Creating a Holiday Marketing Plan That Converts

In this webinar, you will learn how to build a successful holiday marketing campaign that stands out. 

Transcript

Kayla Ivey, Product Marketing Manager Hi everyone. Welcome, as you're joining. Just going to give everyone a second to join from the waiting room here. So again, welcome. We are really excited to be talking about creating a holiday marketing plan that converts. So we'll get into all of our tips and tricks. We've really honed in on a lot of best practices over the years when it comes to campaigns during the holiday season. So we're going to be talking about everything from Black Friday, Cyber Monday, through the Christmas season, kind of everything in between. What should you be doing as a car wash owner operator to kind of maximize return at the end of the year? And we have, as I mentioned, definitely honed in on what works and what doesn't, trying things over the last 10 years or so. So, it looks like several of you are joining. 

As you guys are getting settled here, and we're kind of waiting for a few more people to jump on, let me know or let us know in the Q&A at the bottom of your screen. Have you guys started planning your holiday campaign for this year yet? And if you have, let us know what you're thinking. Gift cards, wash books, what kind of promotion do you typically run or are you thinking of running this year? All right, let's see here. We'll get into a little bit of housekeeping as you guys are posting your thoughts there. So Q&A, which maybe you found so far. I see a couple things coming in. So the Q&A button is where you'll communicate with us through our session today. Chat is going to be disabled, so anything you need, just put it in the Q&A, whether that's a question, technical issue, or you just want to leave us a comment and kind of chat with us, we would love that. So put anything you that you need in the Q&A. If you for some reason can't see that, try exiting full screen and bringing your zoom window into a smaller area so you can see that button if for some reason you can't. 

And then last note here is we will be recording our session today. We'll share the recording with you so you don't have to take notes unless you want to. And we will also save some time at the end to go through questions. We'll send out answers to all of the questions, whether we get to them all or not. So definitely put thoughts and questions in there as we go along. Let's go ahead. Okay, so a little bit about Suds here before we get into specifically holiday campaigns. So Suds is part of the DRB family of brands, and really what we specialize in is helping car wash owners and operators of all sizes grow. So what we really hone in on is data. So we leverage data and analytics to basically come up with strategies that are going to help you get to whatever your goals or your growth strategies are. So it might be helping you open your next site, even helping analyze a location. It could be looking at your data and understanding whether your member potential has more growth, what you can do to capture more members, all types of different strategies along those lines. 

And similarly, we're going to focus today on all of the data that we've gathered over holiday campaigns through the years, and tips and tricks, best practices, what we've seen work, and share those with you today on the marketing strategy side. So with that, I'm going to introduce Jennifer Henderson, who's going to be your primary speaker today. I have had the pleasure of working with Jennifer for five or so years now at Suds, and she is fantastic when it comes to marketing strategy. So really wanted to bring her on here and let her share with you tips and tricks that she has learned, and that we've kind of observed over the years when it comes to what's going to make your holiday promotion successful and truly revenue driving. And you know, we'll leave you with some takeaways that you can implement with your own holiday campaign this year. So, try to stay till the end and we will give you those key action items. So, Jennifer, I'll go ahead and hand it over to you.

Jennifer Henderson, SUDS Marketing Strategy Expert Thank you for the introduction, Kayla. Much appreciated. So today we are going to talk about developing marketing plans for the holidays that convert. So, we'll chat a little bit about challenges that operators are facing during the holiday season, and then we'll dig into how can we address those challenges and then how do we pull it all together into a marketing plan slash campaign that delivers. So, starting off with challenges, here's what we hear year over year from clients, and what we know from the industry is what people are facing. 

First one right off the bat, cutting through the competitive noise. This is such a crowded time of year in the marketing space, and trying to get your voice heard, trying to get in front of the right customers, trying to get your message out and compete not only within the car wash space, but also retail at large, when everybody is vying for those same dollars. 

Next challenge, determining the best fit offer for your target market. What does it make sense to sell and who does it make sense to sell it to is really what that boils down to. Where can you find the fit? How can you make sure that what you think is a good idea actually is going to resonate with the people most likely to buy? Setting realistic expectations for performance, especially given what we know about this time of year. What should you expect for an outcome? How can you develop goals and track progress that makes sense for you and that you're not going to feel like you've kind of overshot the mark or you could have done better? 

