forward. So set up a schedule for regular reporting. Now, I'm going to go so far as say, during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, your reporting should almost be hourly. I know it sounds like a lot, but you need to be adjusting. If something is working well, you want to be able to do more of it. Remember, there's a really good chance. If you are in the Black Friday, Cyber Monday space, there's a good chance that what you make in those four days is going to be more than you make in the whole month. So you can see why understanding what is selling, what is not selling and being able to adjust things like your spend or sending out a different email is really important. I also think that during a product launch, you should be looking at daily. And then for the rest of the time, you probably want to be looking at weekly for the holiday season. For share these reports, share these with your e-com team, with your in-store team, with your paid ads team, make sure everybody is aligned and on the same page. Because what's working in one channel may not be working in another channel or what is being utilized in one channel might not be being utilized in another channel. And they might be able to pivot and put those changes in place really, really quickly. Remember, the goal to measuring data is not just to collect data for the sake of data. It's to gain actionable insights. It's to allow you to pivot when necessary. Every metric that you track should have an action attached to it. If it doesn't, then you don't need to be tracking it. Do you need to spend more money? Do you need to spend less money? If your email open rates are low, maybe you need to revamp your subject lines. Maybe you need to do some more testing. If certain products are underperforming, perhaps they need a placement, maybe they've just been not highlighted. Maybe you need to do a promotion on them. Every metric should have an action that you can attach to it. So that's a wrap. I'd love to hear what insight you've gotten from this episode and how you're going to put it into action. If you're a social kind of person, follow me at the Selena night and make sure to leave a comment and let me know. And if this episode made you think a little bit differently, or gave you some inspiration, or perhaps gave you the kick that you needed to take action, then please take a couple of minutes to leave me a review on your platform of choice. Because the more reviews the show gets, the more independent retail and e-commerce stores, just like yours, that we can help to scale. And when that happens, it's a win for you, a win for your community, and a win for your customers. I'll see you on the next episode.
