Methods of promotion for a start-up business

The store launch is a controlled trigger event to create in the life of your audience. Depending on the actions you take, you have the chance to get sales from the first day live… or even before, with pre-orders.

We’ve talked repeatedly about the store launch campaign.

This consists of 3 main stages and a post-campaign stage, where you cultivate the customers you get.

#1. Teasing for the store launch

What’s the biggest challenge for a startup? Not known, yet, in the market.

But this is a stage that all businesses go through, even the big brands that we admire and that make huge annual sales.

There’s a way to get started, and it’s validated by the experience of other businesses over the years.

The first step is to start sending clues to the market that something is going to happen. In other words, you start teasing.

You need some spaces of your own where you do that:

• Facebook page for your business
• Instagram account
• A social media group
• A base of email addresses – maybe you have followers or followers for another business, a blog you own or another showcase site.

In these places that you control – but also on the pages of your friends and acquaintances, for example, start posting banners, videos, behind-the-scenes images and messages that convey that you’re going to announce something big that people are interested in.

When do you tease?

At least a week before the official launch, depending on how long you want the pre-release to last.

#2. Pre-launch offers

The second step of this campaign is when you reveal specifically what you’ve been teasing for.

At this point you can adopt different approaches:

• Doci AMR posts until the official launch + sneak peek for offers and products on the site.

• Open pre-orders for 1-2 weeks, where people buy your products in advance and have them delivered to them on a priority basis.
• You create a landing page with registration formwhere people can give you their email address to be notified when the launch is done. You can encourage them to sign up by giving them a discount code for the launch day or some other bonus (a useful guide, a free product with the first order, a gift card, etc.).

When do you pre-launch?

If you’re just doing it with posts and pictures, then about a week or two before launch. But if you want to collect email addresses or pre-orders, you can extend it to a month – but no longer!

#3. Official launch of your shop

Now is the time when you do the actual launch.

It’s the first live day of your store, and if you’ve done your job well in the pre-launch and launch, now you’re just following how real orders are generated, responding on live chat, posting in real time about the most wanted products and sneak peeks from the warehouse about preparing packages.

It’s very important to prepare in advance for this day.

Don’t sit on your hands, because there’s no point in making your website functional, beautiful and full of unrefusable offers if people don’t know about it.

On launch day you’re on the barricades to monitor the situation and keep people informed of the powerful impact your store is having.

#4. Post-launch: how to keep your customers close

Even though post-launch actions happen after the first orders, you actually prepare this stage around the time you start teasing.

Your store should be prepared with post-order transactional email sequences such as order confirmation, request review, cross-sell recommendations and customer retention.

In the same idea, you can offer loyalty points as well as package inserts – thank you letter, small gifts, vouchers for next order etc.

These post-launch actions are, in fact, evergreen applicable techniques, after every order generated in your store.

If you fix them now, you’re out of business in the future. You just need to optimize them as you go along, as you see customer reactions and bring new elements into the business.

Read also: To DO List when you want to launch an online store (or product)

2. Star Product Campaign

These are the main steps of the campaign starting with the star product, which can run monthly – or, highly recommended, in the off-season, when sales drop.

#1. Ads and promos for the star product

Every online store should have an established star product. It can be chosen before it is popular, and promoted heavily to reach bestseller status, or it can be identified some time after launch, among the bestselling products in the store.

So, have you chosen your star product?

Maybe:

• At a lower price
• A product that solves an urgent need
• Which can have a high commercial value
• Which may be sold with many accessories
• Has small dimensions
• Consumable product

Once you’ve established what this star product is, it’s time to create banners, ads, posts and campaigns around it.

It becomes the core of your campaigns, is pushed to the front and is meant to attract the attention & click of the audience.

#2. Upsell & cross-sell on site

Once people have arrived on the site, it’s important that they see a full and informative description of the product they’ve been drawn to.

Here your only goal is to attract a click on the add to cart button. And once this action is completed, you can start pushing to increase the value of the shopping cart:

• Product recommendation in the popup displayed after adding to cart.
• Upsell recommendations in product page
• Product bundles with the star product
• Gifts added to the product in 1+1 packages for free.
• One-time offer on the checkout page.