And then finally, pulling that all together into developing, executing and evaluating a successful marketing campaign. What are the nuts and bolts there? And we'll talk about that. So let's dig into those challenges a little bit. The first one is cutting through a competitive noise. And what I like to say here is you can't outrun a lion. And what I mean by that is you can't outspend the big boys at this time of year. You cannot keep pace with retailers who have deeper than deep pockets. And this is, you know, this is the time of year when they're shooting their shot. So for example, you take Target. Target spends about $1.4 billion a year on advertising. And the biggest chunk of that is during the holiday season, like people are not playing. So we're not going to try to keep pace with other operators' budgets or the retail industry at large. We're not going to urge you to spend bigger and more and to try to keep up. We're just going to say, you can't outrun a lion, we're going to be smarter. Start early. And there's two facets to that. The first one, and I don't want to give anybody a panic attack here, is that survey research from retailers does show that almost 75% of them have finalized their holiday budgets by September. By the time you get to October, that jumps to 97%. So if you've been kind of lagging, you've been thinking about this, you've been backburnering this, it's time. You know, the rubber's hitting the road now. So if you haven't thought about it, let's get you thinking about it today. The other part of starting early is with your messaging and priming your audience to get those offers. And I know I'm not the only one who hates to go into Costco in July and see like a 12 foot high werewolf that they're promoting for Halloween. Or even worse, like Christmas trees creeping in before Labor Day. Unless you're my mom, she would love that. But that kind of thing, we're not talking about going that extreme. What we are talking about is what are some subtle things that you can do to sort of plant the seed in customer's mind that offers are coming. It might be a sign and a QR code on site that says, hey, join our text club. Be the first to know when our awesome holiday deals drop later this month. And start that in November. The same for hitting up your email list saying, hey guys, we're going to have some great holiday promos happening this year. You know, put it in your calendar. Expect more emails from us, letting you know what those offers are. So start early with your planning and budgeting. Start early with your communication. 

And then be consistent. And that means one, just one offer from Black Friday, Cyber Monday through to the end of the year. It takes five to seven on average marketing touches before somebody's in a position where they're ready to convert. We need to be consistent with those touches. We need to be marketing the same thing to them each time, reinforcing that. So that means no one day flash sales, no changing up the offer midway through, et cetera. It's be consistent, keep the offer. By all means refresh your creative, go through different iterations of messaging. But one thing that we're promoting consistently throughout the period. That'll help us cut through the noise and stick in people's brains. 

Okay, so next challenge. This is a biggie. You know, what is the actual offer that we're going to be consistent about? What does that look like? How do we figure that out? So number one is understand your audience. And I'll tell you who we think that is. We think that is your current customers. You already know them, they're your members, they're your retail customers, they're the folks in your prospect database. This is an incredibly expensive time of year for your customer acquisition cost. It's going to shoot way up when you're trying to get net new customers, guy off the street who hasn't heard of you to buy. We think it's much easier and it's much more lucrative to market to people who are already familiar with your brand, who like you, who are giving you money, who are coming back month over month, week over week. That's your core audience. Think gifts, not obligations. There's a reason people don't give Netflix subscriptions or phone plans for the holidays. It creates an obligation. On the giver, the obligation is, oh okay, I got to make sure my credit card info is updated so this doesn't expire halfway through the year. It's coming down at the end of the year, do I really want to renew my brother-in-law's, you know, car wash subscription? And it creates an obligation on the part of the recipient as well. Oh, am I making good enough use of this? Oh it's coming down to the end of the year. Is he expecting me to renew it? We don't want that. What we want are standalone gifts, things that you can give and get out. That's how we like to think about it. Make it easy. So the easier it is for someone to buy, the better. So not go online, print out this code, take it on site, someone's going to scan it, they're going to hand you a form, you're going to fill out the details, then you get a little sticker. No, the easier you can make it to buy, to redeem to use, that makes a good offer. Put two and two together for your shoppers, and we'll show you an example of this in a second, but this is really telling people who this gift makes sense for and what they can do with it. Don't leave it to people's imaginations to say, hey, you know, who in my life could use a gift card to a car wash? Make your marketing around doing that legwork for the customer. Putting that two and two together so it's a no brainer. Oh yeah, that makes sense. 

