Slow Weekend Sales? 3 Ways to Handle a Weekly Sales Slump
Digital marketing can have its challenges, especially if you’re new to the game. Oftentimes we find our clients setting up fantastic campaigns that hit all three stages of the funnel and drive traffic to beautiful landing pages designed to sell and still ending up noticing some days of the week when their sales aren’t quite what they wish they were. This presents a challenge for new advertisers: How do I make up for these days where my sales are lacking? How can I smooth out lumpy weekend conversions? Do I even have to? Today on the blog we’ll discuss three ways you can handle your conversion slumps and give you some perspective on how they even occur in the first place. So let’s not waste another minute, there are conversions on the line!
First Things First: Understanding Why Conversions Slump
Let’s start by discussing why conversions slump during certain days of the week, and how you can adjust your strategy to offset it. There are several factors that can contribute to slumping sales - Dropping your spend, having inconsistent creative, not coordinating your landing pages - but the most common one is simply tied to consumer behavior.
At FieldTest we maintain that an “audience-first” approach is the most effective strategy to achieving digital sales. This means that when you select your audiences, your ads will appear to them wherever they are browsing online. When it comes to DTC intenders, weekdays are far and away the top days for conversions, which makes sense if you think about it. The majority of intenders for most DTC products will be urban professionals in a certain income bracket, people who are sitting on their computers 40+ hours a week. It’s fairly common for these people to either take a small break from their tasks and check out products that are advertised to them during work hours or simply come across your brand advertised while browsing in the course of their work day.
One FieldTest client report showed nearly every initial impression occurred at a desktop computer in an urban area while about half of every conversion occurred on mobile in a suburban area. This should give you a very good idea of the type of consumer behavior to expect: People will see your brand in the course of their daily work tasks and those who don’t convert immediately will then go home and convert while relaxing in front of the TV. What sets the weekend apart? Less work, less browsing, more time away from devices and more time spent doing in-person shopping if any. This is a consistent pattern and if you don’t know how to contextualize it it can drive you up a wall. With this in mind let’s talk about how you can offset this slump and smooth out your conversion numbers.
1: Adjust Your Creative to Reach Weekend Browsers.
Many advertisers’ first step when trying to smooth out weekend sales wrinkles is maybe not the most effective (we’ll talk about this in a second) but it is one that makes sense, at least on first glance: Adjust your creative to appeal to weekend browsers. Given what we just covered in the last segment, that weekend browsers are a distinct group separate from the typical weekday browser who makes up the meat and potatoes of most ad campaign conversions, it only makes sense to adjust some creatives to appeal to these consumers and try to fill in as many of those lost conversions as possible. This can absolutely work, if you have the resources to do it.
The process here is similar to the process in any initial campaign: Experiment, get creative, and test new audiences and creative strategies until you find the right combination that fills in your conversion numbers. This will take time and resources but it is absolutely doable! We’ve seen several clients set up multiple campaigns monthly, one or two that run during the week and another couple that run during the weekend, all serving different ads to different audiences and all making up small pieces of a larger advertising puzzle. While this method is effective, it can be a little more complex than some newbie advertisers may feel comfortable with. There is a simpler method of smoothing out your conversion numbers, however. Let’s dig into that.
2: Increase Budget Where Your Campaigns Are Already Working
If managing an elaborate set of discrete campaigns all targeting specific groups on specific days sounds a little above your head there is an easier, and more effective, way of filling in the gaps of your lost weekend sales: Let the data do the talking and simply increase your budget in the areas where your current campaigns are effectively converting.
Too often we find customers building successful campaigns with small slump days who then become enamored with the idea of filling in those days rather than increasing the sales on the days where your campaigns are hitting. Think of it this way: If you were a gold miner and you found a vein, you wouldn’t go across the valley to another spot to try to find gold there too. You’d stick with the vein that you found and dig into it with everything you’ve got!
One of the most powerful parts of the FieldTest Platform is the campaign data overview dashboard, where you can track all metrics across any given campaign on any given timeline. This is your guide to increasing sales and doing what we call “campaign optimizations” - finding what is working and cranking it up to 11. Take a look at your campaign dashboard and take note of any patterns that arise. Maybe, like the customer report we discussed earlier, you see huge sales on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays in major urban centers. Increase your budget on those days and you’ll only see those numbers amplify. Maybe you see huge clicks early in the week and huge sales later on. You guessed it, turn up your budget in both of those times and you’ll amplify those successes. The power of the FieldTest Platform truly lies not only in our unparalleled access to high quality intender groups but in our complete data transparency that allows you to make informed decisions about the future of your campaigns and take your success to the next level. Still sound a little complicated to you? Well, there is yet another, simpler option.
3: Go Platform Plus for White Glove Service
Most of our clients like the freedom to experiment and take their campaigns into their own hands that the FieldTest Platform offers, but many understand that to take their campaigns to the next level they need to bring in the professionals. That’s where the FieldTest Platform Plus service comes in. Any platform client spending $3k or more per month receives our “white glove” service, including personalized campaign insights, creative services, and guidance on subjects such as best practices in handling things like weekend sales slumps. At the $10k/mo level we will take your campaigns into our own hands and do custom optimizations to make sure your campaigns are performing their absolute best.