Promotions are Killing Your Profits.
Ecommerce strategy
Struggling to acquire new customers at scale? Learn more about how we've helped brands just like yours. Click here.
How do I build my brand?
Storytelling
Building your brand is all about Storytelling. It’s about communicating the Why of your brand. And the best way to communicate the ‘why’ is through emotion.
We all know that harnessing audiences’ emotions is a key tactic to brand marketing – it’s why those well know Christmas campaigns do so well. Think about your brand and your brand story and what emotion you want to convey through your advertising; is it freedom, serenity, adventure, passion? This emotion needs to be threaded into your creative, your messaging, your website.
Audience
Acquire new customers. We know that it’s easier (and cheaper) to market to your current customers than to acquire new ones but if you’re current customers are used to those pay day sales and will only purchase during promotional periods, you’ll struggle to ever see true growth.
Go back to the starting line and look at acquiring brand new customers who have never been exposed to your brand before (this could even be a new demographic or new territory). Present them with your brand building storytelling campaigns. Hook them with emotional content and consistently target them with brand based messaging. When they are finally in market to purchase, they’ll buy full price as they understand the value.
How to tactically use promotions.
Sometimes promotions are needed for more than just generating revenue. If you have out of season stock that needs moving, promotions can be an effective way to clear your warehouse.
There are ways that you can still run these promotions without damaging the valuable brand you’ve spent time building.
Reward loyalty.
Release the promotions you need to use for end of season stock to your most loyal or valuable existing customers. Instead of blasting promotions and sales across all your advertising, send email or SMS notifications to segmented audiences with high LTV and reward their loyalty with exclusive access and discounts to an outlet or sale section of your website.
These consumers will feel special and seen by your brand, improving brand reputation and further increasing LTV over time.
Conclusion
Reducing the reliance on promotions is a combination of brand building, storytelling, new customer acquisition and careful planning.
This is not a short term solution.
Making this transition is not something that is going to reap rewards immediately. Marketing teams need to have patience and understand that purchase journeys are longer and more complicated than ever and that brand building is a long term solution to incremental growth. It can be daunting not to run that sale on pay day when you haven’t met your revenue targets but there will probably be a period of decline before you start to see the needle move in a positive direction. It’s about remaining resilient, testing, learning and looking past monthly KPIs.
