Show Notes
While we’re not always running an advertised promotion, they ARE a powerful tool for increasing sales, creating awareness and maximizing contact with current and future customers.
But if you’re not IN the promotion business – where do you start?
During this episode we’ll break down some simple approaches to great promotions and how to get them up and running. First, let’s run through the basics:
Who is your Audience?
If you haven’t done this yet, you need to develop a clear idea of WHO you’re selling to. That way you can design something that fits that “sample” person. That will also lead you to what kind of promotion you might want to run.
Example 1: Blue collar worker in a small town working for an electrician, single mom who loves to spend money on her kids
Example 2: Local parents of elementary and middle school children
Deciding What to Promote:
- Do you have inventory of something you’d like to sell off?
- Is there something in particular you’d love to sell MORE of?
- What NEW product would you like to test in your market?
- Something seasonal that just makes sense
Promotion Types:
- Savings or discounts (was/is)
- Free upgrade or add on at retail $$ spent
- Loyalty coupons
- Order one, get another one for free
- Referral offerings
- Time-limit bundles
- Unique Offering
- Seasonally hot or fashionable
Create Your Message
What, Why, How
Support your local restaurant by eating out with a 50% discount on food or non-alcoholic drinks.
What: 50% discount on food or non-alcoholic drinks
Why: Support your local restaurant
How: eating out – ordering online
Publishing Options
How will you actually promote your promotion? Because that will determine what you’ll need. But the basics are almost always the same:
- Photos or a short video
- Pricing
- Digital
Email Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Menus / Tables
Signs Outside of Schools
Calling your Customers
Measure success
- Make sure you measure success
- How many sales did you generate?
- Did you sell the promo or make other sales because of the promo?
- How much did the promo cost you? (ads or goods or time)
- Should you do another one?
Transcript
Mark Stephenson:
Hey everyone and welcome to episode 176 of The Custom Apparel Startups Podcast. My name is Mark Stephenson:.
Marc Vila:
And this is Marc Vila. And today we’re here to talk about how to design a promotion or a sale for your business.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. It’s something that isn’t talked about that much. You can tell because this is episode 176, and I think it’s the first time that we’ve talked about this.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s one of those things where it seems simple enough that you just do it. Because we see promotions in sales all the time, right? How do you go on to get customers into your store? You tell them that Coca-Cola is buy one get one free, and then people will come in.
Mark Stephenson:
It’s more part of, we talk about how to write a good email marketing, how to do good email marketing and there’s promos in that. How to do Facebook marketing or Facebook ads and it’s basically a promo in that. So it’s really, normally we talk about it as a subset of marketing when really we should give it the attention it deserves.
Marc Vila:
It does deserve some attention. And I’ll say that some businesses thrive off of promotions because of where they’re located or who their customer base is or how people expect to shop for those items. And other businesses really don’t benefit from promotions and it’s not necessarily a good use of their time. But in your business out there, it’s definitely worth the effort if you’re trying to grow your business, to give promotions a shot, to give sales a shot and see if you can benefit from this with your market. And I actually have a good example I thought of with that. I’m sure you know this story.
Mark Stephenson:
Does it have to do with a biker bar?
Marc Vila:
I’ll let you find out as I tell it. Okay?
Mark Stephenson:
Okay.
Marc Vila:
I don’t remember names so if you can just forgive me. This was a while back, and this is something that came to memory while we were starting the show. But JCPenney had a new either CEO or business development executive of sorts. Do you know what I’m talking about?
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. A guy from Apple went to JCPenney.
Marc Vila:
Yes.
Mark Stephenson:
They thought they were going to save it.
Marc Vila:
And they went to JCPenney and the big thing they were going to do is just advertise good prices everywhere. That you can walk into JCPenney and just everything is the price that is and it’s a good price. And it probably was a good price. I bet they had polos for 12 bucks. But the problem was is that they were located in malls and the brand of shopping in malls and the competition around them is you go into a mall and there’s a bunch of expensive stuff and then there’s sale sections that are 50% off and people feel really good that they’re getting this $25 shirt or their shirt for $25 that’s normally 50. But the whole secret is that almost nobody is buying them when they’re 50. Everyone’s buying them when they’re half off. So that sale and promo business thrived in malls. And it didn’t work for JCPenney and they went back and I think … I mean, they are still in business. I don’t know how they’re doing.
Mark Stephenson:
They are but that guy’s not in charge anymore.
Marc Vila:
I don’t think he’s in charge anymore. That’s an example of promotions not working and working for certain businesses.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And I like your comment about basically if you go in a … You’re trained to look for sales in malls. So when you’re in a mall, if you are not … It’s like if you are familiar, it’s got to be 15 or 20 years ago now, with the Saturn brand of cars.
Marc Vila:
Yes.
Mark Stephenson:
They were the first ones to come out with just like it’s no negotiations. It’s just one price. And they didn’t do that well because people have been conditioned to go in and negotiate a price on a car. Even though it says one price in their advertising, no one believed them.
