How to successfully run a sale on your eCommerce website

Offering discounts on your products or offering a promotion can do wonders for your eCommerce business's sales, profit, and website exposure.

Sounds easy money, but is it?

Organizing AND optimizing a successful sale is bigger than it sounds. If not done optimally, you can end up putting money, conversions, and loyal customers at stake.  

Talking Money, Talking Sale 

A sale (not to be confused with a completed purchase) is a tried and tested marketing tactic. The primary goal of a sale is to boost profits in a short period of time. A sale can be very short (just a few hours, or for one day only, known as a flash sale), or a longer sales event (several days, a week, or a month).

Why should you run a sale? 

• A sale is an attractive opportunity for an audience to make a purchase. In fact, it motivates the audience to make a purchase. 
• A consumer is more likely to make a purchase on a discounted item than on an item at MRP. 
• The traction on the sale ads increases which leads to better traffic on the website which then helps in retargeting these audiences later. 

How often should I run a sale? 

• Monthly: You can run a “payday” sale that can either be run towards the end of the month or the start of another month or overlap of both. 
• Weekly: A sale every week on a day or two that generally sees lower sessions on the website or lower sales have shown better results. 
• Festive season sale: An occasion-specific sale such as freedom sale for independence day, rakhi sale and Diwali sale etc. also helps in improving the conversions. 
• End of season sale: For industries where seasons impact the sale performance, an end of season sale should be tried. For example, apparel. 

The different types of sales

Flat % sale: When a flat discount is offered on top of the retail price of the product.

Upto % sale: When there are different discounts offered on different products and categories. It can be clubbed together to be promoted with the highest discount offer. 

Freebies: When a product is given for free along with a purchase of a certain amount. This may also be promoted as buy1get1 offer or buy 2 pay for 1 offer. Offering the best-selling product as free with purchase helps. 

Campaign:  

A new campaign with a dedicated budget for promoting the sale should be created. This is to ensure:

-- that we’re able to monitor the performance of the sale separately. 

-- the spending of a set amount of money on the creatives used for the sale campaign. 

Once the sale is over, the campaign can be paused without affecting the learning of other campaigns. The same may be restarted in case of a recurring sale. 

*Targeting in such campaigns should be of audience motivated by discounts. 

Ad creatives: 

> Running a few ads with the sale communication in the creatives will help you grab the attention and yield better results. It’s recommended to have a new set of creatives for promoting a sale.

 
> Depending upon the past experience, the best performing format of the ad may be used. For example: for health care, single images, videos, and animated gifs tend to perform well. The image of the ad may be a lifestyle shoot image. 

> The sale communication should be added in all the ad texts of existing ads.

> Sale and strikethrough overlays should be used on smart ads to clearly communicate the sale.

Google: 

> Ensure that the offer is updated on the google ad copies.