Catherine Langman:
Well, hello there. It is Catherine Langman here with you on the Productpreneur Success Podcast. Welcome to the show if you are a new listener, and of course, welcome back to our longtime listeners. Fabulous to have you back here.
Catherine Langman:
Recently, I’ve been speaking to quite a few eCommerce brand owners about how tough they’re finding it, trying to generate sales and get traffic to their website consistently over the last couple of months. I think between the drop in consumer confidence maybe leading up into the federal election that we finally just had maybe the increase in our cost of living, maybe a couple of school … Well, the last school holidays with two long weekends in a row. There’s a lot of reasons I’m sure leading to lower sales than usual. And it has been a common experience pretty much across the board, but what is also happening is business owners adopting the mindset that customers just aren’t spending at all and that the only way to get through is to deep discount or to cut all the spending, to ride things out as lean as possible.
Catherine Langman:
And really, I feel like maybe there are a lot of people who either have forgotten what it was like or maybe not experienced what it was like prior to this COVID induced fury of eCommerce shopping behavior over the last couple of years because back before everyone was forced by lockdowns to shop online, we typically had to work. As business owners, we typically had to work a little bit harder with our marketing and get a little bit more creative with our promotional activities in order to really drive the consistent revenue growth that we all want.
Catherine Langman:
And now that we’re all living more freely again in our society, our consumer behavior is just not the same as it was during COVID lockdowns. And really as business owners, we need to readjust how we do our marketing. And as a result, what I’m not seeing enough of or a lot of is business owners doing the kind of marketing that really gives customers a reason to buy from them on their website. So perhaps not everyone around the country or the world is needing to shop as much as they did before right now. But I can guarantee you, just as the sun will come up tomorrow, consumers don’t all suddenly stop buying everything completely.
Catherine Langman:
And so when they do need to buy what you sell, you really want to be at the forefront in their mind so that they give their business to you. And so that means in many cases, getting a little bit cleverer and a little bit more strategic with your marketing and promotional planning. And so in today’s episode, I’m going to be sharing with you how I go about planning my promotional calendar so that you can hopefully crush your goals for the rest of ’22 and really put yourself in an excellent, healthy position to dominate when Q4 comes around, which is always the biggest sales period in the eCommerce promotional calendar. All right.
Catherine Langman:
So the first, we’re going to go through three main stages in the planning out your eCommerce marketing and promotional calendar, and the first part I really want you to think about is locking away the biggest campaigns that you’re going to be running during the year. So when it comes to eCommerce marketing, you’re typically going to have what we call like an always on funnel, and then you’re also going to have time limited promotions or product launches. And we really want to have both, right? So you always want to have some marketing running that is going to consistently drive traffic and sales to your website, something that’s going to be always building awareness and building consumer demand for what you sell. But then, you need to also think about putting in the kind of marketing that gives people the reason to buy right now.
Catherine Langman:
So for this part, I want you to start by, and it can help by getting out either a printed annual calendar or you could do it in a spreadsheet, which is what I love to do because I love Excel. I know not everybody loves Excel as much as I do, but anyway, find a way where you can really look at the year as a big picture, as a whole.
Catherine Langman:
And the first thing that you want to do is to lock away four major promotions in a year, and this could be either a product launch, whether it’s a new product to your range or you might be doing almost like a relaunch if it’s a seasonal thing, or it could be a really big promotion like your Black Friday type size promotion. Okay. So you really want to have four really big promotions in a year. And when I say really big, we want to go out with a lot more song and dance and put a lot more effort into planning all of the detail for these sorts of big promotions, and we add in more steps for these as well compared to perhaps some smaller things which we’ll talk about in a minute.
Catherine Langman:
And so in the lead up to your four big promotions, you’re going to be doing some kind of a list building, audience building effort such as running a giveaway or something along those lines. Sometimes people will get lists in other ways, whether it’s at an expo or doing an online collaboration type event, but something that’s really going to build your list. There’s some fantastic apps that really do an amazing job at building lists really fast as well. We love Wheelio, so long as you do a good job of customizing that to match your brand. Anyway, so list building effort. Hopefully the reason for that is obvious. We want to be using our email list as much as possible because it is going to give you the highest returns. So before you go into any major promotion, you definitely want to have a list building effort.
