What We Learned During Our First Sale!
When I look at the website blogs of other artists, it is common to see irregular posting behavior, sometimes months or even years between posts! I get it, you get busy, your attention gets refocused, you lose motivation. That’s all I’ll say about my posting frequency!
We held our first ‘sale’ this past week, although we called it a “Labor Day Special”, it was still a sale. We offered 25% off all our ring designs. We held it for 5 days and only targeted our current Facebook and Instagram followers, we did not purchase any advertising so it ended up being a 100% word of mouth and a (digitally) local sale.
Here is one of our ads:
We consider it to be quite successful with many new orders which we are working on now. Afterward, we brainstormed what went well and what could be improved. Here is what we learned:
- Don’t hold a sale and then have all (3) team members go on a backpacking trip for 3 days!!! We still chuckle about it but it was the last long weekend of the summer and we needed to hit the trail! Surprisingly, we did not have any specific questions from customers when we were ‘off the grid’.
2. You get what you pay for. We paid for no advertising, therefore we only sold jewelry to the people who already knew about us (or friends of friends) using only FB and Instagram posts to our account.
3. We wanted to offer buy one=good price, buy 2=better price, buy-3=best price, but the Shopify platform did not have this option. “You can purchase an app to do that,” the customer service person told me, so we didn't do it. Looking back, we could have sold twice the rings if we just paid for the app, we won’t make this mistake again.
Next time:
- Make sure that the sale ad looks good on and fits the mobile screen.
- Post at different times of day on social media to have better reach.
- Extending the sale an extra day did not help (no sales the day after Labor Day)
- Create all the sale ads graphics on Canva BEFORE the sale begins.
- We will use promoted posts and paid advertising the next time, one step at a time!
- Include an incentive to buy more than one ring.