Alden Morris from Intentionally Creative walks through first purchase promotions for liquor stores, showing how to find and activate them in City Hive and promote them via social media and Google ads to boost customer retention.
First purchase promotions are the number one way to get new customers once you have their contact information and City Hive even pays for 50% of them. My name is Alden Morse. I'm the founder of Intentionally Creative which is the leading liquor store marketing agency in the United States. So in this video we are going to talk about what even are first purchase promotions. Where could you find it? In the CityHive user dashboard. You're going to go step by step why first promotions are great, which FPP should you choose and how to promote FPPs, arguably the most important thing here. So as you know we are going to go all the way from the beginning. I'm just pulling in my contact information but it's merchants.cityhive.net once you are in your dashboard you are going to go over to this left side here. We'll pin it just for there and you're going to go into promotions. So now it is located under coupons and it pops out fully well, but obviously in smaller regions as well. Again if this disappears right over here and then all you have to do is activate it or not. So that's where you find it. Why they're great City I've paid for 50% of it and I found the second that somebody makes a purchase they will come back and they will purchase more. Online purchases are much higher value than they are in store. For instance, the average in the United States hovers at around $120 basket ring and you can kind of compare it to where your site is compared to that also which ones I should choose and how do you promote first purchase promotions. So and then our bonus tip at the end which is how you use them in ads, which is great. So that way you're not wasting a lot of money on ads and we're pretty much going to tell you what I recommend in terms of promoting first purchase promotions. Before we get into ads, there are two ways that you can do it. Automatic promotions and manual promotions. So under automatic promotions the easiest one you can set this up in 10 seconds is using and utilizing autopilots in City Hive. So again on our left hand side we're going to go down to the one that says autopilots. This is very daunting. Not a lot of merchants use it. All you need to know as it relates to what we're doing here is you hit the plus sign and you want to go right here, create from template because you don't want to make it from scratch. It's going to be very confusing in Here you will notice all the first purchase promotions have their own series. So these were created by City Hive. They work, they're great. And really once you choose one of these, you just have to customize it. So again we're going to go off of my favorite which is 10 off 50. And as you can see it automatically just loads everything in here. So the way to read this is customer record created. Whether you're importing from the store, online signups, it's going to wait 24 hours and make sure that there isn't a purchase. Obviously if they've already made a purchase, we don't want to give them the coupon. And then right here you can see it's going to send a promotional email. The next step, it's going to wait for five days and then it's going to send two more follow ups. But the way that you would just adjust this is you click into it and you can see, you can choose which type of notification you want it to be. Very similar to how you would make emails. You are adjusting your subject line, preview line, and right down here is your editor. And you can see this is what comes by default. But you can obviously switch out all of the images, all of the products and all of that. And again the code right there they're saying is 10 off 50. So that's the first method, the second method, homepage banners. So these are provided by City Hive right here, right up top these are going to be banners. So you can see this one's promoting a barrel pick at this particular store. Another barrel pick and another barrel pick. But right on this they rotate. These also show up in the app. So dual purposing there and you just say 10 off of 50. City Hive actually does have them that will auto populate when you select a first purchase promotion. But otherwise I just want to show where they show up on the website. Right at the top you can adjust your homepage if you want so that you can even double it up, they go lower down, you can put Shop Wine, Shop Spirits higher up. So it's really up to you. But the banner is great again because on the website and on the app. So those are going to be your automatic promotions. Again, those are just essentially done by default. And it's again, you're not paying for marketing, you literally just activate them. In terms of manual promotions, you can send additional emails and push. So for instance, let's say that there is a, a tasting and you can add on right below there like oh, did you visit the tasting afterwards? Thank you for visiting our tasting. Here's a 10 off of 50 and then just put some products that are higher end on there. So let's say there's a bottle of whiskey that's $60 and then with the first purchase promotion, they're going to get the $10 off of that. Yes, it does hit your profit margins right off the bat, but the whole goal is to just rope people in. Once you've roped them in, they're going to do additional purchases. And that's how you get your loyal custom that I like to promote is as I mentioned, the whiskey again. But let's say you get a barrel pick or it's you're promoting gifts or for instance during the holidays you want to promote your more expensive bottles. Put it in there. I found it to be very, very effective in terms of triggering that first purchase again. And then ads, number one question, social media and ads on social media. Again you can just put it literally just in the image. But let's look at ads and very specifically in Facebook, Instagram and then also Google Ads. In Google Ads, which are these two snapshots right over here, what you want to do is when you're creating your campaign, there will be an option to add additional details within the additional details. Within the additional details is a location to essentially put all your, all your details for your ad. And that includes what the text is. You can send the URL where you're going to do it, start end date. So it's actually really dynamic. And again, Google Ads are what I prefer over meta. And right here's an example of how it would show up when you do the promotion, you get a much higher conversion rate, engagement rate. If you have those, so you already have them on your website, you might as well promote them. That's for Google. In meta where you are creating your own assets, I recommend to just build it right into the image. But remember, you don't want to have too much text on graphics because your graphics, your assets will perform worse if you have a lot of text on your assets. Or you can also do a very similar coupon and just talk about the coupon in the description of it. And again, you can test different formats, you can test different types, A, B testing and that's how you really refine what you end up with at the end. That's overall what I recommend for ads. Thank you for listening. If you have any questions, let me know. But otherwise 100% you should be doing first purchase promotions.
