The biggest mistake that small business owners make with their sales and promotions? Not planning far enough in advance! I recommend at least a 1-2 month lead time, but as a small business owner myself, I know how difficult planning that far in advance can be. So today, I’m sharing a ONE MONTH timeline for planning, preparing, launching, and executing your sale.
- 4+ weeks out: PLAN
- Determine the details of your promotion: start date, how long it will last, which products will be discounted, how much they will be discounted, etc.
- Determine the type and quantity of marketing assets necessary to properly promote the sale (emails, social posts, discount codes, website updates/graphics, physical flyers, or signs).
- Determine what personnel or resources you will need
- 3 weeks out: DESIGN MARKETING ASSETS
- Create the visual assets needed for sale promotion (social media graphics, website banners, printed materials, etc).
- Make sure the branding is cohesive across all platforms.
- Please note: If you use a graphic designer, check with them ahead of time to see how much time they need to design your assets. This may affect your timeline!
- 2 weeks out: DRAFT AND SCHEDULE
- Make sure all emails and captions are drafted and ready to go.
- As much as possible, schedule all your social media posts and promotion emails to send at specific times, so you can set it and forget it!
- 1 week out: PROMOTE
- Your sale SHOULD NOT be a surprise to your customers. You need to start talking about it in advance of your launch!
- Your first communication about the sale should be going out 3-7 days prior to your launch date (any earlier and people will forget).
- The DAY BEFORE your launch, send out your second promotional communication alerting your customers and fans when the sale will go live.
- Make sure you record what your numbers looked like before the sale so you can effectively measure how successful the sale was.
- LAUNCH DAY ANNOUNCEMENT!
- Send 1-2 emails and post 1-2 posts on social media announcing your sale is live!
- REMINDERS
- How long your sale is will determine how often you should remind your customers about the sale.
- If your sale is one day only, hit it hard multiple times that day.
- If your sale is less than a week, talk about it every day. It’s a short period of time.
- If your sale is a week (or so), post on launch day, and once in the middle of the week.
- If your sale lasts a month, don’t post every day. Communicate on launch day, send weekly reminders via email, post twice a week on social media about your sale specifically.
- LAST CHANCE
- No matter the length of your sale, make sure you send one final “last chance” communication, both in email and posted on social media.
- If it was a longer sale, you might want to change your website banner as well.
- POST SALE REVIEW
- Don’t forget to track your numbers! Look at your sale numbers and see how they compare to your pre-sale numbers.
- If you’ve run multiple sales during the year, see how these numbers compare to those.
- If you run the same sale every year, look at this year compared to previous years.
- Determine what made this sale successful (or not) and make sure to implement your findings on the next one.
Now do you understand why I talk about needing time to prepare?? There’s a LOT to cover when you want to do a sale or promotion. But if you’re going to do it at all, you might as well do it right! I hope this helps guide you in the right direction.