Marc Vila:
Nobody believed them. And it took a company like CarMax to disrupt the market and really promote that idea. And push it and work on promoting the idea. And then CarMax quickly became a leader in the used car market by offering a fair price per se and non negotiating and changing the way you buy cars. I believe that maybe even is their slogan.
Mark Stephenson:
You know what, I think that one of the reasons that CarMax was so successful is because even though they didn’t run discounts on their cars, they still had tons of promotional material that came out. They still did a lot of advertising and they did a lot of … They did flyers and postcards and they did some TV stuff. They did radio stuff. So they were using promotions without applying the discount. As a matter of fact, they were promoting the idea that they’re not giving discounts. This is the best price.
Marc Vila:
Which I think is probably a distinction we should make from the beginning here is that you can talk about a promotion of something where you’re specifically going to discuss a particular product that you would like customers to buy or inquire about. And then you could have a sale of something where the item that you’re promoting is discounted to some degree or the sale is discounted. So as we talk about this, we’ll probably bounce back and forth. So we’ll do our best to make sure we say words like sale or promotion to help discuss some of those things. But it is a really good point is they promoted an idea at CarMax that it was a one price place and conversely how with the JCPenney example was they weren’t promoting sale items like Macy’s were and Macy’s was continually beating them in the malls because they were promoting the sale.
So let’s just go into how to create or design a promo or a sale. And then at the end of this, we’re going to talk about measuring your success to see if you should repeat and do the same thing or if you should try something different or how it works for you.
Mark Stephenson:
I do want to stop and put in a very important definition here for all the Gen Zers. A mall is a place where they used to keep all the stores. It’s one building that they put all the stores in. There you go. That’s it.
Marc Vila:
Now it’s a place where they have farmer’s markets and car shows.
Mark Stephenson:
That’s right. And disappointment frequently.
Marc Vila:
And disappointment.
Mark Stephenson:
A lot of disappointment.
Marc Vila:
I went and I hung out at the mall. I told you about how my daughter had a birthday party.
Mark Stephenson:
Oh yeah. Okay.
Marc Vila:
It wasn’t too close to my house so I just decided to-
Mark Stephenson:
Go to the mall.
Marc Vila:
I just went to the mall and I went to the bookstore.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
In real life. Not Amazon. It was fun.
Mark Stephenson:
You can pick up books and look at them. Yeah.
Marc Vila:
Had a lot of fun. I bought a coffee.
Mark Stephenson:
Oh, nice.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Not a book. I ended up buying the book off Amazon, because it was like 30% cheaper. I felt bad.
Mark Stephenson:
Okay. This is more fodder for what we’re talking about.
Marc Vila:
I felt bad about doing it, but I was like, I’m not going to pay 30 something dollars for this book when I can get it for 19.99 on Amazon. I just can’t do it.
Mark Stephenson:
They made more on the coffee. They made more on the coffee.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. But I did buy a coffee. No snacks though. I was trying to avoid the sugar. But anyway…
Mark Stephenson:
So I think these conversations actually like JCPenney’s and CarMax and Saturn and all that stuff really are examples of companies that did or did not really know their audience based on what happened in the end. So one of the first things that you have to figure out when you’re looking at your business in general, but in specific, when you’re looking at what you want to sell or put on promotion is who are you going to sell it to? I mean, if you haven’t figured out who your audience is yet, then you should pause for a second and work out who are you talking to? Because when you create a promotion or you create a sale, that’s the fundamental question. I’m not going to, hey, BOGO on onesies and you’re doing it at a convention of people that don’t have children.
Marc Vila:
Right, right. We’ve talked about it in plenty of other examples before. I think even an episode or two ago, we were talking about … We even mentioned some sales and promotions and some upsells. And we were talking about that if your customer base was people who ride motorcycles, offering a free hat very well could be a good promotion for them. Right?
Mark Stephenson:
Right.
Marc Vila:
Because you often see people wear motorcycles wear a hat. Why? Because your hair gets really messed up while you’re on a motorcycle.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Good one.
Marc Vila:
And you can cover it. Compared to offering them a 10% off coupon might not be something that type of person’s really that interested in. They’re not going to be as excited about carrying the coupon to bring to you later as they may be to get a free hat with their logo on it or something.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. That’s good. Got to know your audience.
Marc Vila:
Knowing your audience. What we could talk about here is a little bit about how do you define your audience and then we’ll come up with a couple examples and we can carry those examples out throughout this promotional idea process.
Mark Stephenson:
Okay. That sounds good.
Marc Vila:
So just to start on that in the first place, in regards to coming up with your audience or your avatar, it’s a vision of a sample ideal customer that you might have. One exercise to do would be to say, describe your perfect customer. What would they be? If I start thinking about my business, I may say, okay, it’s a parent with a child in elementary or middle school. Mom and dad, either they both have pretty good jobs or maybe just mom or dad work and they have a higher income job. They live in a nice community in a single family home. They have two kids. They both drive pretty reasonable, nice cars, but not Lamborghinis, but maybe somewhere between a Camry and a Lexus range. And they really care about participating with their children at school and in after school activities and daughter’s in dance and son is in little league. That’s my avatar.
Mark Stephenson:
I love how detailed that is. The only thing I would do in addition is I would give them names.