And then finally, clarity over creativity, which you probably can't believe anyone at Suds is telling you this, but by creativity that we see almost every year, people go off the rails with this, and it's well intentioned, but they come up with these offers that they are sure are going to stand out in the market, and they inevitably are complex, they're confusing, they're difficult to understand, to pitch to buy into. We don't want that. We want absolute clarity. As simple as you can make the offer, one to two seconds, I can understand what this is. So no 12 days of Christmas where there's a new deal every day, no flash sales on the weekend, none of that stuff. Make it really clear, and then if you want to go hog wild, make that your marketing, your copy, your visuals, et cetera. That's where you can have fun. Let's look at a couple of examples. So here's an example of the idea of putting two and two together. So why not pitch gift cards as the perfect gift for your sister's new boyfriend? We don't even know if he's going to still be around by the time Memorial Day hits, but you got to give the guy something. So this makes sense. Or your neighbor, who every winter, lets you borrow his snowblower. Or the kid's soccer coach, you know, you don't really like the guy but you also don't want your kid on the bench all season. Maybe he's a good target for this. So let your marketing do some legwork to kind of put those ideas in people's heads who this makes sense for. Then on the clarity front, here are three examples of client offers from last holiday season that the creativity is in the presentation, the clarity is in the offer. Buy four wash books, get two free. Everyone can understand that math. 25% off gift cards and wash books. Makes sense to me. How about 30% off gift cards? That's great too. Very simple, very clear offers that worked. Next challenge, setting realistic expectations. So this is about what can you expect performance wise? How do you set yourself up not to be disappointed. We recommend thinking deeper, not broader. 

Like I said, focusing it in on how can I get more revenue from my existing base? How can I get them to invest more, buy gift cards as stocking stuffers, maybe buy one for themselves, et cetera. We want you to go deeper. How can you get a little more juice out of that orange? Not broader, because like I said, customer acquisition costs jump way up at this time of year, and it's just not cost effective with your spend to try to be thinking about a whole host of net new folks coming through the door and this is the time to get them. Spend where you know it will be effective. Ad costs increase on average across channels about 25% over the holiday season because the competition is that stiff for people's eyeballs and people's wallets. So you need to be selective about channels. This is not the time to try new experimental stuff. This is the time to double down on what works and has worked for you. Look backwards. The time to evaluate your marketing plan is not January, but if you've done it in January, great. If you haven't done it at all, we're going to say, look at last year's stuff right now. We want you to look backwards at your holiday promos and how in the past, and how they've performed, and identify opportunities where you can make incremental improvements this year. So you might look at it and say, you know what, Jennifer was right. Last year's offer seemed a little complicated. You know, we got a lot of questions at the pay station. People were kind of, didn't really get it. If I simplified it, I think we can get a little bit more performance out of it. Maybe on average, 15 or 20% better performance. Last year, we went a little light on the discount. You know, we looked at what other people were doing afterwards, and no, we should have probably been about 25%, 30% off. I think if we up the discount, that's going to increase our performance. But you know what? Our CSAs weren't really as well prepped as we'd like. Maybe if we do a little extra training and incentivizing this season, we can squeeze some more performance out of there. So look at those performance metrics from the past and build forward. And if you had a great promo and it worked last year, rerun it. By all means, do that. If it works, keep doing it. And we have a number of clients who just are known for what they do year over year. People expect it. People come to sort of pencil that in on their calendar. Hey, I'm going to buy something at this time because I know this deal is coming out and it works. So look backwards, look at if you haven't done holiday promos before, look at how your other promos have performed and what lessons you can learn there. Don't just count dollars. So maybe you put in a thousand dollars in marketing investment for your holiday promo and you make 10,000. Maybe 10,000 is a drop in the bucket for your operations, but that's $10,000 you didn't have before. That's a 10X return on investment. We would say go after that all day. So think about the ROI in addition to the dollars, and think about anything else that you might be able to measure that makes sense for you with this promo. It might be, hey, we're going to also try to collect contact info for people so we can remarket to them down the line. We're also going to try to build brand equity at this time of year with some community partnerships. So think creatively there. What are we measuring that's not just dollars? Dollars are obviously number one, but there's some other stuff we can look at too. 

