A good promotion gets the attention of the customer, drives traffic to the store, and eventually, brings sales.

The biggest success factor is if the promotion is good and interesting enough to get people to show up to the store and take advantage of the promotion.

The most underrated factor? Timing.

The right deal at the wrong time won’t be effective. Why it isn’t effective isn’t as straightforward as the quality of the promotion. Maybe the promotion doesn’t align with customer needs at the time. It might come at a time where customers aren’t able to take advantage of the promotion. Maybe there is just enough going on other places that it gets lost in the noise.

There are more ways timing can be a problem for a promotion than any other factor of promotion success. Let’s explore those and dig into how to think about promotional timing in a way that makes sense for you and your customers.

Traditional Timing Benefits

There’s a lot to be said for using traditional promotional windows when establishing your promotional calendar.

Customers like things that are predictable. Dropping your promotion at a time that a customer would expect to see it makes things line up in the customer’s brain in a pleasing way. People like to comfortable, and knowing “they always have a sale the second week of September” gives the customer that familiar, warm-and-fuzzy feeling.

That predictability also lets your customers plan for your promotion. There are planners and non-planners, list-makers and non-list-makers. But at some level we all like to be able to identify what is coming next. Predictability and planning go hand-in-hand. They let your customer anticipate purchases.

In its extreme, traditional windows are also expected. The most obvious example of this is Black Friday. Everyone expects a deal on Black Friday. More than that, they expect a BIG deal. Not meeting that expectation of your customer may lead to questions about why you aren’t doing what they think you should be.

All if this together makes a pretty compelling case for using those traditional windows that you’ve established or been conditioned to respect.

The Downside of Traditional Windows

Predictability can cut against your promotion’s success as well. If your customer is so conditioned to a predictable promotion window, they may not take advantage of a promotion waiting for the next one, or worse, regular day-to-day sales suffer because the customer knows there’s a sale coming.

The frustration of hearing a customer say, “I’ll wait for it to go on sale” is made exponentially worse when you have to stand there and recognize that they have you figured out. I’ve worked for brands that had become so addicted to the direct-to-consumer pipeline and the adrenaline high that comes from a six-figure weekend that the consumer knew to wait for the email that would no doubt be just around the corner.

In the case of a brand, you devalue the products that you offer to the point that MSRP now means nothing and the consumer believes that your product is worth less than you try to portray because it’s always on sale. At the store level, you devalue the entire inventory when you become that predictable.

The other significant issue with traditional promotional windows is the noise-to-signal ratio. The best example of this is, once again, Black Friday. Everyone has a sale for Black Friday, because it’s become expected. The sheer volume of sales makes every sale mean less. It’s a race to the bottom across all categories, not just your own, as everyone scrambles to get their piece of that holiday-shopping pie.

With that much noise in email inboxes, radio ads, commercials, and signage, how can you make sure your message resonates? Is it even possible?

I think there’s a real case to be made that it’s tougher to sell on Black Friday than almost any other day of the year for a shop like yours.

Big box will always have the advantage on Black Friday. Bigger bullhorns to spread the word, purchasing power to get better prices that allow for better deals, and in general, better proximity to traditional Black Friday shopping areas make the headwinds significant.

Embracing Alternative Windows

Now that we’ve made the entire prospect of running promotions seem daunting and not worth the time it takes to make them happen, let’s talk about why alternative windows may be the solution you’re after.

The best promotions are effective, at least in part, because of the attention they deliver. That means you have to make sure you can even let people know about what you have going on. The less there is going on during your promotion, the better.

Granted, we lead busier lives than ever. There’s always something taking our time, and if there isn’t, we find a way to volunteer it by always having a phone in our hand or something else.

At least try to find times that aren’t clogged up with messaging from other similar outlets. Hunting seasons are pretty well-defined; there’s only so much we can do to work around them. But that doesn’t mean you can’t avoid high-noise times of the year to give your promotion, and its messaging, the best chance to break through.

The other thing you may find when you start exploring non-traditional promotional windows is that you’re better able to align the promotion with your goals. Because you’re putting fresh eyes on your promotion strategy, and not just re-doing the same things you always have, or that the customer expects, you may find yourself able to identify different and more dynamic goals that your new promotion strategy can help deliver.