#3. Follow-up with recommendations

In point #2, two things can happen: either customers only buy the star product (if they don’t, you can use idea #5, and retarget them), or they also take the recommendations from the site into account, buying a bigger basket.

In either situation, it’s vital to do a follow-up a week or two after the order, in which you send upsell and cross-sell recommendations for the products ordered. In this email you can add, for example, a gift discount code – even 5% or 10%, to encourage the purchase decision.

#4. Follow up offers

If the follow-up email doesn’t work immediately, wait 2-3 days, and then send another email, in which the offer in the previous email is time-bound.

You can also increase the amount of the discount.

3. Seasonal Campaigns + Giveaway

Seasons and holidays are predictable trigger events. Christmas, Black Friday, Valentine’s Day, March 8, Easter, wedding season, back-to-school, these are all recurring sales opportunities for you.

People budget for these because of customs and traditions formed over time.

So, unlike a promotion at work, moving house or the birth of a child, which are important events in your customers’ lives – but you can’t foresee them – holidays and formal seasons give you a stable framework for promotion.

#1. Standard campaign with seasonal messages

What does a standard marketing campaign look like? Here goes:

• • Setting campaign objectives – you may want a certain volume of sales, capture a certain number of addresses, registrations, sales for certain product categories, etc.
  • Establishing your target audience – You may only want to reach certain audience segments with your messages, or different audiences with different messages.
  • Establishing the main promotional message – In this case, it can be related to the season, but can also include the discount, giveaway or number of products on offer.
  • Establishing promotional channels used and the desired techniques to be applied.
  • Determining invested resources in the campaign, in particular budget.
  • Setting the campaign calendar and KPIs for monitoring.
  • The actual implementation of the campaign.

#2. Giveaway as the main mechanism of the campaign

An effective primary mechanism for getting quick attention is to use a giveaway. People love getting free stuff!

This core will provide you with the right amount of traffic, so that people will realize the giveaway mechanism: you can invite them to the site to sign up for a form, place an order for a chance to win a prize, etc.

Read also: 50 ideas for selling more at lower cost

4. Social Media lead generation campaigns

This type of campaign works well when you are starting to have a community following you on social media, especially in a Facebook group, for example.

Where you can’t reach with organic posts – because you’re not going to reach very many people, you supplement with ads.

#1. Lead generation campaign from social media & ads

My advice is to use a reward to encourage sign-ups: a guide, an ebook, a discount code, the promise of a secret offer, etc.

The idea is to promote a message that doesn’t ask for money up front, but a different kind of customer engagement. From banners and posts, you attract them to the site.

#2. Sign up in the form on the site

Create a landing page with a sign-up form to give customers what you promised in the promo.

Don’t ask for too much data in the form, it would be advisable to limit the fields to name and email address only, plus, if necessary, another field according to your business objectives.

#3. Redirect on thank you page with limited offer

Once the person has given you their email address, redirect them to another landing page as a thank you page, where you give them what you promised, plus a secret, possibly time-limited offer (24-hour timer, for example).

Use price lists to limit the display of prices from this landing to here only.

5. Continuous remarketing campaigns

Depending on the products you sell, the time of the month and many other aspects, many people who come to your site will leave without making a purchase.

It’s normal for this to happen. The important thing is to try to prevent abandonment with cart recovery actions and popup exit.

But even if people exit, you can retarget them with ads on social media, on Google, on Gmail, using remarketing tools.

Their impact will be all the stronger, the more personalized and attractive the message and images used.

Read also: Increase Performance of Remarketing Campaigns on unosoft with HelloBar

Now it’s your turn!

The sooner you start testing these ideas, the sooner you’ll get results, so you can figure out what works for you and what doesn’t.

Each step in these campaigns needs to be tailored to your business differentiators, audience expectations and audience reactions – be alert and flexible in your strategy and the results will come quickly.

Good luck with implementation!

PS. All marketing is meant to bring people to your site – where the selling takes place. And selling is made easier when the eCommerce platform you’ve built your store on actively helps you influence the buying decision.

Sell online with unosoft! We offer exclusive features that make your life easier and turn your shop into a customer magnet. Try it for free, for 15 days!

Passionate about entrepreneurship and eCommerce, I started my online activity in 2000.
Together with my team I have helped over 3,000 companies grow their business on the unosoft platform.

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