Even after weeks of planning and effort, an event or promotion can still fail, leaving you to wonder what went wrong.
When events have to be canceled or are poorly attended, you’re not only wasting valuable time and effort—you’re hurting your pharmacy’s reputation, too. For example, if you partner with a local physician to host a diabetes education class and no one shows up, then your relationship with the physician could suffer.
Often, promotions fail because something unexpected occurs or an important detail was overlooked. Maybe the postcards you mailed to promote a diabetes class didn’t get delivered in time, or a presenter had to cancel at the last minute.
Not all failures are within your control, but by taking a few extra precautionary steps, you can prevent most of these mistakes at your pharmacy’s next event.
Here are five reasons why your promotion or event failed and tips for preventing the same mistakes in the future.
1. Poor scheduling
When you schedule your promotion can have a major affect on its success. For example, if you scheduled free blood pressure screenings at the same time as a community parade, your turnout might be smaller than you hoped. Your promotion failed because you were competing against another event with the same target audience.
Also, make sure that the hours work for your event. For example, if you host a diabetes clinic at 3 p.m., you might miss out on people who work regular business hours.
Even the most interesting events can be spoiled due to poor scheduling. Carve out a time that will work for your target audience and consult community calendars before you schedule your next event to prevent overlaps.
2. Difficulty of participating
Setting the bar of entry too high for a promotion, contest or event can discourage people from participating.
Your promotion might have few participants if you asked patients to do a difficult and time-consuming project, such as entering a contest by creating a video or writing a long essay. For very long essays use essay writing service. People don’t participate because the entry is too much work for the prize you’re offering.
Instead, make participation proportional to the reward, and use simple entry options so your promotion can engage as many people as possible. For example, you could ask patients to share your pharmacy’s Facebook post in exchange for a front-end coupon.
3. Weather
Weather can spoil even the best events. An unexpected rain or snowstorm can make attendance dismal, or even force you to cancel.
Avoid this problem by designating a back-up location, and scheduling a make-up date in case the event has to be postponed. Advertise the rain out location ahead of time on the flyers, posters and emails you send out to promote the event.
Take this precaution for all your events, even if they’re inside events. That way, if there’s inclement weather, you can postpone your event until the make-up date and you won’t have to redo the promotion for it.
4. The technology didn’t work
Even if you’ve lined up great prizes and spread the word about your promotion, if the technology doesn’t work, the whole promotion can fall through.
Maybe the scheduled emails promoting your sale never went through, or the link on your website to sign up for a raffle promotion didn’t work, so you’re left with no entries to select a winner from.
Prevent technology errors with simple testing and review. Send a test email to your staff, and ask them to try to sign up through the raffle link, so you can make sure it works before sending it out to patients.
5. Lack of benefit
Prizes for an event or promotion should be appealing enough to get participants to want to enter.
Offering a coupon for 5 percent off your front end is probably too small to get many people to compete in a contest. Inversely, offering too big of a prize, like giving away a car, can make people think they have no chance at winning it and can also discourage participation.
Try to select prizes that are proportional to the difficulty of the entry. For example, if you’re running a promotion to collect email addresses, give everyone a small discount off a front-end purchase, or host a giveaway for a gift basket of skin care products.
Use these tips to learn from common mistakes and make your pharmacy’s next promotional event a success!
