(Hell!)o Holiday Deals
Hey E-preneurs! Whewwww the holiday deals definitely kicked my butt and the worst part is it was the planning process that hurt the most. Everyone thinks oh drop a sale here, take off free shipping there, add 20% and wha-lah your holiday campaign is set. NO WAY. Soo much work has to be put into a good holiday campaign and I am now a firm believer of planning wayyyyyyyyy ahead! So with the holiday deals you have of course Black Friday, then American Expresses Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, and then Holiday Deals just in general. [insert curse word here] This takes A LOT of work. So let me tell you about my journey….
Of course I waited until 3 weeks before the Holidays to start planning for my deals, which was error #1.
Always, Always plan ahead definitely on big events/holidays like this. If you want to be creative and different when it comes to holiday campaigns, it’s going to take a lot of hard work and planning. I didn’t think it would be hard to come up with holiday deals until I sat and started to write out what deal I would have for each day, and of course I was left stumped with only free shipping and % off to offer. I had to make it different so when I started planning I decided on this:
Black Friday: Everything “Buy one get one half off” (Promote with Video/Commercial)
Small Business Saturday: Pass out pom pom key chains in the area with candy, business card, and discount code. 20% discount for online shoppers (Promote with Boomerang Flyer)
Cyber Monday: Everyone receives $20 in VITAL BUCKS (free $20 off order) Promote with “Make it Reign-deer” videoscribe
But of course…NONE OF THIS WENT AS PLANNED!
Black Friday EFFUPS: So for this deal I planned to shoot a video/commercial in the city and have words saying “Buy one get one Half off” but my intern got sick and it was super rainy outside on the day of the shoot so I had switch days and use my other intern who had to work later that day, so the video had to be super rushed which kind of left the quality of the video in an epic fail. Also I couldn’t figure out how to create a discount code on my
website to automatically do “buy one get one free” so I had to switch up my whole deal and change it to Buy one Bag get a free pom pom key chain and free coin purse. The video still came out nice because my best friend had it edited for me but it definitely wasn’t what I envisioned.
Small Business Saturday EFFUPS: So for Small Business Saturday I wanted to go out in the community and pass out flyers, free pom pom key chains, and candy to people in the area to make them aware of small business Saturday however that didn’t turn out as planned. I reached out to some local businesses to see if they wanted to partner to do an event but sadly none of them responded. So I still did 20% off online orders for Cyber Monday and posted a Boomerang video of the Small Business Saturday Poster.
“The only one who can tell you ‘you can’t’ is you. And you don’t have to listen.”-Nike
Cyber Monday EFFUPS: So for Cyber Monday I attempted to give customers $20 in VITAL BUCKS but when trying to figure out the discount codes on my site I couldn’t configure it to take $20 off all orders so I had to specify and do it only for orders over $80. It wasn’t a big change but it still wasn’t how I wanted it. I did get the chance to make a cute little video with the app Videoscribe that allows you to make whiteboard drawings. Check out the cool video I made
So to wrap it up, coming up with holiday deals are STRESSFUL!!! PLAN, PLAN, PLAN in advance.