So I don't typically do sales and that sort of promotion (my promotion focus is on getting the word out) so this weekend was an experiment. Here's what I did:Free tentacle charms for certain orders - Cost negligible.
Free shipping - Average shipping cost for me is $5.40.
Advertising - I use Project Wonderful to run ads, my usual ad budget is $5 a week. I ran a campaign costing an extra $10 from Thursday until Monday.
Blogging, Twitter, Social Media - Using my blogs and social media accounts to promote my sale. Only cost was time.
Paypal and Etsy fees - $.20+3.5% for Etsy and $.30+1.9%-2.9% for Paypal.
Sales - Sold 2 necklaces and an ornament.
Total sales: $95.00By comparison last weekend when I wasn't running a sale I actually made a few more sales (including some higher priced items so my profit was much higher) so while my sample size is quite small I'd say that Black Friday/Cyber Monday did not seem to have much of an effect on my sales. Maybe it was the fault of my promotion not being effective enough or the economic uncertainty but at least from my experience it seemed to not be worth the extra costs. Especially the free shipping because that was a big loss on each order, maybe a more aggressive ad campaign would have been more effective but I need to do more experimenting with ads first.
Total costs: $33.79
Profit: $61.21
So what was your experience like this weekend? Did you have increased sales? What sort of things did you do to promote your sales?
I'm embarrassed to say what I spent to advertise Black Friday, and I saw no sales. I did get a lot of new traffic, so I'm hoping some of the people who visited will return to purchase something.
ReplyDeleteI'm seeing from some, that the 2nd week of December is actually the best week for e-tailers, some actually call the 2nd Monday in December "Green Monday".