Marc Vila:
Okay.
Mark Stephenson:
I would be like, it’s Tom and Gina.
Marc Vila:
Really, it’s Eduardo.
Mark Stephenson:
It’s Eduardo and Lisa.
Marc Vila:
It’s Eduardo. He goes by Ed. Sometimes Eddie. In college, he went by Eddie.
Mark Stephenson:
I like that.
Marc Vila:
But he decided after college, he was just going to go by Ed because he didn’t think it was as mature enough. But even his buddies at work still call him Eddie.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And he wears stupid hats. He wears just like … Nobody will tell him that he’s too old to wear these hats. But the point is valid is the more descriptive that you get … And this is just the way I do things. The more that when you create something or you write something that you’re talking to a person in a specific situation, the clearer everything afterwards gets. So in Marc Vila’s example, I mean, you’re talking like who is your audience? Tom and Gina have two kids, a 12 year old boy and an eight year old girl. And he plays baseball and she goes ice skating. They drive a Camry and she drives Lexus SUV.
Marc Vila:
White.
Mark Stephenson:
She identifies as a soccer mom. They watch-
Marc Vila:
It has to be a white Lexus by the way.
Mark Stephenson:
Yes. Of course it is.
Marc Vila:
Very specific.
Mark Stephenson:
Do they make other colors? But you’re building this profile and you start to figure out what do those people buy? How do they shop for things? It’s all good.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It is important to be detailed on this and sometimes certain details matter and they don’t. So you really have to decide this for you. If you live in a particular Hispanic area and you’re involved in the Hispanic community … And my father was so he specifically, part of his avatar was Spanish speaking. Or first or second generation immigrant. So these are things that you can consider in your avatar too. Other times you may say, well, the race or national origin really doesn’t matter for mine as long as they’re into motorcycles.
Mark Stephenson:
Right. Yeah. Or it may be you’re … Let’s say an alternative avatar is going to be a blue collar worker in a small town. Maybe he’s an electrician’s assistant or she’s an electrician’s assistant. Her dad was an electrician. She’s not married, but she’s got one four year old little girl. She is just trying to make ends meet, but occasionally splurges on things for her daughter. That’s where she spends her money. She drives a crappy truck, but her kid has brand new shoes and pretty dresses and things like that.
Marc Vila:
And that’s important to her.
Mark Stephenson:
Yes.
Marc Vila:
I get it. That’s the example you’re going for?
Mark Stephenson:
Yep.
Marc Vila:
So we’re doing small town, blue collar worker, and we’ll do one a local parent of elementary or middle school kids just to shorten those up. And the reason why you do this is whenever you’re thinking of your promotional ideas or sales or whatever they are, you’re going to say would Eddie and his wife … I have not given her a name. We’ll call her Maria. Would Eddie and Maria … She goes by Mary sometimes. Her grandma called her Mary so it’s sentimental for her. Sorry. I apologize.
Mark Stephenson:
That’s okay.
Marc Vila:
Eddie and Mary, would they like this promotion? That’s the question you ask is if I showed this to Eddie and Mary, would they like it? Would they want to act on it? Would they call me? And that’s your mental litmus test of it works. Now, we all know that not everybody is the same and it’s really hard to put somebody into one definition. You use that as a test and you say, would this resonate with blue collar, single mom? Yes, it would. Because it’s got all the features that she would look for. Fair price. It’s going to look amazing for her daughter. It’s a little bit of a splurge thing, but it’s going to make her feel great. All these things. Then you know that this is a good promotion. So that’s why it’s important to know who your audience is.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And just to get out the way, I mean, if you live in a suburb, you share a lot of common characteristics with the people that live in your burb. Right? You probably, if you’re in a three, two house, everybody in that development lives at a three, two or a four, two. Everybody drives, for the most part, a $30,000 to $50,000 import. They all have probably one or two kids. I mean, just when you think about your avatar, it would be weird if a single guy lived in a four, two in a suburban neighborhood. You’re not talking to that guy because he stands out. You’re talking to everybody that lives in that neighborhood and that’s what the local parents thing is and that’s what the electrician’s assistant is. They’re examples.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. No, I think that’s great. So the first exercise in this is knowing who your audience is, picking your audience. And by the way, this can be more complex over time, meaning that you do have maybe two or three audiences or avatars that you sell to. But remember that there’s two things that are going to happen. You’re going to have promotions that can span across all of your avatars, which are much more generic. That’s going to be Coke is buy one, get one free at the grocery store because such a massive amount of people drink soda. It covers so many different avatars. Compared to they had … What’d Coke have? A Starlight diet Coke I think was one and it was in a fancy can and it was a Coke Zero product, I believe. So that’s a much lower subset and the marketing was for that because that’s not necessarily for the person who just wants a traditional Coke. For now, we’re going to focus on one. Your business may have two or three or more different avatars, but you want to think about your promotions with individual avatars. It’ll help them be more successful.