Okay, so the nuts and bolts of it, we're here to create a successful seasonal marketing campaign. What goes into that? Obviously at Suds, so we're going to start with data. And like I said, you want to look at your data from the past, but you also want to look at things like seasonality and traffic patterns. You want to look at tenure and churn. You want to have a sense of your data, but also what are things doing in the region? What are things doing in the industry? And just generally what's happening across retail in this season? What does consumer behavior look like? Do you know how much people spend on average over the holidays? How much are they spending on gifts? What piece of that do you think you can reasonably capture? So start with data. Decide on your goals. Like I said, we want to make them realistic, and track progress. So if you looked at your plan in January and evaluated, great. You're ahead of people who didn't look back at all. But we don't want you to wait until 2025. We want you to be looking at all of your assets and your rollout week over week across the season, because you're going to see some things there that you can act on. You're going to say, hey, we're crushing it with onsite sales on the weekends. What if we put another CSA out there on the lot who's working the stack while someone else is at the XPT? Could we sell even more? Look, okay, look at our ad campaign. We have a three ad set here, ad number three, kind of bringing up the rear. What if we ax that one and put the money into the two that are doing better? So there's a lot of tweaks and levers to pull throughout the campaign that can improve performance. So that's why we want you looking at this week over week, making the adjustments that you can come to the end of it saying, hey, we optimize this and we feel confident we're at peak performance. Make current customers the star. That's the bottom line. We think that's where the money is, that's where the traction is. Spend smarter, spend not more. So the largest share, the way that people are breaking down generally across retail their budgets, are a third, a third, a third over the holidays. Brand awareness campaigns, a third, spending on customer acquisition, a third, customer retention, a third. We're not going to do so much in the range of customer acquisition 'cause we don't have $1.4 billion to throw at it, and we know our customer, our net new customer acquisition costs are going up. But we might want to think about what does, you know, what are we doing on the brand awareness side? A good example of this is Starbucks. They invest heavily in brand awareness at the holidays. They've got the red cups, they're promoting the season and linking themselves with the season. It's not just necessarily specific drink discounts. 

And then we probably want to spend the chunk, the biggest chunk of our money on retention. So we want to spend smarter, not necessarily more. And then good example of this in the car wash space is channels you choose, and where do you put the emphasis? So our rule of thumb is if you can sell online, if you have the capacity to sell online, we suggest you put the emphasis and the bulk of your spend into your digital budget, because that's a seamless way for people to buy, click from the ad, through to the storefront, boom, done. If you don't have that, then we recommend dialing down digital in favor of onsite signage. So you're capturing people who are there on site with the offer, and really digging in on email and text and pushing that hard. So like I said, it's not more dollars, it's just smart allocation. Get employee buy-in and incentivize efforts. One of the other top reasons we see campaigns go off the rails, aside from cuckoo bananas complicated offers is CSAs are not converting customers. And they need to be trained to be able to do that. So you want their buy-in, you want them to be able to deliver the offer. And this is conversation-based conversion. So they need to know how to have those conversations that open up the opportunity to sell. So it might be asking things like, you know, are you an early bird shopper? You one of those people like me who leaves things to the last minute? You know, who's the hardest person on your list to buy for this year? And using those sort of prompts as a way into putting the offer in front of the customer. And then following that up by incentivizing efforts. There's absolutely no one out there, your employees included, who would not like a few more bucks in their pocket this season.

So whether it's a bonus, whether it's a prize, something that you can do that will spur some friendly competition to get people selling, we've seen that work tremendously well. So put some emphasis there on how you can get your team involved, active, enthusiastic about selling. And then think beyond the bottom line. We talked about ROI, we're also kind of talking about community building efforts. Is there other things that you can be doing that are going to have a halo effect throughout the year that are going to build a positive brand image in the community for your car wash? Are there also things that you can be doing that are on the data side? So if I'm able to collect the emails or texts from people who are gift card recipients, then later in the year when I know that they've probably used their gift card and had a good experience, can I remarket membership to them? So that's another component to your marketing campaign that is a little bit more forward thinking. So kind of think beyond the bottom line, think beyond the holiday season.

