Running Promotions for Your TpT Store

Grow with Angie and April: A Podcast for Teacherpreneurs

In this episode, Angie and April are talking about the secret weapon for sales – promotions. They like to shake things up with their promos so they’re covering a lot of different options in this episode. Join in on the conversation in the mastermind group at www.growwithusmastermind.com. It’s always nice to chat with others about what they’re doing in the TpT world, so we have a special guest today, Ciera Harris of Ciera Harris Teaching (formerly known as Adventures of Room 129). She has been on TpT for 10 years and specializes in creating reading comprehension resources for grades 2-4. Together, we’re going to answer some of the commonly asked questions about running promotions. How often should you run sales and promotions? The more you have a promotion, the more people will start to expect it and wait for you to have it. Ciera tries to do one huge promotion each quarter outside of TpT sales. In addition to those, she’ll do little promotions and sales but they aren’t planned out the way the larger ones are that happen each quarter. I don’t run big promotions in my store, but we try to have some kind of promotion going each week. This could be a free resource or a 24-hour quick sale on a resource for a related bundle. We’ve also found that presales work well. We give people a ridiculous sale price if they buy the resource before we create it. We like to do those once a quarter because they are really successful and pay for the creation of the resource. Running promotions and sales on your website store vs TpT Ciera also offers a higher discount on her website store compared to the price on TpT. This gives customers the options to save more (and she earns more because she doesn’t lose the 20% as a premium seller) by purchasing directly through her site. This doesn’t go against TpT restrictions because the resources are priced the same, it’s just the coupon code that’s different. It’s important to know your audience. Some people are only comfortable buying resources on TpT, whereas there are others who don’t care where they buy it from. Encouraging them to buy from your website store has the added benefit of being able to access your money right away in addition to avoiding the commission. Your followers and customers who have already supported your business and buy into your philosophy will likely know that you’re able to do a little better from the sales on your website so they won’t mind buying there. And if you give them a larger discount there as opposed to TpT, it’s even more incentive. People usually like this option and are happy about having it. How do you decide which resources to promote? For Ciera, this is a cross between looking at yearly data and what resources are coming out. At the end of the year she does a big planning session where she tries to plan out all the big promotions. When looking at the upcoming year and the data of the biggest sellers and when they sell along with the new resource completion dates, she can create a mix of old and new resource promotions. It can be easy when you’re focused on new resources to forget about promoting the old resources, but looking at the data is important. Look at what sells well at certain times of the year, what resources are coming out, and how you can best present it to your customers in a way that makes them want to buy it at that time. It all comes down to planning. You can’t throw together a big promotion in two days. If you know months ahead of time, then you can build a stronger promotion for new products. Products you already have are a little easier to plan promotions for. However, from my