Mark Stephenson:
So let’s move on to deciding what you’re going to promote. And there’s a lot of ways to do this. And the first one that comes to mind for some reason for us is always, what do we have a lot of inventory of? Because I remember, especially in the eCommerce business, Colman and Company tends to … We release a lot of new products and not all of them are terribly successful. So we may end up buying 500 light blue and green coffee mugs for sublimation. That’s a terrible example. And they end up not selling very well. So we might want to try to sell through so we put them on sale and we create a promotion for it.
Marc Vila:
Right. So that’s an extremely common one that you see. Other things are just something you want to sell more of. So you have a particular hat that you like to make. It sews out really well on your embroidery machines. You get a really good profit margin on it. And you like working with your embroidery machines because you can do a bunch of other stuff. So you’ve got some hands on equipment, like vinyl and sublimation where you’re moving a lot. But you’ve also got your embroidery machine that you hit start and walk away. You’d like to sell more of those hats for all of those good reasons.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I love that.
Marc Vila:
And that’s something else. Yeah.
Mark Stephenson:
It could also be that it’s just super profitable. Like you went through one of our business reviews like we did for 2022 and you looked at the year before and figured out what were the most profitable deals. And maybe it’s on left chest logo DTF polos that you sold a bunch of and they’re super profitable and they’re easy to make so you want to sell more of those.
Marc Vila:
Yep. That’s great. You can also do on new products that you want to test out.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I like that a lot.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. You might see a new product advertised or you might have a new piece of equipment that you’re working with. Maybe it’s the first time you’re working with sublimation and you haven’t tried selling mugs or tumblers or mouse pads or something like that. Or it could be a new style of garment. Vapor Apparel was something that recently came on to the Colman and Company store. Yeah. And so maybe you say, well, this UV protection apparel, I think we could probably do pretty well within our market.
Mark Stephenson:
That’s a good example of the difference between a promotion and something that you just want to promote. When most people think of a promotion, they think of putting something on sale or doing something financial. Where Vapor Apparel is a great example, because it is a premium brand of sublimatable shirts, et cetera. And it’s worth every penny. So we used it in a lot of our videos. When we talk about sublimation, we talk about Vapor Apparel specifically for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s awesome. It’s easy to work with and it’s a good product for us to sell. We don’t promote it as a BOGO because we want to sell more of it. We just talk about it more and feature it in the things that we do.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. A bit earlier, we were talking about promotions versus sales and things like that. Definitely to reiterate this concept, when you’re deciding what to promote, it may be something that you want to sell at a lower price to bring business in, or it may be something that has particular features like the UV protection apparel. It’s a little more money, but it’s got unique features. It might be something that you can sell really cheap, so you can offer it at a very low price. It might be very profitable for you so you just want to talk to people about that product more. You just might want to just promote it more because it’s profitable for your business. And of course the great thing is if it’s all three. That’s beautiful.
Mark Stephenson:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Marc Vila:
That’s beautiful. And then there was one more thing that you wrote down here, Mark, which is a good one was seasonal items that just make sense.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I like this for two reasons. Not that I enjoy doing seasonal promos. I’m famous for not enjoying seasonal promos. It’s two things. If you’re trying to get more people’s attention to your business, just in general, and the 4th of July is coming up, if you have related products, it makes sense for you to talk about the 4th of July in any promotions that you do and use it as an excuse to launch promotions. So it’s the combination of, hey, we’d like to sell more of these dark blue fuzzy bunny ear hats that we have in inventory. I bet I can … If I sew an American flag on the front, it can automatically be my 4th of July promotion. And then I’m getting some attention on my products in general and I’m moving something that I’ve got in inventory.
Marc Vila:
Yep. Yep. We have sublimation flip flops as an example. This is a particularly good time for a business to say, summer’s coming, get yourself some flip flops. You can put your dog’s face on them. I mean, it’s weird, but you could.
Mark Stephenson:
No. And there’s a 100% chance that Hannah and Jess will put their dog’s face on sublimatable flip flops now. If you’ve seen any of our videos, you know that the two marketing gurettes that do most of our videos now, they have dogs and they’re not shy about putting them on everything. So flip flops. Yeah.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that all of this is just great stuff, to get back on track. Because I got lost in the dog flip flop.
Mark Stephenson:
On the dog flip flops.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. I want to print that-
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, so promotional types.
Marc Vila:
I have an idea. I want to print that shoe size thing. The metal thing you used as a kid to test your shoe size. I want to print that on flip flops.
Mark Stephenson:
Nice.
Marc Vila:
And just get a really big pair and then you can measure your kid’s foot right with your flip flops. I’m just saying it’s not a good idea.
Mark Stephenson:
That’s a winning idea. That’s a winning idea. Is there a podiatry day? Is there some kind of a seasonal approach to doing shoe measuring flip flops?
Marc Vila:
I don’t know if podiatry is a seasonal business.
Mark Stephenson:
I feel like people listening to the podcast right now are fast forwarding just as quickly … So the next thing that we’re going to talk about is promotional types. So we’ve talked about who your audience is and some different ways to decide what you want to promote. Now let’s talk about the different ways or methods that you might use to promote those things.
Marc Vila:
Great. I’m going to add a couple things to your list here while you get started.
