Holiday Promotions - Are They Working?

What was your best promotion in 2016?

A new report came out yesterday from Business Wire that reveals some very interesting data about retail promotions in 2016. See here for the overview info-graphic and here for the article.

Since we hope you’re extremely busy right now (in a good way!) we just offer this one piece of advice…

Quick Tip: Take 5 minutes to check the success of your holiday promotions and your inventory levels.

This time of the month, with only two weeks left before Christmas, is about the last time of year that you can make any last-minute adjustments to your promotions and strategy for the holidays. Based on this report, you want to make sure that you aren’t giving away too much profit margin in promotions while leaving yourself overstocked on inventory.

There is a fine line between making the promotion good enough to entice the buyer and not training your clientele to always be a discount shoppers. Some people feel bad about this; that you are inflating prices arbitrarily. They key here is remembering that the cheapest price is not always the best for the consumer. The old adage that "you get what you pay for" holds true on average.

A few ideas:

Take a look at your top 2 promotions and your worst 2 promotions. Cross reference the 4 and see what went right and what went wrong. Use them to plan new promotions here are the top 3 promotions that get me every time:

1.     Spend $xx and get a free gift! They don't even have to tell me what the gift is - all I know is I want it.

2.     Get 25% off your next order! Using a big number like this gets people’s attention. This could almost be better than free shipping.

3.     Free shipping if you order now! Who doesn't want free shipping?

All these promotions might not work for your store, so you can alter them to fit your situation. Another great way to get promotion ideas is go talk to your retail neighbors or community. See if they had a promotion that worked really well for them and then make it your own. Remember that when you are coming up with new promotion ideas that it is all about the CLIENT!