Kayla Ivey  Perfect, and I'm just going to give you a second to breathe there, Jennifer. So I noticed most of you that are commenting are doing promotions around kind of wash books, gift cards, those kinds of things that are that one and done purchase that Jennifer mentioned. There maybe was a comment or two about membership promotions, which we're going to talk about next. So really interested to hear Jennifer's take on how membership promotions kind of fall into this strategy during the season, and how do you know if it's right for you to do membership versus you know, kind of the giftable purchase as we've talked about so far. And then also quick note, as we're kind of rounding out the last few minutes of our discussion today, if you do have questions, now's a great time to put those in the Q&A section, and we will circle back to those in just a couple minutes here. So back to you, Jennifer.

Jennifer Henderson Thank you, Kayla. So what about membership promotions? I know some of you are kind of scratching your head, like this is what Suds does. Are they going to talk about membership? Why haven't we heard about memberships? So as I said, they're not a good option for a gift. They're not a good option for a promo, and it's because of that, the idea of the obligation, the idea of it's not give a gift and get out, it creates kind of a longer term commitment, etcetera. But there are a few edge cases, there's a few scenarios in which we would say, okay, let's run a membership promotion this time of year. One would be, obviously if your go to market is this time of year, that's what you're going to do. But the other case is, if you're an established operator, seasonality. So this applies to very, very, very few of you out there. But if your peak season is November, December, if you're one of those rare unicorns, that that's where the bulk of your traffic is, absolutely run a membership promo. We would say no messaging around it being a gift. This is just, you know, hey, you live in a part of the country where this is the time of year to wash your car, it's going to be weather focused, et cetera. Run that membership promo, go with it. We would also say annual plans. It's a little bit of a different flavor than a membership promo, but we've seen these work really well as a holiday offer, and we'll get to an example in a second. And that depends, it depends on if it makes sense for your customer base, which is why you need to look at the data. But this is, this makes a great gift. It's kind of a spendy gift. So it's someone that you like more than someone who might get a gift card. But it's kind of that one and done transaction. If it fits the profile of your customer base, we think it's a great option. And then maybe you run a membership promo to take advantage of this idea of treating yourself. So believe it or not, 60% of shoppers, of us, admit that we buy for ourselves over the holidays, and of course we do. If your favorite brand is having a Black Friday sale, why, you know, why would you not look at a little to me from me? So we don't mind a membership promo, or even marketing some of your holiday offerings, if be it gift cards or wash books, you know, as a sort of treat yourself option. That makes sense. We would tell you if you're going to go down that road that the biggest cohort for spending on themselves, which will probably come as absolutely no shock to you are millennial men. So you might want to gear your marketing toward that particular cohort. But definitely if you, if it feels like there's a play there for you around that, treating yourself, gifting yourself, it might make sense to run a membership promo tied to that. So speaking of annual plans, that segue leads us into a couple of success stories from the previous holiday season. This is approximately a 10 site operator. They did a 50% off interior and exterior annual plans. Super simple, 50%, one half, got it. Very easy to understand and market. They sold over 1100 plans split between interior and exterior, exterior obviously kind of being the bulk of that. And they increased revenue $320,000 based on this, with a very minimal marketing spend. Simple offer, clearly communicated, boom. Number two here, good old gift cards. 50% off all gift cards. Not 20% off $50 gift cards and 30% off $100, no. Flat 50% discount across the board. Again, this is another multi-site operator in the range of 30 locations. They sold over 8,800 gift cards. And that was, believe it or not, a 100X, that's not a typo. 100X ROI on ad spend. Minimal ad spend, huge results. Super simple offer, clearly communicated, onsite signage, digital ads, done. 