Any business, big or small, should work to be as proactive as possible. When you get reactive, things get sideways fast, and before you know it, you aren’t the one making decisions anymore. You’re just along for the ride, letting other people drag you around by your lapels.

Potential Alternative Windows

If I’m going to tell you not to use traditional promotional windows, it’s only right that I offer a few ideas for other times of the year that a promotion might make sense for your store.

New Year’s/January: On the heels of the holiday shopping season may seem like an odd time for a promotion, but if you avoided the noise of Black Friday, it might make all the sense in the world.

It might be that someone got a new hunting rifle for Christmas, or some other new gear that wasn’t complete or needs added to.

The real way to make this window a success is by leading it with a gift card/gift certificate sale for the holiday shopping season. I know I said that’s a window to maybe avoid, but think about your customers. A lot of hunters tell their family not to buy hunting stuff for them because they are particular. Gift cards are the obvious solution.

A promotion for discounted gift cards can be a great way to attract the right kind of attention twice, instead of once. The initial sale of the gift cards at a discount allows the gift giver to be the hero, and save money. Maybe you offer $100 gift cards for $75, or $50 for $35. This initial influx of cash is no doubt welcome during the tail end of the year, and it is a good enough deal that you will likely get some traction.

The beauty of gift cards is in the redemption. Very few people only spend the money on the gift card. They use the $100 towards a new rifle or optic they’ve been putting off because of the price tag. Chances are, you’ll make back the discount you offered on the gift card itself many times over.

And if you’re running a sale to clear out the store as the new year kicks off to make space for new orders, you get a multiplier effect from the previous gift card sale, if you did one.

Even without the leading holiday promotion, it’s a common time of year for people to fill holes they found during the previous hunting season. Because so many stores are in recovery mode from their sales during Q4, you can take up a lot of the oxygen in the room to make people aware of your promotion.

Tax Season: Tax season is a common window for bigger purchases like car lots, but this seems to have tapered off in recent years, at least around me. I still like this time of year, though, because a lot of people can’t stand to have that refund check burning a hole in their pocket.

To me, this works best as a promotion on big-ticket items. Again, the goal is to find a logical time of year where there isn’t a lot of noise in the landscape to allow your promotional message to get out. For my area, while this used to be a popular timeframe for sales, it has slowed noticeably in recent years, and I think there’s some room to bring it back.

Father’s Day: We love our parents, but Mother’s Day leads in flower purchases, and Father’s Day is the #1 day for collect calls. At least it always was. Are collect calls even still a thing?

What about a “Bring Dad in for a Free Gift” promotion? Set up a spinning wheel with different gifts on it. Could be $10 gift cards, a free hat or t-shirt, maybe you have a table of items you just want to get out of the store they can choose from.

It brings people in the door and gets them something with your name on it or a gift card to get a purchase started. Worst case, you end up with some new people in the store. Pair it with a bigger raffle or giveaway and you also add a customer information collection opportunity.

Season Opener: I love using a season opener as a promotion window, especially if you’re a state game check-in location. Lots of shops run promotions ahead of seasons opening to get their customers stocked up, but that kind of falls in the “to be expected” category, of which I’m not a huge fan if I can avoid it.

What about using a season opener sale to look ahead to the next thing, way early, or to close out the current stock of the season that just opened. This is especially true of turkey season goods. Of all the animals we hunt, none do we care about less once our tag is full than turkeys. It’s a remarkable phenomenon.

Hunters are consumed with finding a gobbler from the month before season opens, and once it closes or they fill their tags, turkeys are totally forgotten.

Honest question. How many friction calls do you have in your store right now that haven’t been looked at since last turkey season? Use the opener as a last-gasp chance to move on from that inventory and turn it into cash, so you can move on to the next thing.

A New Perspective

None of these are magic-bullet ideas. Customers are spoiled for choice when it comes to shopping these days, and that makes running an effective promotion more difficult than ever. If you’ve had mixed results by following the generally-accepted ideas of when and what to do for promotions, maybe it’s time for a change.

Zig when others are zagging. Mix it up a little bit. You might stumble into a wildly underserved demand.