Thoughts on Using the Same Discount Code

People have gotten used to shopping anytime within the BFCM weekend. This makes marketing simpler and allows you to explore using the same discount code, banner and landing page style for both sales.

However, if you have time for it, you can adjust your marketing strategy slightly. For example, in your social media posts and emails (which you should be sending every day – covered in “How often should I email my sale?“), mention the specific sales day. For example Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday.

If you want to run two discount codes, make sure both are working and are available throughout the BFCM weekend. For example, both the “BLACKFRIDAY” and “CYBERMONDAY” codes should work throughout the entire sale period. Otherwise, this would create confusion among your potential customers and will probably lose you some sales.

There are some sites and industries famous for adjusting their sales to be even better on Cyber Monday. One example is the video game store Steam. In fact, they take it to the extreme, with the discounts swinging from 5-90% hour by hour over the holiday weekend. The process at Steam is automated and probably has been fine-tuned for their specific audience. It creates a lot of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) among customers. This isn’t something a small membership site or business would be particularly interested in. 

In general, less confusion is better. Use the same discount code on Black Friday and Cyber Monday to make set-up simpler.

Bonus Tip: 

The more comfortable you are in running sales, the less effort you’ll put in setting up BFCM sales. You can choose to create reusable content, designs, and layout for the whole weekend. You can use the same emails and social media posts next year with minimal changes.

Related articles about Discounts:

• How Much of a Discount Should I Offer on Black Friday?
• How Do You Create a Discount Code in Paid Memberships Pro?
• How Do You Create a Coupon in WooCommerce?

Getting ready for Black Friday

The following related articles will help you get ready for running sales on your site over the BFCM weekend:

• When Is Black Friday This Year?
• How Long Does It Take to Set Up a Black Friday Sale?
• How Long Should I Run my Black Friday Sale?
• Where Can I Get My Black Friday Sale Listed?
• What is the Sitewide Sales Plugin?

The post Should I Use the Same Discount Code for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? appeared first on Stranger Studios.

In this article, we share our thoughts on pricing Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other seasonal sales.

Tips on Discounts During Black Friday

First, don’t run a sale if there’s too much competition (to sell a particular product) since your efforts won’t make an impact, i.e., netting in profits or bringing in new customers.

If you’re going to raise rates during the Black Friday/ Cyber Monday (BFCM) weekend, test the price increase through some customization efforts before running the sale. You can update the price everywhere to be the “highest test price” except your checkout page. 

We tested this (needs traffic levels to support it), and we found that there was not much difference between the click-through rate and conversation whether the customers saw the higher price first or the actual price first. So that validated that we could proceed to implement the strategy.

However, you don’t need to go through all these customizations and experiments. You can raise the rates and tell yourself you’re just going to bump the price for a period and watch how things unfold. If things don’t go well, you can always course correct.

You’ll often realize that there isn’t a notable concern in customer behaviour due to the price difference, which can be a sign to raise rates. Also, raising rates is in itself a sale opportunity. When people know that you’re raising prices and that it’s their last chance to get the subsidized price, they may go ahead and buy your product/membership.

In short, if you need to raise your prices, don’t bother yourself with BFCM. Also, you don’t have to put everything on sale. If you have more than one product, create a discount code only for a few items. This makes a lot of sense in the retail space, especially if you’re trying to sell off excess or old inventory.

Another thing to keep in mind is that having some items/products missing in the sale can frustrate your potential customers. It’s safe to avoid the “doorbusters” game with digital products e.g., software/membership since they are certainly unlimited. 

Always keep your ethics. It’s a bad sign if you ever feel guilty for creating false scarcity. 

The post How Much of a Discount Should I Offer for My Black Friday Sale? appeared first on Stranger Studios.

Easy vs Complicated Black Friday Sale

Sales can be as straightforward or as complicated as you want. Different levels of configuration and customizations allow you to modify any sale to your liking. It comes down to what do aim to achieve versus how much time you have to achieve this.

Setting up a Black Friday discount code

You can create discount codes for your Black Friday sale within WooCommerce or Paid Memberships Pro (PMPro).

• In this document, we cover the step-by-step guideline of creating and editing discount codes with PMPro.
• See the WooCommerce documentation on creating Coupons with WooCommerce.
• If you are using the Paid Membership Pro WooCommerce Integration, you can set global product discounts based on membership level. See the PMPro document on member discount for more information.

Landing Page Design

A landing page is a vital aspect of your sale and can be any old page on your site. If you’re in for a fancy page that needs lots of custom coding, you can hire a designer; otherwise, an ordinary landing page will get the job done. We also have a variety of Sitewide Sales (SWS) themes you can try.

Read more on setting up landing pages.

Third-party Landing Pages:

Sitewide Sales will work with other third-party landing page plugins that might already be integrated into your other marketing practices. If that landing page is on the same WordPress site, you will be able to integrate directly to your WooCommerce or Paid Memberships Pro coupons and discount codes.

Sale Banners

The Sitewide Sales plugin includes three banner positions you can use to advertise your sale. For inspiration, as you design your banners, check out our series of articles that include the same content used in the demos. WooCommerce Sample Content and Paid Memberships Pro Sample Content

The following steps detail how to set up the Banner for your Sitewide Sale.

Email Campaign

Your email campaign can be brief and to the point, or creative and well-detailed. We tried the two models, and from our experience, people seemed to like the simple email templates. Getting creative might help capture better attention, but simplicity works as well.

The post How Long Does It Take to Set Up a Black Friday Sale? appeared first on Stranger Studios.

Steps to create discount code

• Firstly, you would need to have the Paid Memberships Pro plugin installed and activated. Read more on Download & Install Paid Memberships Pro.

• Creating the PMPro Discount Code:
  • Navigate to WordPress Dashboard > Memberships > Discount Codes in the WordPress admin area.
  • Click Add New Discount Code or choose to Edit an existing code

• Depending on the membership level you want to create the discount codes for, you can edit some of the following fields:
  • ID: This is an auto-generated field with an internally tracked ID (not public).
  • Code: This is the value of the code members can use at checkout to purchase products/services (public).
  • Start Date: The date you want the code to active from.
  • End Date: The date you want to end your discounted sales. The code will stop working on this specific date.
  • Uses: You can limit the number of times a discount code can be redeemed/used. Leave the field blank for unlimited uses.  

Note that setting up a discount code for a particular membership level will completely override its initial price, subscription, expiration, trial, etc.

• You can check this PMPro Discount Codes documentation for further details.
• Screenshot:

The post How Do You Create a Discount Code in Paid Memberships Pro? appeared first on Stranger Studios.

Asking for the Sale Price

In our experience, you should just give customers that ask for the sale price, the discount unless it’s not technically possible. Some reasons on the latter could include the product is out of stock, unavailable, or you can’t afford to offer the sale price anymore.

Rest assured, not many people will ask for the sale price after the sale has ended. Customers that will ask for such a favor have their reasons for doing so. They either forgot to purchase, saw your sale too late or only got their cash flow after the sale has ended. If you decide to extend the offer for them it could show as a sign of goodwill.

You may want to try extending your sale (not advertised) to those who ask. If you find it doesn’t work for your case, you can come up with a different strategy. 

Minimal Discount

Generally, it’s a good idea, even outside of big sales, to have a minimal discount code or a coupon (5% or so) always available to give to anyone who asks. This can be seen as a great measure of consideration and the customer can feel valued and that you are more interested in their success than your pocket. Even if this is not the case, you will probably help retain most of these customers in this way.

The post What Should I Tell Customers Asking for the Sale Price After the Sale Has Ended? appeared first on Stranger Studios.