So as we come to the end here, what are the key takeaways? What would I like you to remember from this webinar and as you go off plan or maybe retool your holiday promo? Number one, simple offers are successful offers. Simple is successful, make it as clear as possible, as simple as possible. And I would say, as aggressive as you are comfortable with, we want it to move the needle, we want it to be easy to understand, but we also want it to be attractive. So think 25% and up, as you'll see from the, as you saw from the annual plan and the gift card, those are pretty aggressive offers that did really, really well. And that's kind of a lever we think that we can pull there is if you go a little bit more aggressive, it does help. Number two, focus on current customers. Focus on the folks who are already giving you money. It's much easier to get more money from them than it is to get net new. And that's not just your members, that's your retail, that's everybody in your prospects database. Those are the people we're running after. Those are the people that we are going to try to capture because they're already, you know, they're already captured. We're just trying to level up a little bit of what they're spending. And then finally, run your own race. Don't try to outrun the lion, don't try to outspend the guy down the road. What makes sense for the number of locations you have? What makes sense for your data, for your history, for your customer base? So tailor your offer, tailor your marketing to that. Run your own race. Don't get caught up in what other people are doing, and that's going to make it much easier for you to come up with something that's going to work in your market regardless of what anyone else is doing.

Kayla Ivey Awesome, that was fantastic, Jennifer. Love the takeaways at the end too. So it's really actionable, and we've got some really good questions rolling in. So let's take a few minutes here to go through, and I noticed we're getting quite a few questions around annual plans, so maybe we can kind of dive into that a little bit more. So just to kind of summarize a few of these questions that are similar, how would you know if annual plans are, you know, the right fit promotion for a particular wash and kind of a little bit more of the strategy around how we would go about that? Will you dive into that a little bit?

Jennifer Henderson Sure, sure. So what we want to do probably first, we want to look at average tenure. If your average tenure on your monthly plans is over a year, annual plans probably don't make a ton of sense for you because you're keeping people longer than a year as it is. So if your tenure's under 12 months, annual plans are going to extend out that window for revenue. So that would be a go. I would also look at churn. So it's kind of, we've talked about this with respect to the Suds idea of the three for 30. That's a way to extend tenure and reduce churn. Think of it the same way. So if you're seeing a lot of churn coming out of your promos, you're seeing a lot of natural churn, and you know you've investigated going down the rabbit hole of reasons, and you've troubled, you know, you manage to troubleshoot those. If your churn is fairly high, we think this is also a good option for you. It locks people in, albeit in this case at a discounted rate, but it extends out that tenure and reduces churn. So if you're seeing elevated churn and you're seeing tenure under a year, annual plans are probably a good bet.

Kayla Ivey Yeah, and there's a couple questions too on if certain areas geographically or demographically would benefit more from annual plans, and just thinking through that, I don't know that we've seen that necessarily. So I would maybe go toward what Jennifer's saying, like look at your own current membership stats more so, especially since we're kind of tailoring this promotion more toward your current customers as Jennifer has really honed in on through the presentation. Maybe don't worry so much about the demographic of the entire area. Look at your own tenure, your own kind of membership patterns to know if that might be a good fit for you data wise. And we'd be happy to help kind of dive into any of that with you if you need.

Jennifer Henderson For sure. And I would say that if your crazy busy season is coming into the winter, like I said, almost nobody's is November, December. But if you're getting into Jan and Feb, March, and that's when traffic is picking up, you can probably get those folks at full price at that point. So I probably wouldn't run an annual plan deal that's going to cannibalize any of my revenue for later in the winter. So that might be something to think about seasonality wise or regionally.

Kayla Ivey Perfect. Best channels to use for holiday promotion. So you talked about using channels that you've kind of seen work and that work really well. Do you want to give a couple examples of the channels that we at Suds have seen work really well for these types of promos?

Jennifer Henderson Digital in terms of social ads, not so much geofencing or anything like that, just plain old social. Email. We love email, it's low cost. If you've been diligently building your list promo over promo, year over year, you should have enough contacts in there that you can do a really nice email campaign over the whole holiday period and convert. And then I'm old school, I like onsite signage, and visible from the road, capturing people who are coming in that are retail traffic and converting them. We've seen those three tried and true channels work really well for the holidays.