Mark Stephenson:
Sounds good. I mean the first one is pretty obvious. It’s a savings or a discount. And those take the place … That’s get 10% off if you come in before five. The price was … Car dealerships are famous for this. Was 29,999. Now 29,995. It’s some kind of a symbolic discount. So savings or discounts, probably the first and most common type of promotion.
Marc Vila:
I think an important thing about savings or discounts … I mean, there’s a couple things about this. For one, savings or discounts usually implies that the customer has an understanding of what it should cost or I don’t find that they’re as effective.
Mark Stephenson:
That’s good.
Marc Vila:
Right. So if you’re going to say 10% off and a customer really would not know what this should cost, sometimes that’s actually good or bad. It depends on how you’re displaying it. But those are promotions that I find are particularly effective, but you have to make sure that the customer understands or believes that it is a good deal.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. You really have to buy into the was-is concept. You have to build the value of what the price was before you discounted it to try to see if you can convince people that the higher number is the value. I will say that for all of these, but in particular for this one, man, you have got to know your numbers. If you don’t know what things cost you and what it cost you to make and what your overhead is, if you haven’t done all that math, don’t do any of this. Because what you don’t want … And Marc Vila and I were talking about Groupon a little bit beforehand.
Is there was basically a tea shop that was open across the street from me for about 90 days. Now, they were doomed to failure to begin with because they were a tea shop and this is the college bar district. But one of the promotions that they did was a Groupon and they did it for the gift box of teas that you would give people and they didn’t do their math. And I talked to the owner. He was losing money hand over fist because 100% of the people came in and just bought that and they were losing 10 bucks a pop. So don’t get caught with that. If you don’t know how much it costs you to make a shirt or embroider a hat or produce a sublimated tile or whatever it is, then stop and do math and then come back.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. I think that’s good. I like a savings or discount promotion. I really like that for upsells in our industry. If somebody is looking to complete an order of a bunch of T-shirts or a bunch of mugs, you can say, “Hey, by the way, I’m doing a promotion sale this month. If you add on embroidered hats, they’re actually 10% off.” Or whatever the number might be. And I find that’s a good way to upsell is to offer something that you’re promoting this month. And especially with a little savings. That’s just a nice little thing to be able to add onto the end of that. Because you could try to upsell to a hat, but you can also say, “Hey, by the way, I have a sale going on right now. Any order over $200, you can get hats at 20% off.” Huge savings and everybody loves them. It could work really well for you for upsells.
Mark Stephenson:
Yep. It works really well on shipping too. So if you offer somebody, hey, you get free shipping if you get your order to 300 bucks. That’s another promotion type that allows you to do that.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. You had put on some free upgrades or add-ons, which I think are great too. That’s if you spend up to this amount of money, I’ll also put the logo on your right arm as well. We’ll add a second spot to it for free, which is normally we charge $8 for that.
Mark Stephenson:
So if you’ve got a business, which all of you listening to this probably do, where you are expecting your customer to have the potential for coming back and buying more, just keep in mind when you do any of these promotions, you’re almost training them to expect this kind of behavior from you in the future. So if you do a lot of discounts, then it’s very likely that they’ll wait until you advertise a discount before they purchase again. You may be one of these people that only buys a certain item when it goes on sale. You won’t buy hand soap unless you can get them five for a dollar from Bed Bath & Beyond or something. So you will literally never pay retail. They’ve trained their audience to only buy in this way. So you have to be careful. So that goes for the savings or discounts. It goes for the free upgrade as well. But what I like about the free upgrade is you could be training them to buy something else from you.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. And the thing is is that it’s not necessarily bad to train folks to do that as long as it’s profitable for you and you like doing the business.
Mark Stephenson:
And you’re doing it on purpose.
Marc Vila:
And you’re doing it on purpose. Yeah, absolutely. So Hobby Lobby is a place that a lot of people love to shop and they are big on the sale items. They put all the 4th of July stuff out in the middle of the winter at retail and they sell five things. And then they put it all 30 to 50% off right around this time, or maybe even starting a month ago. And they will sell out of that aisle three weeks before the holiday.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
All those items are profitable at that price. They’re in business for a long time because they are, and they don’t mind that their customers wait for that and their customers are happy to wait for that. And some people who really, really need the item early or really want to get that picture that there’s only three of will pay a bunch of money extra in the beginning, but most of the customers are waiting for that deal, that coupon, that special. And they’re perfectly fine with that.
Mark Stephenson:
And let me tell you, this goes directly to the avatar that you’re talking to. I mean, if you are talking to the single mom, the electrician’s assistant buying stuff for her daughter, maybe if that’s a regular market for you, then maybe the discount is the only time she wants to buy. She feels better about buying, more responsible when she buys at a discount. So that could be just a built in part of your business where if you’re talking to that suburban couple, that maybe the discount isn’t actually so important, it’s just occasionally they want to get a good deal. I mean, you can get into the head a little bit of your customers by keeping those avatars in mind.
Marc Vila:
Yep. And you just say, is my avatar going to care about this promotion? Will it get them excited? And sometimes you need to survey people or ask. If your avatar is the suburban parents, then it’s easy. You have friends in your neighborhood, neighbors? Just ask them.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. What do you like better?
