Top tips for staging a sale
- Rosemarie Milsom
- 8 July 2009
Successful e-tailers swear by the value of sales both in terms of building their brand recognition and boosting the coffers, but there's more to staging an online sale than meets the eye. Get the balancing act between the art and science wrong and you'll not only lose the opportunity to attract new customers, you risk alienating your existing base.
"Getting people's attention online is a whole different challenge to that faced by off-line businesses," says Netregistry chief executive officer Larry Bloch. "It's a complex mix of creativity, research, planning and technology. Sales are essential and if you get them right the benefits are enormous."
Well-known for creative, attention-grabbing approaches such as this year's ‘Larry has been kidnapped' sale, Netregistry invests time - on average about three weeks per sale - and resources to get the recipe right. Planning is essential.
"Sales are tactical," says Bloch. "You can't just keep sending customers discount promotions; it's important to engage them with interesting content as well. We want to get our customers used to seeing our brand and to build up recognition and
respect, because that has an impact on how they'll receive
a sale pitch."
It's important to have genuine justification for a sale, according to Brisbane-based internet entrepreneur and blogger Yaro Starak.
"You don't want to appear to be like the guy on TV who has a sale every other week," he advises. "You want customers to switch on not ignore you, so give some thought as to why you are holding a sale. Have a purpose."
Timing is everything
Jenny Van Cleef, founder of family-run online children's wear store Madison Lane, gives careful consideration to the timing of sales, which are essential to the ongoing success of her business.
"We hold sales depending on the seasonal pattern and key times of the year," she says. "For example, Christmas shopping sales are planned 10 to 12 weeks out with the offer of a lay-by and free giftwrap service."
The planning phase is also an opportunity to get the pricing right.
"Determining the right pricing is influenced by three things: the product mix and either the need to move some product quickly or the need to boost customer loyalty through a VIP sale," says Van Cleef.
Once you have chosen a sale date, give customers a deadline to respond.
"If you seem to have a permanent ongoing sale then people will take it for granted that they can get back to you later," says Starak. "Plan a sale so that you are encouraging people to make a decision and commit. Send out a reminder close to the end."
It's important to make sure that once plans are set in motion, all the various elements of implementing a sale come together.
"You need to prepare the creative, [and] be clear about the timing, what you are offering and what it will cost," says Bloch, "and you also need to make sure the back-end tech is in place and sales staff have been trained up. Errors with the technical aspects chew up time and resources."
Getting the word out
For any retail business, sale time is usually also time to spend big on advertising or other ways of letting customers know about your special deals.
For e-tailers, an email strategy is essential.
"Without it we wouldn't have survived the tech wreck," says Bloch. "Email is the simplest and easiest way to maintain a relationship with customers and it's our most frequently used medium. But at the same time it's a very calculated exercise.
"We are sending emails to... thousands of customers each week but we use email to target particular groups of customers who we know favour a particular product. We can aim special offers at certain people."
Before targeting customers it's important to build up your email database and have a clear understanding of who your audience is. Refine your customer segments.
"You don't want to try to sell something to someone who has already bought the product from you, as this will only irritate them," says Starak. "Monitor traffic so you have a clear picture of what works and what doesn't."
Pay-per-click advertising programs are another way of targeting different customer segments while also raising revenue. For many sites, being paid for every click, rather than waiting for a sale or two to trickle in, is an appealing advantage. But Starak urges caution.
"A lot of people don't spend the time learning the subtleties of a particular program. It's a little like learning mathematics and you will be wasting money if you don't implement the right program for your business."
A key advantage of pay-per-click programs is that they are often targeted towards a very general audience and this could be ideal if it is difficult to determine what products or services your visitors might be interested in. But because of their general nature, they might not be the best choice if your site has a narrow focus and a targeted audience.
Stay on target
Van Cleef has used Google AdWords and has the following advice: "Know your budget and ask your friends what keywords they would search for if they were looking to make a purchase online. In our case ‘children's clothing', but it is very interesting what some people will search for."
Van Cleef also targets her email newsletter subscribers as a way to promote a sale and she relies heavily on the Missy Confidential site, which alerts subscribers to upcoming sales in fashion, both locally and nationally.
"Blogging also provides a good tool for some interesting informal reading for customers, with good links back to our site," says Van Cleef.
Both Starak and Bloch use microblogging service Twitter to spread the word, and value its immediacy in terms of receiving feedback.
"I'm very active on Twitter and our marketing department is also involved," says Bloch. "It's an interesting medium for disseminating information about the company and I like to keep track of what people are saying about us."
And if all the elements of a sale come together, what customers are saying should be all good.
"The art definitely plays a role," says Bloch. "You need to be creative, desirable and provocative on the promotional side, but you can't ignore the technical, the science. Those who do sales well measure every single aspect of their strategy and aren't afraid to change." #
