As a small business owner, you should be keeping track of upcoming holidays, big events, changing seasons, etc. so that you can continually send out special promotions via text and email to encourage customers to drop by. Memorial Day is coming up in a couple weeks, so we’ve put together some promotional ideas to help get your wheels turning.

Before we jump into sales and advertising, a quick note about Memorial Day 🙂

As we approach the Memorial Day holiday, it’s good to remember what the holiday is truly about. Yes, you should celebrate life, enjoy barbeques, get out on the lake, give customers great deals or specials for the occasion, etc. But we as Americans get to enjoy these fun days only because of those who have fought for our right to do it. Memorial Day is to remember those who have given their lives for our great country.

It’s good to be mindful of these things as you’re creating Memorial Day promotions; you definitely want to be respectful to those who gave their lives, as well as their families who are also effected. Yes, you’re in business to make some additional revenue in general, but make sure your Memorial Day promotions come from a good place!

Memorial Day Promotion Ideas

The best way to reach your customers is to use a combination of emails, text messages, social media, and some visual point-of-purchase displays. Lucky for you, if you’re part of the Fivestars small business network, we’re going to help you knock out the first two with our email and texting tools in your Fivestars Dashboard. The examples below cover a handful of business verticals (retail, restaurant, desserts, & nightlife), but we tried to make the examples general enough where you can easily change them to match your specific business’s offering.

5 types of campaign ideas with examples

• Time Sensitive: “Having a get together for Memorial Day? Get $10 off our All American Apple Pie if you put your order in today before 3pm!”  This is one of the most common types of promotions. They end quickly or are only available for a specific amount of time, can be days or hours.
• VIP Exclusive: “A VIP Member Exclusive: Come to Jim’s Steakhouse, share a meal, and remember our American heroes before 2pm today and get an appetizer on us! Be sure to show your cashier this message to get your Memorial Day special.” Your Fivestars software marks customers as a VIP if they have earned a specific amount of points at your business. You can adjust the point amount in the Settings section in your Fivestars Dashboard.

• Happy Hour: “Beat the Memorial Day rush and get rewarded. Shop Belle’s Home & Goods Mon-Thurs between 2-5pm and get an extra 30% off our Memorial Day entertaining dinnerware. Show this message to redeem your reward.” Happy hour is a pretty common type of promotion. Some have it as a daily special during a specific amount of hours of the day, but we’ve seen some people have holiday specific happy hours as well. 
• Impromptu Event: “Not sure what to do for Memorial Day? Come to KG Bar & Grill for a special Memorial Day event. Enjoy live music and half price appetizers. If you have a military ID,  you get a free raffle ticket for a chance to win 4 tickets to a Texas Rangers home game!” Who doesn’t love a fun event to attend on a holiday?
• Whisper Code: “Make your Memorial Day sweet: when you buy one of our Patriotic Pastries, you get one for free! Just whisper “freedom” to your cashier!” This is a promotion that is to be more exclusive and secretive, only your subscribers (email, text, and/or social media) know about it. To ensure only specific groups of loyal customers get it, you ask them to whisper the secret code or phrase to the cashier.

Here is an infographic with more details on these types of promotions and how to make them work for your small business.

Send the perfect balance of texts and emails leading up to Memorial Day

If using email, you probably want to send three emails total. The first email to announce the promotion to your customers which you would send a week before the sale or promotion starts. Your second email would go out the day of the promotion, and then your last email would go out the last day of the promotion as last chance reminder.

If your promotion was during a specific set of hours within one day, this is where you would want to text instead of email. Most people don’t check their email every hour on the hour, so if you sent an email 1-2 hours before the event ended as a reminder, not very many of your customers will see it in time. Text messages have a 99% open rate since people carry their mobile phones with them at all times, so your text message is pretty much guaranteed to be looked at. If you aren’t text messaging your customers, you are missing out on a HUGE opportunity!

Since we recently launched our brand new Fivestars Dashboard, here is a step-by-step guide to help you send your Memorial Day text message and email promotion to your Fivestars customer database.