Fanminder Blog

Here’s six types of promotions you can use to brainstorm your next promotion to grow your revenues.

Specials – Use Specials to avoid excessive price discounting or to highlight new food or inventory. Specials can be tied to specific days, times, or channels, or they can be evergreen. Examples: Tuesday is Deal Day; Monday Wing Night 5-7pm; Free Martini Fridays; Specials All Summer Long; Early Bird Specials; Nighthawk Specials; Weekly or Daily Specials; Chalkboard Specials.

Giveaways, Gifts, and Freebies – Everyone loves free stuff. So give away a prize to the 100^th follower on Facebook or the 500^th subscriber via email. Fans always love the proverbial t-shirt giveaway and that’s free advertising for you; $1 Deals catch peoples’ eyes; And the word “Free” is viewed as the most powerful word in all of marketing, so giveaway a Free pound of fresh pasta if a fan brings friends to your store.

Trivia Contests, Challenges and Scavenger Hunts – You ask customers to perform one or more challenges (in other words, a game of skill) in return for some type of reward. The challenge is typically to gather a list of physical items but can also be simply figuring out a puzzle or finding particular information. Challenges can be performed by individuals or groups and can have one or more winners (first to reply, all who get it right…) Simple example from one of our customers: An online baby gifts store asked her customers to find the birth date of her baby daughter on her website in return for a discount on a shirt for Father’s Day. See www.actbolder.com.

Sweepstakes, Instant Win, and Raffles – In contrast to a contest, sweepstakes are a game of chance. Customers submit a free entry form and one or more prizes are awarded to the random winner. You can giveaway free food for a year, free video rentals, or even free haircuts for a year like recent clients of ours are doing. Sweepstakes help you bulk up your fan list and create excitement. Text message providers even enable winners to be drawn on the spot. Sweepstakes are governed by strict law so you’ll need to write down your Office Rules and follow some process. Of course the original sweepstakes could well be dropping your business card in the restaurant’s fishbowl to win a free lunch; and one of the all-time favorites?  McDonald’s Monopoly game. See www.raffledog.com.

$ Off – Some of the most popular promotions are the simplest to run. $ Off promotions are typically coupon-based so they have the added benefit of providing trackability. Examples: Buy One, Get One; $10 Off with minimum purchase of $40; $1 Off Cup of Tea; $5 Off anything in store; $10 Instant Gift Card. Fanminder makes it a snap reach your customers instantly with a $ or % Off Coupon with Fanminder Offers.

Throw a Sale – A well-constructed sale can often be the most effective tool you have to spur revenues. Try some of these and be sure to limit the sale to a set number of days and times: 7 Days of Xmas; Back to School Sale; Summer Preview 2011; Sandals Sale everything in store up to 50% off; Labor Day Clearance Sale Aug 27-Sept 6; 10% Off Every Tuesday; All Appliances 15% Off; VIP Private Sale.

Don’t forget that you can use Fanminder flexibly for any of the above promotions. Login or Try Us.

If you already send specials and deals to your email list, then adding a Grab Coupon button will increase response and walk-in traffic. This is how Giordanos does it below, then follow these simple steps. Call us at 800-335-0520 if you want help.

1. Sign in to Fanminder and click the <Send an offer or coupon> link.

2. Create an Offer for your email campaign. Use an Offer that works well for you, or get ideas here.

3. To create the link you need for your email, you just need to send your Offer now to at least one mobile fan OR publish it to your Facebook wall.

4. After you click Send, a green confirmation box displays your link. Copy this link and paste it into your email template next to the description of your special or coupon. Even better, ask your webmaster to make a big red “Grab Coupon to Phone” to get the most clicks.

5. Send your email to your fans! Fans will receive your email, and click the link or button to send the coupon to their phones via text message. With your coupon on their phones, fans are more likely to come back to your business. Have your staff ask fans to show the coupon. If you’d like to track how many fans redeem these coupons simply ask the fan to reply with the four digit redemption code and Fanminder will track sales for you!

Now do one more thing:

Showcase your brand and get more sales by adding a photo and your logo to your online Social Page. Your fans see this Page with your Offer when they enter their mobile phone number to grab the coupon to their phone. See the Social Page below as a screenshot. Go to My Profile and click “Edit” next to Social Branding to add your photo and logo.

It’s a Saturday, so naturally I’m working my tail off. But it’s also time for a little reflection. Today I just received some feedback from a couple of customers and thought I’d share it.

I just got off the phone with our favorite insane business owners, Web and Jordan from Psycho Donuts. They used the new Fanminder Offers feature to blast a one-day only offer for their “Cereal Killer” donut and shared the wonders of our automatic revenue tracking.

Said Web Granger, Partner, “I liked how I didn’t have to go and ask our Nurses (ie, Staff, yes I know, they are crazy!) how the Offer went, I could just go and look it up.

Exactly.

Earlier today I also had the pleasure of exchanging emails with Jennifer Ayre, the Owner of Savvy Cellar Wines, in Mountain View. Jennifer and her husband are indeed, quite savvy, but not just about wine. They’re also genius social marketers, and now, Mobile Marketers too.

I dub them “geniuses” because they have figured out a way to get the highest redemption rate of all Mobile Marketing programs we have had the pleasure of transmitting thus far: “About 80%” – according to Jennifer.

What’s her magic? I can boil it down to 2 simple methods any business owner can replicate:

• Great Offer - She offers 25% off a flight of wine for joining the list (see below)
• Relentless promotion - She advertises her Mobile Club on each page of her wine menu, and as you can see below, within email blasts, in addition to in-store and on her website. This tends to attract exactly the kind of customer most interested in engaging via mobile because it’s easy for those customers to find the message.

What are you doing to drive higher redemption rates?

Paul

A few months’ back I participated in the Los Altos Chamber of Commerce Social Media Panel. There was a good series of discussions in this wide-ranging panel for mostly new-to-social-media business owners.

You can watch a series of mini-webisodes drawn from the session here:

http://bit.ly/socialmediavideos

Love this new program, from today’s Wall Street Journal:

This fall, customers using Target-branded credit cards will a get 5% discount on every purchase at its stores. Gauging by the results of an eight-month test Target recently concluded in Kansas City, the company expects the program to drive a 1% to 2% nationwide increase in sales at stores open at least a year by luring shoppers to its stores more frequently to take advantage of the savings.

“A 5% discount every day on every transaction is unique in the retail world and has the power to drive profitable sales to Target,” said Terry Scully, president of Target Financial Services.

In addition to leading to meaningful sales gains, some Wall Street analysts think Target’s credit-card rewards program will be a powerful low-price hook that competitors would have trouble matching. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., in particular, has a larger base of lower-income shoppers who would be hard-pressed to qualify for a credit card.

“I think it is one of the most innovative programs to come along in retail in a long time,” said Colin McGranahan, a retail analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein LLC. “Five percent off prices that are already discounted and are almost at parity with Wal-Mart is a good deal,” he added.