Catherine Langman:
We want to be trying to go out with multiple different channels of communication around big promotions, so we absolutely are going to be sending a lot more emails during this promotion. You definitely want to be running at least a couple of paid traffic channels. So whether it’s Instagram or Facebook being one and Google being another, you might do some extra effort such as designing and building a really well optimized landing page or a blog so that you’ve got some SEO traffic coming in, but it’s also designed really nicely to convert, get people from that landing page or blog into your store and to purchase as well.
Catherine Langman:
And maybe looking at collaborating to get more eyeballs on the promotion as well, so whether it’s with other brand or eCommerce business owners who share your audience but are not in competition or with influencers or brand reps or all of the above to get a bit more reach in terms of the number of eyeballs that are going, as I said, are going to see your event, your promotional that you’re running.
Catherine Langman:
So these four big promotions, like I said, you’re going to be putting a lot more thought into these. You’re going to be doing things like perhaps getting some photography or some videography, so working with some content creators there or photographers. You’re going to be getting some design work done to get all of the assets that you need to use in your promotion, so graphics for your website and for your emails and your social media content and all of that good stuff. So you can see it’s a fair bit of effort.
Catherine Langman:
When it comes to running a large promotion, I definitely want to be planning ahead in terms of the goals, traffic and revenue goals, the number of orders that you want to get, how are you going to motivate people to buy it? It doesn’t have to be an incentive. Obviously, if you’re launching something new, you wouldn’t necessarily be putting a big discount on that, but there might be other promotions where you are working on incentives. So really putting a lot of thought into planning that.
Catherine Langman:
So if you do this, just as an aside, if you do want to have a lot more help in how to plan and execute a promotion like this, a big campaign, I do have a training bundle available to teach you the step by step process and give you templates and calculator tools and all sorts of good stuff. So if you’re looking for a little bit of help on that, you can just head to productpreneuracademy.com and it’s in the short courses section, it’s just $197.
Catherine Langman:
Anyway, moving on. So once you’ve got those four big promos in your 12-month calendar, hopefully you’re already along the lines of thinking, “I’m going to do one per quarter because it’s quite a bit of effort.” So if you can do that and that works out, then that’s going to help you manage your time and energy throughout the year as well.
Catherine Langman:
And I guess just one last tip there. When you are working on those big things, you want to try and line up any promotional partners you might need well in advance. So if you are going to work with content creators or influencers or brand reps or anything like that, you can’t be dropping this stuff on people like that at the last minute. They’re going to have things locked down already, so you want to try and book these things in advance. All right.
Catherine Langman:
So around the bigger promotions like that, you want to be making sure that you have other smaller promotions running throughout the year. And typically, when we’re running all of this systematic marketing for our eCommerce clients, we have something going every week. Sometimes it is like a theme that we have running for a whole month. Sometimes we’ll just have something going for a week or maybe two weeks, but essentially we want to be looking at how can we break up the year into months and weeks and have something going out all of the time. And this does not mean that you have to have a discount going out all the time because if you do that, especially if you’re really just resorting to using email subject lines and ads or content on social that is like, “20% off this week,” it’s not particularly inspiring, right?
Catherine Langman:
Whereas, I want to do a bit of a shout out to one of our clients, Ashlee from frenchsoda.com.au, which is such a great, fun brand for kids that she is doing a promotion right now called mayhem. Beg your pardon, Messy Play May. I’m getting ahead of myself here. And so for her, her brand is beautiful, great, fun, bright, vibrant colors, outdoor rain gear, so raincoats and gum boots for kids. And a big part of the mission for her brand is to really encourage kids to get outside, even when it’s cold and wet to play and get dirty and messy and creative and having fun outdoors and jumping in muddy puddles and doing all of that good stuff that kids love to do and parents hate to clean up after. So being able to put this theme around the promotion and that then led on to some really great fun content to be created for blog and for emails and for ads and for social media content. This just has so much scope for what can go out every single time she’s reaching out to her audience.
Catherine Langman:
And so she’s got some special bundle offers that you can only get if you go to this Messy Play May landing page, and you can also go in running to win something as well. So there’s a whole lot of stuff that’s happening and it’s all themed around this theme of Messy Play May, which has really led to how the promotion gets executed. I don’t want to give away private data, but I can say that she’s really been able to achieve some much better results than the same time last year, which is obviously what we want to be comparing to.
