DriveThruRPG & Sister Sites: Promoting During Site-Wide Sales
Site-wide sales are sales intended to launch across multiple sister sites (e.g., DriveThruRPG, DriveThruComics, DMsGuild, etc.) with a blanket discount in place over several publisher and creator accounts. Site-wide sales occur annually always in the same month each year but their actual dates shifting slightly from year to year within that month. Not every sale includes the same sort of content: For example, our New Year, New Game sale in January focuses on quickstarts and introductory modules, while our Teach Your Kids sale in December includes only child- and family-friendly games.
Regardless, these sales are promoted heavily across our various social media and newsletter channels; they are essential for many of our partners, a great way to bring new customers to their product lines and also to retain current customers who want to expand their library at a discounted price.
Publisher Relations has identified a few patterns we want to share with you in the hope that this might help increase your sales in the future.
Sale Participation
The Opt-In / Opt-Out Tool allows you to make your titles available for inclusion in site-wide sales. Over time, we have made that tool more robust in defining what you’d like to include in promotions, from choosing titles or subcategories to maximum discount levels, and also defining how many days a title must be available publicly before it is eligible for site-wide sales.
— Opt-In / Opt-Out for Publishing Partners
— For Creator Partners (DMsGuild, Pathfinder Infinite, or other Community Content Programs) → Go to ACCOUNT → My Content → Promotional Tools → Opt-In/Opt-Out of Site-Wide Sales
Currently, around 2,000 publishers and creators choose to make their brand-new titles (i.e., anything under 30 days old) available for site-wide sales. While we allow you to price your titles however you want, we felt this topic is worth calling out.
When a title is first released on the marketplace, customers are generally willing to pay the full price on release and for at least a month or two afterward; for particularly popular titles, sales at this level can go on for many months. When you discount a title in its first 30 days, you lose the opportunity to benefit from this tendency. We advise you not to discount your titles within 30 days after its public release so that you can maximize your sales revenue.
Not participating in a Sale? You can still run your own!
If your title(s) are not included in a sale (for example, if they don’t meet the requirements for inclusion, etc.), you can always run your own sale using Manage Sales, found under Promotions on your Publisher Hub. These sales will appear on the Daily Deals page, and you’re welcome to run them however you’d like.
A sale can only be set up to go live starting the next day, and titles currently in a site-wide sale or already in queue for another sale (i.e., in the week right before a site-wide sale) cannot be included. This is by design so that discounts do not accidentally stack.
Assets
Going forward, we will provide promotional assets for site-wide sales slightly before the sale goes live. These assets include a Twitter / Facebook graphic, a logo of the sale (where applicable), and a sample graphic. We understand that you might only know what is in the sale the day the promotion begins, but maintaining the branding of the banners can help customers look out for it on social media platforms or easily recognize it.
We will be posting this on our Discord and doing a Publisher Newsletter when applicable.
You are not required to use these assets, of course, but we want to give you the option to use our shared branding in your own marketing effort.
Promoting Elsewhere
Ideally you will time your social media promotional efforts to your customer base around the site-wide sale event. On launch day, we promote the sale to our entire customer base on social media and through our weekly customer newsletter. Sending your own email out during the sale is not advised since it will get lost in the promotional flood and provide little impact to your sales, and it can lead to email-spamming customers.
Social media is an obvious choice, but for best results, consistency is key: If you post once during the sale, people may miss it. Posting a few times throughout the event can maximize exposure.
Also, promoting other publishers in the sale (retweets, for example) helps build the community, and that way your customers can experience new publishers. The goodwill that comes from promoting your peers can create a mutually beneficial cycle that helps everyone involved, and it’s really nice to see when it happens.
Finally, be sure to tag @DriveThruRPG on Twitter and Facebook so we can amplify your posts! While not always a guarantee, it’s easier for us to retweet when we are tagged.
Summary (Or TL;DR)
- We recommend that your titles be active for at least 30 days before you include them in our site-wide sales.
- If you are not part of a site-wide sale for any one of several reasons, you can still run your own.
- We will provide assets to you via our Discord or Publisher Newsletter before a sale event to use in your promotions.
- Talking to your customers is crucial throughout the sale. We recommend the following:
— Reach out to your customers through your own newsletter and email lists on your own sites a few days into the sale and perhaps again with a last-minute reminder near the end of the sale.
—Market your titles via social media and other community-driven platforms like Discord.
- Look out for asset drops from us on Discord that you can use to advertise the sale. (If you’re not on our Discord yet and are a freelancer, creator partner for a program, media contact, or publishing partner, come on over! We can’t wait to have you!)
- Promote other publishers too, to grow the community and point your customers to some of your personal favorites.
- Tag our social media accounts so we can amplify your posts.
Are there any suggestions not listed here? We would love to hear them so we can share them with the community!
