Make your seasonal deals store a successful experience

Running a seasonal deals store is a great opportunity to provide shoppers with a variety of relevant deals. Seasonal deals stores (think Valentine’s Day, Cyber Week, and Mother’s Day Stores) get buyers excited to purchase deals for the upcoming holiday or season you are promoting. Optimize the potential of the seasonal store by keeping with the theme from the deal, to the design and even with your potential advertisers.

Beth Wiggins and Joelene Sherman from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Today’s Deal program joined me to share their experiences driving revenue with seasonal deals stores. Watch the webinar recording below, or scroll down to read through our top takeaways.

Let’s look at a few ways you can strengthen your seasonal deals store:

1. Plan ahead. Plan your stores 90 days ahead of time. A promotions calendar is always important, but it is even more essential for deals stores due to the seasonal nature of many themes. Putting a calendar in place for the year – or even just the month – enables you to start selling earlier.




2. Have your sales team submit target merchant lists ahead of time. Planning ahead and having advertiser targets well in advance will help the creation of your store go more smoothly. Create special bonuses for your representatives tied to deal stores sales. Bonuses for reps who bring in the most deals from the target list, new advertisers or who lands the biggest revenue deal have been the most effective.




3. Make sure your deal categories align with the store theme. A relevant theme helps generate excitement around a deals stores, and you want to make sure that the deals within don’t disappoint. If you have been advertising a golf deals store but your customers arrive to find it full of event and automotive deals, your customers will lose trust in your site.




4. Strive for deal diversity. Deals stores are a great opportunity to expand your deal mix. Smaller deals that wouldn’t stand up well as a regular featured deal can work well as complementary deals in a store, and deal diversity creates a better browsing experience for your customers once the store is up and running. Add variety in deal price, location, and category within the store grouping. A good rule of thumb is to make sure that your deals store contains at least 12 different deals.




5. Add “flair” to your site to give it the seasonal look and feel you want. Mix it up and incorporate different creative elements in your deals site. Be sure to take advantage of this opportunity and come up with a design that clearly distinguishes your store from your regular deals page.




6. Promote, promote, promote! Create stores that tie-in with offline promotions or special sections and ad groupings, and then advertise your deals store in print or on air in addition to online and on social media. For example, you can advertise your golf store within the sports section of your publication or during the on-air sports coverage as well as on your website and Facebook page and in your deal emails.




7. Run your store for 7-10 days. The ideal amount of time for a deals store to run is a little over a week. Try to schedule your store to maximize weekdays and minimize weekends, as more deals are purchased during the weekdays.