When to Run a Sale or Promotion
If you've opted out of Managed Pricing and Promos, the when and how to run a sale or promotion in your Artist Shop is entirely up to you! Here are some tips and tricks on how to create effective promotions:
Terminology
A sale is just a way of saying that a price has been marked down. "Markdowns” typically refer to items that are permanently on sale. That is, the price will not go back up. So something would be on sale, for example, if you were planning on deleting it from your shop after marking it down for a brief time.
Promotion (promo): A promotion is when items are marked down in price and discounted for a limited time.
Types of Promotions and Sales
Threadless Managed Artist Shop Sales and Promotions
Now, you can choose to let Threadless manage your shop pricing and promotions in your Artist Shop with strategically varying incentives to help your sales grow. Artist Shops promotions will have a distinct promotional calendar with different offers so you can strategically share promotions at various times. Each upcoming promotion will be communicated in your Artist Dashboard so you’ll know when and how to promote the different sales and offers available in your Artist Shop.
Participate in the Threadless Marketplace
If your Artist Shop products are opted into the Threadless marketplace, this means your shop's products will be added to the Marketplace with pricing managed by Threadless. Your items will be automatically included in certain Threadless.com sales and promotions. Your shop’s products may also be available in the Threadless site search and possibly even featured in Threadless sale and promotion emails and social media communications or the Threadless homepage, giving them a greater chance to be seen and sold and creating incremental sales for your Artist Shop!
Run Your Own Sales and Promotions
If you set your own prices, here are just a few different types of sales you might use for your Artist Shop:
- Reduce the price of everything: Do a shop-wide sale by bringing down the price of everything in your store.
- “Loss Leaders: discount products that are in demand and that have been doing well to boost more sales.
- “End of the Season” sale: This is a great way to make way for new designs, get the most out of any holiday and season-specific designs before removing them from your shop (if you so choose).
- Pre-season sales: Summer just around the corner? Try having a sale on tanks! Fall creeping up? Try a sweater sale!
- “Get it before it’s gone” sale: If you don’t have excess merchandise you have to get rid of, try having a sale for any designs you’re considering deleting from your shop so that people know they have to act fast.
- New Arrivals sale: discounting new items is a great way to get attention for new items in your shop, as well as to show people that you are staying on top of regularly updating your shop.
Tips for Running Sales and Promotions
Schedule It
Scheduling out when you’ll have sales and promos is a great way to prepare what you need to do before each one, when you’re going to push certain designs, and when you’re going to have specific social media posts advertising your sale, limited time offer, new products, etc.
Feel free to use this template! Click here and when you get to the table, hit File then “Make a Copy” and it’s all yours!
It’s a great way not only of organizing sales/promos you know you want to have, but it’s also a fantastic way of looking down the line and getting inspiration for scheduling sales/promos that line up with holidays, pop-culture events, your birthday, etc.
Trends
Do you have a design relevant to a movie coming out? Advertise that product at a discounted price! Is summer around the corner? Start a sale on tanks! Do you have ugly Christmas sweater designs? Do a November sale on them so that people get them in time for the winter holidays!
Track Your Efforts
The key to getting better with sales and promos is looking back at ones that maybe didn’t work out so well, learning from what flopped vs what did well.
One way you can do this is by checking Google Analytics. Did a certain sale drive more traffic to your site? Did a certain post? What’s working?
Set Goals
This is often overlooked because everyone assumes that the goal of a sale or promo is to make money. Duh.
But you know the phrase “you have to spend money to make money”? Sometimes, that’s ok too. Knowing what your goal with a sale is will help you figure out how to price your items if you’re discounting. Are you doing a MASSIVE sale just to garner more fans and traffic for your shop? Maybe making money isn’t the goal here, and making a little bit less for adding a greater discount to items is more important. If it’s a sale where the goal is to make money, you want to make sure that you’re careful with how much you’re discounting your items.
Find more tips and tricks to creating effective promotions on our Creative Resources blog.