Marc Vila:
You know I have this business. Which one of these three sales or promotions sounds most interesting to you? Just ask them. See what they have to say.
Mark Stephenson:
That’s great.
Marc Vila:
There’s some other sales and promotion ideas we have in the show notes, so if you go to customapparelstartups.com and you go to episode 176, you’ll see some more. But the last ones I think to end with are just things that are just promotions and not on sale. And that is something that we mentioned before with the Vapor Apparel. A unique offering or a seasonally hot item or a fashionable item. And this is something that’s not on sale, but you’re going to promote it for whatever reason it might be. It’s a brand new thing. It’s a really interesting thing. It has a unique property to it that’s different than anything else out or most stuff out there in the market. Things like that.
So you can promote your higher end shirts, like the Bella + Canvas as a promotion. That’s a brand of shirt that a lot of people know. It has a semi retail offering. I had somebody bring me one of those shirts. A mom handed me a shirt and said, “Hey, do you know those logos that you did that one time? Could you put one on this shirt – I got on mine.” And she’s like, “Will it work?” And I looked at it and it was a Bella and I said, “Oh yeah.” I said, “This is a good brand. We use it.” And she … One of my favorite shirts whenever I want a plain T-shirt. So you can offer a brand like that to your customers and saying this month’s featured item, Bella + Canvas V-neck tees. Not because they’re cheap, not because they’re on sale, just because you’re featuring them because it’s an item that might catch some attention.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And the seasonally hot is a good approach to. Football season is coming up so maybe if you’re doing custom bleacher seats. I mean you can look at anything that is hot right now, go out in onto Colman & Company and start scrolling through the blanks and you’ll definitely find something that will be appropriate.
Marc Vila:
Yep. Well, good. So now that we’ve got that done, next we need to talk about creating your message.
Mark Stephenson:
Right.
Marc Vila:
So what do you think about that? Do you have anything?
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Just that there are going to be parts to it. You’ve got to think about … You’ve already figured out what you want to promote. You’ve got to figure out why someone would want to make that purchase and then how you’re going to promote it.
Marc Vila:
Okay.
Mark Stephenson:
Right. So what, why and how. So if you use for example … And I pilfered this from someone online. If your promotion is for a restaurant and it’s a 50% discount on food or non-alcoholic drinks for a particular day. So the what there that you’re promoting is a 50% discount. So in the custom apparel, it might be a BOGO or a free hat, or one of the many things that we talked about. The why is really important because in this case, it’s local restaurant support. So why is somebody going to take advantage of this promotion? It could be something altruistic like, hey, we’re just trying to boost local businesses. So you could say, “Hey, support your local T-shirt shop. We’re giving a small discount. We really appreciate the business.” So the why is because we’re small and we want to sell more stuff. And then the how would be, how do you take advantage of it? Eat out. Order online.
Marc Vila:
That’s great. That’s great. And so it gets me thinking in our industry about that. And with the why, I want to add one more thing to it too. What if we talk about, let’s say, that we’re going to talk about the UV protection apparel. That’s what we’re going to promo.
Mark Stephenson:
Yep. I like that.
Marc Vila:
All right. Now, why? There’s two why’s in my opinion. Why are you going to do it? Why does your customer want it? So why are you going to do it? Because those shirts are particularly profitable for you. The UV protection shirts still have a really high retail value. You can sublimate them or do transfers on them, which is not that expensive to create. So you have a nice profitable product that your customers will like. That’s why it’s good for you. Why is it good for them? And then you can pitch all the UV properties. You can wear a long sleeve shirt and you don’t have to wear sunblock. It’s great for kids. It’s great for not getting sunburn. It’s good for skin cancer. All these things. And then how are you going to do this? So how are you going to get folks to buy the shirts? And I think we can go into publishing options next on that, right?
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I just want to go back to our avatars again when you think about this stuff. So the single mom, she might be interested in Vapor Apparel for herself or some related items for her daughter because it’s sun protection. They’re both really fair skinned and she wants to avoid sunburn and blisters and she’s very concerned about cancer because they are outside constantly. So Vapor Apparel is a good move. Why? Because now’s the time. Summer’s coming up. So if you want to get UV protection for outdoor wear for beach days, for park days for you and your daughter, for you and your kids, then Vapor Apparel’s a good pick and now’s the time to do it. And how do you do that? It’s easy. Just click this button and order or pick up the phone and I’ll talk to you about our special promotion.
Marc Vila:
Okay. Okay. That’s good. I like that.
Mark Stephenson:
Right? And that’s going to be completely different from our suburban couple, because for them, you’re going to talk about, “Hey, these are the perfect polos to wear when you’re playing golf. This is a great … Why do you want to … I mean, you’re going to look great. You can put your own company name on the front and it will save you from getting cancer.”
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. And if it’s for local business, the how might be to come to our store. It might be to call me and mention that you’re looking for this or order online if you have an online store. Okay. Okay. I got that. And then the other part of how I was thinking about was how are you going to let people know this exists?
Mark Stephenson:
Right.