Catherine Langman:
So you want to think about how can you break up the rest of the year around your really major promotional events and product launches into smaller ones? Whether they go for a whole month, whether they go for a week or a couple of weeks, so that you can have something new and different going out to your list. If you’re going to try and sustain a promotion for a month, you have to have enough variety of content being able to break up the offers, the content, the angles, the visuals so that it’s not the same emails going out to your list every single time. So you’ve got to be able to give people a lot of variety there to really give people a reason to buy.
Catherine Langman:
And then the other thing that you can do as well. So obviously if you’re going to be doing something small on a weekly basis, as an example, something that I see a lot of big eCommerce retailers do, you can tell if you’re on their email list, you can tell when they need to make bank at the end of the week because they’ll roll out a free express shipping this weekend only type thing. So that’s what I would classify as something that’s a bit of a smaller offer as opposed to maybe Messy Play May, which is a little bit bigger, but really what you want to be able to do is reach your customers in a variety of different communication touchpoints that they are going to be connecting to you via. So obviously email is a really big one.
Catherine Langman:
You might also be already collecting phone numbers to use with SMS marketing in Klaviyo. Not that I would be doing that every single week, but perhaps for a more comprehensive promotion, you would use that.
Catherine Langman:
But also with your advertising. So something that we like to do and to suggest for ads running on Facebook and Instagram is that you can have a warm traffic ad campaign set up so that you’ve got all your warm audiences in there. The campaign is always running, but in the ad section, you can duplicate the ad that’s running and change out the content to the newest promotion or incentive or offer that you’re rolling out this week or this month so that it just makes it really simple and easy for you to always have an ad strategy to be able to communicate whatever the latest promotion or offer is with your audience. Obviously, if you’re doing a really big promotion, you’d definitely be running cold traffic ads as well, but perhaps for something smaller that’s on a weekly basis, then you might not do that.
Catherine Langman:
You can also, if you’re putting together some really good content for posting on your organic socials, whether it’s Facebook or Instagram or whatever, you can also just take that post and use that in the ad, so you don’t actually have to create anything new. So hopefully that gives you a good tip there.
Catherine Langman:
So once you’ve got all of that down pat, you should have something in your calendar pretty much every week. So you want to be going out with at least one new email every single week to your list, and what we really recommend is that you then resend that email on a different day and time later in the week to everyone who did not open the first one. So two touch points on email minimum every single week. And then if you are doing those really big major promotions, you’re going to be emailing even more than that as well.
Catherine Langman:
Now, the third part of this planning process to really get you some fantastic traffic and revenue growth as the year progresses is to track your statistics, track your metrics. We need to be getting into the habit of doing this. I know some of you are getting really good at this. Perhaps some of you not so much yet. So I really want to make sure that you are all … And when I say track, I actually mean recording it somewhere so not just looking at it because I think a lot of us are pretty keen to every day we get up, we sit down at our desk and we open our Shopify dashboard and we have a look at what’s going on. I don’t mean that. Obviously, we all want to be doing that, but I mean literally on the same day every week, sit down and record your performance metrics across all of your marketing in a spreadsheet or somewhere where you can actually see the trends happening over time.
Catherine Langman:
And also, where you can note down any other observations that you had about whatever you rolled out with your marketing that week. So for instance, if you see that this week, my revenue from my emails really tanked, then you can start having a look at, okay, well, what was different about my email this week? Was it the offer that really sucked or was it the fact that I just didn’t get the email itself right? Maybe the subject line was not great and it either landed in the spam folder or perhaps it just was not very inspiring and people just didn’t open it. Or maybe I’ve seen a few emails recently coming out where I have to keep scrolling for a million years before I even find a button to click. These emails are not making it easy to buy, so I just give up and go somewhere else.
Catherine Langman:
So you want to start reviewing your performance metrics, noting them down on a regular weekly basis so that you can track the trends, but also trying to think critically to get those sorts of insights out of what you’ve been doing so that you can improve. And this scientific approach where you are starting with a plan of attack, “Here’s my hypothesis. This is what I think is going to help me get better results.” You implement it all, then you track and monitor the results, and then you learn from that data so that you can do better next time. It’s really crucial when it comes to growing an eCommerce business. And so doing that, observing the trends.
