11 Essential steps to prepare for your sales campaigns

Essential steps to prepare for your sales campaigns

Fail to prepare and you prepare to fail – the notion stays true in the business world, especially for a sales campaign when the world is saturated with a massive amount of new content every second. Nowadays, promoting your brand takes more than just randomly putting up advertisements and running sale programs while hoping that new customers would come across them by chance.

It should be noted that the word “campaign” itself means “an organized course of action to achieve a goal” (Oxford Living Dictionary). Whether you want to successfully bring about a launch campaign, or to promote a product that you already have, it is crucial that you take care in paving the way for it.

Study your targets

Before you can draw up a plan for your campaign, you need to conduct a little research first. Knowing who, where you currently are and where you want to be is the first step toward a successful operation.

Your own strengths

The very first step is to understand what competitive edges your products have over other brands. Be well versed in your strengths so you could amplify them and persuade customers to choose you instead. For a better indication, you might want to conduct a SWOT analysis of your products.

Customers

Carry out some market research and picture clearly what kind of people would buy from you. What are their ages, occupations, incomes and interests? The more you know about your target, the better you can figure out how well your product would satisfy them and how to attract their interest.

Goal and parameter

Having a measurable objective is extremely important for a plan to work out. Something as vague as “Increase company’s turnover” would not be tangible enough for further planning and motivation.

Create a KPI (key performance indicator) for your plan. It can be conversion rate, amount of traffic to your store or the return rate of loyal customer.

Set up crystal clear goals by asking yourself specific questions such as: What do you hope to gain from the campaign? Is this more hits to your site? More purchases? Or more return rate? If so, exactly by how much? And for how long? A good answer could be, for example, “Increase the company’s turnover by 15% in the next quarter” or “Raise the number of visitors to company website by 20% in the next two month”.

In any case, you need to have a clear goal and maybe even a stretch one so you and your team would know what to aim for and how far to go.

The next step is determining the amount of resource that you intend to spend on achieving that goal. Take into account not only budget, but also the human resource and time the project requires. Consider every single possible expense so you would not be ambushed by an unpleasant cost. In the worst case that you strategy does not work out, this also help limit the loss you have to take.

Convey you message

Marketing is, of course, all about finding the best ways for communication between the provider and the customer. It is critical that you pay extra attention to make sure your message reach it intended receivers and get noticed by them.

Select communication channels

Decide on the way through which your advertisement reaches its target. There are the public channels like social media, TV advertisement and physical street banner, and then there are private ones like mail, phone call and message. Depend on the market segment, some methods can be more effective than others. Do your target customers frequently listen to radio or they only ever watch YouTube? This point ties in closely with the one mentioned in the first part: if you know your customer well, then you would have a good idea of how to converse with them.

Make your message clear and loud

In promotion, having a CTA (Call to action) is a must. It is words or phrases that convey the message of what you want the customer to do such as “Call for free consultation” or “Subscribe to our newsletter for update”. No matter what your purposes are and what form your advertisements take, there should always be some CTA in the message for the receiver to work with: perhaps it is call to buy a product, an invitation for a loyalty program or simply an introduction of your company. Otherwise, the customer would simply get confused over how they should perceive your advertisement.

Another major factor to consider is how the CTA is implemented. Depend on the channel you choose, your message should be designed accordingly to highlight the CTA. A CTA for an email must be written and implement differently from the one in a video or an image.

Tracking methods

When it comes to measuring the result and getting feedback, using a tracker is crucial. Tracking devices like UTM tag or Google Analytic are very handy at letting you know which channels is more effective than others at drawing people to your store. From that knowledge, you can adjust your budget to be more efficient next time. Without a tracker, your campaign would be like a shot in the dark and you are left relying mostly on luck and trial and error for success. Needless to say, that can be very costly and inefficient.

Utilize promotional tools

Lastly, you can make use of promotional tool and draw in more attention with the appeal of a good deal. Pick the right time for it and make it limited to create a sense of urgency. Two of the most classic tools are coupon and gift card.

Better Coupons

Believed to be first used by the Coca-Cola Company, coupon has since become one of the most common options for discount. In the virtual world, they can be referred to as “keycode”, “promotion code”, “voucher code” or sometimes simply just “code”. Each coupon consists of a unique string of number and/or letter there can be many different rules when it comes to applying them. Typically, a coupon lets buyer take a certain amount of money off their total purchase for one time, but they can also have other functions like reducing the price of a certain item or offering a free product.

To make coupons truly effective, you would need to decide on how the coupons work, toward which group of customers and how to get the codes to them. For Magento 2 vendors in particular, there are some great tools out there that can help you easily create, send and manage coupons in large quantity from the backend of your store, just like Mageplaza Better Coupon extension.

Personalized Gift Cards

Gift card is another great way to call visitors to your store. Basically, whoever possesses a gift card can redeem it for purchase from a particular store without the need for cash. Some cards are reusable and can be recharged with money. Transferring to online business, gift cards retain the name and function despite no longer having a physical appearance.

Aside from the usual ones, today Gift card extension for Magento 2 by Mageplaza even allows the customer to create and customize their own gift card, which can be conveniently printed out and used like the traditional one. Utilizing such tools will help you maximize the potential of gift cards and provide a unique touch to your service.

Final words

A successful sales campaign would fetch a large amount of new customers and increase your brand awareness. However, it can only reach maximum effectiveness when operated with well preparation. Take time and effort in arranging your operation, and it would surely pay off.