Marc Vila:
Okay. So I guess there’s a how for the customer. How are you going to let them know is your how and their how is what do they do next to get this? So how are you going to let them know Mark?
Mark Stephenson:
Well, I mean, first of all, it’s super important to tell them what to do inside the promotion.
Marc Vila:
Okay.
Mark Stephenson:
It’s very important. We do a lot of Facebook ads. And there’s a learn more button on it. So the people that press the learn more button get to get all their questions answered. So we tell them to press that button. If we just want them to buy something it’s shop now and it goes to Colman & Company. So it’s very important that you tell somebody that you want them to come into the store, take advantage of it. You want them to print out and bring the coupon. You want them to click this button online and place your order before Tuesday. You’ve got to tell them specifically what you want them to do in order to take advantage of it. And how you publish it is going to influence that quite a bit. So if you are going to send it out in an email, it’s going to be significantly different than if you want to encourage them than if you put up a billboard or you pass out a flyer.
Marc Vila:
Right, right, right. So I think when it’s just … The most important thing about publishing or promoting the promotion, getting the word out there, is just understanding your avatar. Where are they going to see it? How are you going to get it out to them? And preferably more than one channel.
Mark Stephenson:
Right.
Marc Vila:
Right. And what I mean by channel is more than one way. So if you have a small email list, you email it. In the email you ask for referrals. Forward this to someone who might be interested. So you’re doing some referral marketing as well. If you’re doing the suburban parents, you might want to advertise in some sort of a school newsletter, or if they have some sort of signage you can put up or something like that. And you may want to physically make phone calls to your current customers. So if you do it in multiple ways, that’s going to ensure your success. And when you have a company like a large company … Like Under Armor, when they came out. They grew big fast. They did ads everywhere. So they were promoting in email. They were promoting on social media. They were promoting on TV commercials. They were promoting in print ads. So you have to find what’s the best way to reach your avatar.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And that’s going to be wildly different or potentially wildly different.
Marc Vila:
Wildly different. Yeah. Absolutely. And so you think of a few different ways and some of those are going to be free. Some of those are going to cost money. You have to determine on what’s worth it. So if you can spend a few hundred dollars by getting a sign up that’s at the entrance of the father, daughter dance at school, that might be a pretty worthwhile promotion for you because you’re going to have potentially hundreds of eyes of your exact avatar, parents involved in their kids that go to school, that will be walking right by it. Might be great to spend money on that. Further, if you have an email list of all your customers, which hopefully you do, that’s relatively free to send an email out to all your customers. And you should probably do both if this is your avatar in that example.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I like that. There’s a lot of different ways to promote it. You should never pick just one. Normally at ColDesi you’ll see we have a video. The promotion gets included in a weekly email. You might see it as a Facebook or Instagram ad. You could see something from us on TikTok on the same topic. If we get something that we’re interested in selling and we really think it appeals to you listening right now who are our avatar, then we’ll try to put it in front of you every place we can. And I think it’s important to remember that if you go through this thoughtful process … Not, hey, I should put something on sale. What do I have? If you go through this thoughtful process, you’ll build something that you’re excited about and is potentially really profitable and you’ll have it mapped out enough where you can decide what channels that you want to put it through.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s true. That’s true. And I think that overall, we’ve gotten to a point now where you have created everything from your avatar all the way down to the promotion and how you’re going to get it out. Right?
Mark Stephenson:
Yep.
Marc Vila:
And then the last step to it is just, you need to measure how the promotion works.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. You need to have a plan in place to measure how the promotion works before you launch the promotion.
Marc Vila:
Yeah.
Mark Stephenson:
Because you know what happens is … And it happens to us. If you ask someone in sales how many leads we got last week on embroidery machines, they will come up with an answer based on their most recent experience. They’ll have an idea of how busy they are. It’s your job as a business owner to actually count the number that came in. So it’s to take a look at, okay, you’ve got this sale on Vapor Apparel with sublimation prints on them and picnic baskets, then it’s your responsibility to go, okay, how many calls did we get based on this ad? How many people filled out a form? How many people ordered online? Not, I think it did really well because I remember I talked to this one person that was really excited and they bought two shirts. And that will be your natural tendency if you don’t have a plan to track it.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. And the tricky part about tracking is you have to … If you’re advertising the Vapor Apparel shirts to the suburban parents, and one way to look at it that is the traditional way … And for folks who aren’t in deep business thought, or aren’t in marketing or something like that, we’ll say, “Well, how many Vapor Apparel shorts did you sell?” And you’d say, “A little bit more.” And then was it worth it? No, then. I guess not. Right? But the big but is, did you make other sales because of this promotion?
Mark Stephenson:
Right.
Marc Vila:
Did somebody call in and say, I want those UV protection shirts and they started talking to you? And really, really what they want is embroidered polos when you really get into it and you start that … So then they buy 20 embroidered polos. They called you because of your promotion and they came out with something else. Now, if what they sold, those embroidered polos, were profitable and a good sale and you were happy to have done them, then this is still part of the success of that promotion. Even though you didn’t sell the promotional item.
Mark Stephenson:
Correct.
