As you develop your marketing plans for the upcoming season, make sure you’re shaping your promotions and sales to benefit your business.
Happy New Year!
With the New Year comes new energy, new focus, and new direction. Last month, we talked about setting goals this year for yourself and your staff. As we all gear up for a strong 2017, I encourage each of you to be intentional in shaping your year and shaping your season.
In the course of business, it’s easy to lose track of time and let holidays and seasonal promotions sneak up on us. That’s what I mean by “shaping your season.” The goal here should be to drive sales when the season starts (early kickoff!) and then prolong your season as long as possible.
While there is more than one way to do business, we all need to be cautious of too many discounts or the constant “HUGE BLOWOUT SALE!” mentality. This creates the furniture store “going out of business FOREVER” mentality with our customers – who are inevitably frustrated when there’s a deeper sale offered the next week.
To shape your season, ask yourself these questions:
- When does your customer typically start their own annual “tanning season?”
- How can you prime the season and start it a bit earlier?
- When does the season naturally slow down?
- How can we use sales and promos to stretch the season and drive renewals?
The answers to these questions will be a little different for each of us; but here’s an example of how this works in my full-service store (offering UV and sunless):
Our customers naturally come in around Valentine’s Day to start their tanning programs for the year. For this reason, we offer a discounted full-year package in January to encourage them to get in earlier. We also offer a “Tan ‘Til Spring Break” package in January to get our student tanners in and keep them until Spring Break. Then, we’ll offer an additional sale in March to keep them tanning after Spring Break (great time to focus on memberships).
Our season naturally slows in June or July. At this time of year, we always push a “Tan ‘Til End of Year” to keep people in and spending money. This is also when sunless sessions really pick up for us, so we start emphasizing it then. We also make sure not to “fight” promotions – so, we don’t push UV tanning in September – it just naturally slows then. We focus instead on other services we offer (teeth-whitening, sunless, and skin care) to keep things moving.
As you develop your marketing calendars and your plans for the upcoming season, make sure you’re shaping your promotions and sales to benefit your business. If you have a plan walking into it, you have a better chance to create engaging advertising campaigns, and thus, successful promotions.
Here’s to a great year!