Catherine Langman:
We like to look at things like taking things like subject line and preheader text in conjunction with each other. What are the trends that are increasing the open rates on emails? And then looking at the click-through rate of your email. If I present my content one way versus another way, if I maybe use dynamic product widgets or if I really make the offer a little bit more obvious, if I put price points in or take them out, what is getting the best click-through rates?
Catherine Langman:
And then also looking at the landing pages that you’re sending the emails to as well. Can you find any insights there that the data is telling you that might be indicating a higher or lower conversion rate once people get to your website? It’s all well and good to think that once you’ve built your website, it’s done and it’s as good as it can be and you don’t have to change anything. Of course, that’s not really how it is. So we always want to be trying to find ways to improve the conversion rate once people are on the website as well. So it might be that you notice, in fact, you can actually go into your Google analytics and you can do a search in there to see what your highest converting webpages are. Sometimes it’s really surprising, and there might be some things that you can learn around whether it’s product descriptions or the call for actions or if it’s a landing page, how is it designed and laid out? Is there something really crucial or glaringly obvious that you can see that is really contributing to a higher conversion rate versus a lower one once people are on your website?
Catherine Langman:
And then hopefully, you can see over time, you’ll be able to learn from those insights. But the other thing that I really want you to take out from what I’m talking about here is by really approaching your eCommerce marketing and your promotional calendar in this way, you are going to be giving people a reason to buy that wasn’t there before. Because you have these promotional events on, you might be theming some promotions around something that really gives people a reason to buy. Some parents might be thinking, “Oh yeah, I probably need to order my kid a raincoat, but I’ll get on to that later.”
Catherine Langman:
But then all of a sudden, there’s Messy Play May going on and you think, “Oh gosh, absolutely. I want to get my kid off their iPad. I want them to be outside. I think that’s going to be fantastic for my kid’s health and development and creativity and intelligence and all of that stuff. And there’s a special offer on right now. I can get this bundle deal. I’m going to do it.” So you’re giving people a reason to buy that’s getting them off the couch, getting them to act and take action, and closing the deal a little bit more often than if you don’t have any of this stuff running.
Catherine Langman:
The other thing that I just want to say that we’ve observed this year, and I think I’ve said this on the podcast before, is that we have absolutely noticed this year that the more generic promotions like Mother’s Day, sadly, and Easter and stuff like that just did not really shift the needle all that much with a lot of consumers. Maybe because it was so common in our inboxes and all over the internet and social media, there was so much content around Easter and around Mother’s Day that nothing really stood out, nothing really cut through the clutter. Whereas, when you have a promotional theme, a promotional title like Messy Play May, which is different, you take a bit more notice. So we are seeing a bit of difference that way in terms of the most successful promotions.
Catherine Langman:
So yeah, hopefully that gives you a really good overview for this episode. I really hope that I’ve been able to give you a little bit of insight and inspiration today around how you can plan for growth, how you can plan for success throughout the rest of this year and beyond. And I do actually have a couple more training bundles as well that might be useful if you do want to have a little bit more step by step help. So I have an eCommerce marketing planning bundle, and I also have an email marketing one as well. So if you are really wanting to up the ante with building your email list and sending the right emails and planning the right promotions to send out to your email list as well, that’s what that one is all about.
Catherine Langman:
So if you really need a little bit of help to plan and implement and monitor your results with all of this kind of stuff, you can grab either of those bundles. They’re both just $197. You can find out more about them or purchase them by heading to productpreneuracademy.com, and it’s in the short courses section of the menu as well. So hopefully that really helps.
Catherine Langman:
Of course, if you are keen for some help with any of this kind of marketing stuff, you can always give us a shout, whether you’re looking for coaching to help you learn and implement things or if you’re looking to outsource to a team of experts, you can always get some help from us. Just head over to productpreneuracademy.com and you can book in for a free strategy session with my team.
Catherine Langman:
That’s it for today, and I hope that you have enjoyed that episode, and I look forward to being with you again next week. Bye for now.