Marc Vila:
There are things, like if you’re trying to liquidate things in your store and you can’t liquidate them because they keep calling into buy other things, it’s interesting because you still want to get rid of those things, but you’re really happy to take this new business that this promotion is generating. You have to find balance.
Mark Stephenson:
It sounds like that’s why I drive by an Oriental rug store going out of business every day. And I have for five years. It’s because they keep trying to go out of business, but people see other things in their store or online and of course they continue to sell. But there are things that you should be keeping track of and that is how many sales did you generate, like Marc Vila: said, not how many sales of the items that were on sale. You should know that. But how much money did those promotions generate independent of the items that were purchased? Is that right?
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah.
Mark Stephenson:
Okay.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. So I think we’re pretty close to wrapping this up then. The last-
Mark Stephenson:
Let’s do a few more measurement things before we do that because I want to make sure that you know not only how much money you made, how many items you sold, what the revenue was, but you also know how much it cost you. So you keep track of, okay, I spent 500 bucks on Facebook and Instagram and I sold this amount of shirts and I made this much money and it made or lost money.
Marc Vila:
Right.
Mark Stephenson:
Right. And then because the answer that you’re looking for is, was this promotion successful? Should I do it again?
Marc Vila:
Right. Should you do the same one? And then alternatively, should you do a completely different one or something similar? So you found that flip flops got a lot of attention in the summertime. So then when the fall comes around, maybe you’re going to talk about beanies or beanie caps or scarves. Because it’s a similar promotion for a seasonal item. You may have found that talking about a particular low price item generated the higher priced version of that. Because when people came in, they realized, well, actually-
Mark Stephenson:
They wanted something more.
Marc Vila:
Because of your salesmanship they wanted something better. So they call in for a free T-shirt and then you upsell to the really nicer shirt. So maybe you continue that same exact type of promotion, but the item you try to upsell to changes. It’s something that just grows and changes over time. If you know the numbers you’ll know which ones work and … The last thing I want to say on that is you just can’t give up if the first one doesn’t work.
Mark Stephenson:
Man, I was just going to say that. Promotions work.
Marc Vila:
Yeah.
Mark Stephenson:
I just want to say that. Promotions work. It’s one of the main reasons why most people do that. So knowing that promotions work, even if the first two that you try fail, keep trying and you’ll find one that will be successful as long as you have all the stuff that we’ve talked about today in place you know who you’re talking to. Because a promotion might fail for a variety of reasons. It could be it was a terrible deal. Could be it wasn’t the right product or the right time of year. It could be you weren’t talking to your avatar right.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. And the other thing is there’s a bit of trust and time in all sales and promotion and advertising and marketing of your business. So if you have a brand new business and you’re promoting a really good deal or whether it’s a sale or whatever it might be, or a featured item and in the beginning, it doesn’t really pop off very well or you didn’t sell any of them. But if you’ve only been in business three months, this is the first time anyone’s ever seen you promote something. They might not buy that first time. So you do a second one and you do a third one, and you continue on the path. And a year from now, you may see that the promotions really kick off every season that you launch them because you’ve been seeding the idea to these people over time that this company has interesting ideas. This company has interesting items. They have good deals. They always have a good deal on something therefore I’m going to go to them when I need these hat made, because I’ve seen them around enough to know that they’re a local business that offers a good product.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I love that.
Marc Vila:
What I like about promotions, my last thought is, whether it’s a sale or not, doesn’t matter. Is that one of the hardest things to do and the problem that I have in marketing is people don’t want to communicate or fear communicating to the masses because they don’t have anything to say. What am I going to email about? What am I going to tell them about? So promotions are what you tell them about. And it doesn’t have to be a sale. So you pick a product you like a lot, you pick your how and why and all that good stuff, and then you tell people about it. And that’s what it is. It’s a great way to just talk to people about your business, because you’re going to take a product and dissect all the great stuff about it and then share it and say here. Here’s one. By the way, I’m going to tell you about another one and I’m going to tell you about another one, I’ll tell you about another one. And then it generates business over time.
Mark Stephenson:
I think what we’re going to do is we’re going to copy this podcast in episode 177. We’re just going to change the name to things to talk to your customers about.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Things to talk to your customers about is hard. We know that. We’ve been dealing with it for years. How do you talk about embroidery? And we always find new and interesting ways to do it. And we have to. I think that if you go through these steps and if you’re intimidated by the idea, you start simple. Pick your favorite thing and just talk about it on the phone with people that you talk to and in person when you introduce people. “What do you do for a business? I do this. Actually, I just want to run it by you, I’ve been featuring these new shirts. I’m really excited about it.” And just tell them about it.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Awesome.
Marc Vila:
And then the person is like, “Cool. Thanks.” You just start doing it until … And it’s an interesting thing to talk about for your business. And it’s one of the best free ways to get going. You know what I mean?
Mark Stephenson:
I love it. All right. I think that is plenty for people to digest. This has been Mark Stephenson.
Marc Vila:
And Marc Vila.
Mark Stephenson:
And Marc Vila, king of the pregnant pause. Hope you guys have a great business.