Kayla Ivey Yeah, so kind of going back to the basics, like it's nothing too complex with something like this, especially when there's so much, so many other advertisements going on during the season. Keep it really simple is going to help your budget be most effective. Which kind of ties to the next question I was going to ask, which is budget. So Jennifer, one thing you called out was social ads. I just, most of you, I'm sure know this, and most of you do marketing, but just a quick note, if you're newer at running promotions, make sure you're doing not just posts on your social media pages, which you're going to target people that follow you, but put budget behind it, so you know, the budget you're going to use is going to depend heavily on the size of your operation more than anything, and you can kind of look at what budget you've used for other promotions such as membership campaigns or other sales kind of this same sort as a starting point. And then I think Jennifer, we talked about a rule of thumb of bumping that up by what, 20%, because it's only--

Jennifer Henderson 20 to 25, yeah, just 'cause you've got to pay your holiday premium there in the marketplace.

Kayla Ivey Yeah, to get eyes on it. We have definitely fallen down that rabbit hole before, earlier on at Suds where we didn't have enough budget behind social campaigns. And what happens is your ads just get completely drown out, like you don't get eyes on them that you need. So long story short, make sure you're allocating budget toward the social media ads, and put a decent chunk toward promoting those, and you can do, you know, promote them to your current audience, lookalike audience, what have you so that you're kind of targeting those people who already know who you are, as Jennifer mentioned. But make sure it's more than just social media posts. Let's see, I think we got time for a couple more here, and we'll let you guys go at 45 after. Let me see. So there is a question, and this is around essentially, if you can't sell online something like wash books or annual plans. And I think this applies not just to the person asking the question, but probably several operators may not have an online e-commerce at all. So Jennifer, I'm thinking, or I'm wondering if we can kind of think through this together. How would you approach selling a holiday promotion, one of these deals if you don't have an e-commerce portal? Can you talk through that?

Jennifer Henderson Yes. So we would definitely, like I said, the presentation, tell you to put less money into digital because it's going to be harder to track. We can run an ad, but it's going to be for information purposes, it's going to to have your locations in it and say come on site to buy. But making that link between the ad spend and then your ROI is going to be a little trickier. We would say put more money into advertising this on site, making sure that this is dialed in at the pay stations so people are going to purchase that way, or you know, you're going to talk to them in the vacuum area and they're going to purchase there, they're going to come into the cashier, things like that. It's going to be all on site, it's going to be lo-fi but you can still use some budget around digital to raise awareness and drive people in. But you really want to lean into email and to onsite promo at that point, because that's where the transaction's going to happen, is going to be onsite. So we want to make sure that that's the hub of that and you've got everybody knowing what the offer is as soon as they pull in.

Kayla Ivey Yeah, I agree with that. And I would just add, we have typically noticed online sales are going to be a smaller portion in general. I mean there's exceptions, but typically a smaller portion of your revenue from these types of holiday promotions. So if you can't sell what you want to sell online, there's definitely still things you can do.

Jennifer Henderson Yeah, don't panic.

Kayla Ivey Yeah, don't panic. There's definitely things you can do onsite to still move the needle, and a lot of times the physical gift cards or the physical wash books do really well also for especially that giftable message. So just kind of work best with what you have essentially and you can still make it really successful. Let's see, do you guys have a service where you run Facebook and or Instagram ads? We do. Looks like this was an anonymous post. If you want us to connect with you on that, we can definitely send you more info. You can either put your email in, or actually I'll go to the next slide here and leave you with, if anyone needs help, wants to discuss strategy, anything like that. We do offer everything from digital ads to the creative design, helping with what your promotion should be helping you look back at your data from last year and kind of hone in on what you should be doing this year. We'd be more than happy to help you talk through any of those things. So just reach out, scan that QR code if you're interested. And I think we're about out of time. Let me see, I feel like we answered almost everything. There was a question on kind of membership campaigns in general, which, when we send out the responses to the questions, we'll send out a link to a promotion or a, sorry, a webinar we did around planning a membership promotion. We'll share that recording in the Q&A doc so that you can kind of reference that, 'cause we go through a similar style webinar where we talk through successful membership campaigns. And again, you can feel free to reach out if you want anything more specific than that. And I think we're out of time so we will call it. I think we got to almost everybody. If we didn't get to you, we will follow up with that email that I mentioned. So thank you all so much and thanks for being so engaging and participating in the Q&A. We really appreciate getting your feedback, and hopefully this was helpful. I know I learned a lot from Jennifer, this was great. So we will let you get back to your day, and just yeah, reach out if you guys need any help planning your campaign. We'd be more than happy to help. Thank you all.