Toggle Time 3: Snow me the money!
‘Tis the season once again, it’s Toggle Time 3 - and as the tagline suggests, this year is all about making sure our Togglers see as much money passing through their Toggle shops as possible during November & December.
There’s a lot of it to go around, with £27 million of Toggle gift cards due to be purchased over the space of 8 weeks. That’s almost half a million pounds a day on average. Over 60% of all hospitality gifting purchases happen between November 1st and New Years Eve.
So what are we hoping to achieve by making lots (and lots) of noise as the festive season approaches? Our aim is pretty simple:
- To make the conversation around gifting, and gifting strategy a priority across all hospitality brands this year. There’s too much money on the table to leave it until the last minute.
- To help highlight the simplest strategies to maximise sales. This is our 6th year at it, and we now work with almost 500 hospitality brands. We want to share the most efficient methods we’ve learnt to drive more eyeballs to your Toggle Shop.
How are we going to achieve this?
In this blog are the headlines of what we’ve learned over the past couple of years as well as the actions we believe that all hospitality brands should take before Black Friday (Nov 24th).
But we’d like to offer you up our support in whichever way works best for you, so:
- We’re running a weekly masterclass every Tuesday morning at 11am, where all are welcome (regardless of if you are a toggle customer or not). Where we will run through which strategies & actions have proved most successful - as well as a live demo showing you how to activate these within your Toggle Dashboard.
You can sign up to whichever session works best for you, here.
- Or if you prefer to read through these things at your own leisure, you can download our PDF with a full summary of what we learnt in 2022, and what this tells us you should be focusing on in 2023. Jam packed with facts, figures & forecasts. More statistics than you could shake a candy cane at.
You can download the PDF by clicking here
- Or, if you want the full Toggle Time 3 experience, you can sit back (on your own or as a team) and watch Sam and Dan, our CCO & CEO, talk through the Toggle Time 3 slides in full fancy dress. ‘The Director's Commentary’, sharing their own insights & experiences of what works best at this time of year, and what you should be focused on as a priority.
You can watch the full masterpiece, here
Whichever way you choose to digest our six top tips for supercharging your winter windfall, we look forward to seeing you all putting them into action. If we could ask for one gift this Christmas, it would be that you pass this content on to your fellow marketers within hospitality, and share the love this festive season.
Ok, for those of you still reading - who haven’t found yourself stolen away by any of the links above, let’s start sharing some golden nuggets of our own here.
The gifts of Xmas past:
Hindsight is 20/20, or in this case it’s 2022. Here’s what we learnt by looking back at the figures from last year.
- Black Friday is a big deal, and it’s not just one day:
- Most brands start their discounting the Monday before Black Friday
- The sweet spot is 20% discount (or 20% added value). Discounts larger than this see a disproportionately low increase in sales.
- You can read our Giggling Squid case study, where they generated £74,000 in gift card sales, on Black Friday last year.
- Email is still undefeated when it comes to conversion rates:
- In Black Friday week, general visits to a Toggle shop convert at 11%
- Traffic from an email converts at 20%
- Compared to traffic from social media, which converts at just 4%
- You can read our case study here on how Ego saw a 30% conversion rate on their summer email campaign, resulting in over £70k in gift card sales. Each click on their email was worth £17.
- Money for nothing - know your redemption rates:
The lower the gift card value, the more likely it is to go unredeemed.
- 49% of £5 gift cards go unredeemed
- 30% of £10 cards
- 21% of £20 cards
- All the way to £200 cards, where 11% of them are unredeemed! Two. Hundred. Pounds.
- Digital Rules (at least in November):
- 80% of all toggle gift card sales in November are digital
- But moving into December, it swings to as much as 60% of all orders being physical in the run up to Christmas. So if you’re not yet set up with on demand vouchers, then get in touch with our team.
- It takes two:
- 60% of all hospitality experiences are bought between November (17%) and December (43%).
- Experiences with the words ‘for two’ in the title sell 5x better than any other experiences, making up 40% of all experience sales at this time of year.
Let’s turn this learning, into earning:
Ok, so what does all of the above mean in terms of actions that hospitality operators can be taking, to maximise their toggle sales in 2023.
- Keep it simple
Above everything else you should be aiming to nail the basics. Just because your shop is live, does not mean that your customers know it exists. So make sure:
- Your shop is easy on the eye & not a drastic departure from your standard branding.
- The link to it is prominent in your website header
- You reference your gift cards on your social banners & pinned posts
- You’re promoting your Black Friday discounts & your christmas gifting options over and over again via email and social
- You have Apple Pay & Google Pay enabled
- You have multiple products live, not just ‘a gift card’. Include experiences, bundles & merchandise if possible
- Black Friday is a big deal
You might not love it, but your customers do:
- We’re expecting £5m in toggle sales on Black Friday alone. 83% of all sales on Black Friday in 2022 had an associated discount with them. 20% off (or added) is the sweet spot.
- If you’re against discounting, then try ‘added value cards’ e.g. Pay £50 and get a card worth £60. They have almost identical results in popularity.
- Shout about it. Our most successful Togglers send multiple emails on Black Friday, alongside a stream of social content. Don’t be shy, your customers have money burning a hole in their pocket and you’re up against a lot of competition.
- Market up to the wire - Christmas Eve & Christmas morning are a must:
- Christmas Eve is the biggest single day of spending through Toggle during the entire year, and at full price. No discounting necessary.
- Christmas morning is the highest converting day part of the entire year. 50% of all visits result in a purchase.
- So market up to the wire, schedule marketing emails that go out on Christmas Eve & Christmas Day morning.
- Toggle is your shop front - make it engaging:
Dwell time is at its highest of the entire year (3 minutes on average), and we know that on Black Friday, non-discounted products see a 100% increase in sales for those shops who have at least one discounted Black Friday product live. So people are browsing the shops they land on, and making multiple purchases.
- Does your shop invite browsing?
- Does it make customers aware of other services, products, merchandise or bundles that you offer
- Are you offering experiences ‘for two’ (date night for two, steak experience for two)
- If you want some inspiration, you can browse all of our Toggle shops here: https://gettogether.shop/
- January Bounce back campaigns:
Let’s start planning for the rather quiet month that is January. Can you steal additional footfall when there’s suddenly less of it going around.
- You can sell discounted products & experiences in November & December, that are only redeemable in January (validity from Jan 1st to Jan 31st and then expire).
- OR, you can surprise your customers (or a segment of them) with a gift card as an early Christmas present in December, but again it is only redeemable in January.
In Summary:
76% of the UK will have started their Christmas shopping before December arrives, so go hard and go early. Take advantage of our weekly masterclasses, and if you’re in doubt about anything, then reach out to our support team on success@usetoggle.com
Find time to make your gifting strategy a priority in November and reap the rewards in the final weeks of the year. There’s £27m up for grabs… go grab it!
