Three BFCM Promotion Tips

Are You Offering BFCM Discounts This Year?

If you're doing a BFCM promotion this year, and trust me just about everyone is, I thought I would jot down three BFCM promotion tips that might help you. Why? Because I think most people just post wild offers and hope it pays off. That kind of hope isn't a strategy. So let's dig in a bit.

First, Not Everyone Is The Same

We know this. We can all agree on this. Not everyone is the same. Yet, when it comes to big sales, we often treat everyone the same.

What do I mean?

The person who has never been to your site gets exactly the same discount as the person who has visited 10 times, spend hours on the site, and is likely ready to buy.

The person who is asking questions and thinking about buying your more expensive offer is shown the same big discount for your entry level product as the person who likely will never buy more than your entry level product.

In other words, without any segmentation, without any info at all, you have no idea how much money you're leaving on the table.

Can I Tell You a Story?

My buddy Shawn can skip this part, because he only wants the final tips. But for the rest of you, let me tell you a quick story of a pizza owner who thought she'd be super smart by hiring a few kids to put flyers out all over the neighborhood. The smart part was that each kid got a different color flyer – that way she could tell who was better at this kind of canvasing / distribution. She also put discounts on these flyers to help get people to come buy!

After a couple weeks, she sees that the kid with the blue flyer is clearly the winner. She lets the rest go and sends our blue flyer friend out to do more work.

After a month, the data is in. A lot of traffic. Tons of coupon use. No real lift in profit.

Can you guess why?

The kid was standing outside the pizza joint handing out flyers to people who were already planning on eating pizza. The only result was additional discounts.

Three BFCM Promotion Tips

Tip One: Prep your audience for the sale.

The first promotion tip is to make sure everyone knows you're about to have a special sale. You want that to go out to as many people as possible. Get the information out to everyone on your email list – and not just once. Often!

The best way to do that is to apply a tag to everyone, “BFCM21” and every time you email your list, you give them an out. “Click on this link if you don't want to hear any more details about our upcoming sale.”

That allows them to stop getting your promotion emails without unsubscribing from your list.

Tip Two: Use your existing segmentation to create multiple offers

I was talking to one plugin owner this past week who has one main product, but licensed based on quantity of sites. So I suggested one discount for the 3-site license, and a different discount for the 75-site license.

The point was that instead of having a single offering, you can shape your offerings for different segments. The person who needs 1 or 2 sites isn't anything like the person (or agency) that needs licenses for 50 sites or more.

If you have tags in your marketing automation platform, you can send different offers and discounts to different segments.

Tip Three: Limit your promotion by quantity

I told you about that pizza place owner. Imagine if the blue flyer had simply added, “Offer valid for the first 50 customers.” That would have changed the entire profit dynamic.

So consider this – create a coupon to drive your discount and then apply a limit to the use of the coupon. You might limit the quantity per day, for the whole weekend, or the total number of uses.

Either way, when you're messaging your prospects and customers, drive their activity towards the start of the window of the sale instead of the end of the sale.

Pretty sure we may do something like this at LearnDash where we'll offer 50% off, but look at limiting it for XX of deals.