Silly season is coming. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, the whole stretch where so many businesses make (or lose) their year. And with it comes the same three ideas that pop into almost every business owner’s head the moment revenue starts to flatten out.
Slash your prices. Throw more money at ads. Rebrand and make everything look prettier.
In this episode of the CTD Roundtable, Glenn sat down with Hannah Rubery, our Head of User Experience and Design, to talk about why these three moves aren’t actually the fix most businesses think they are, and what to look at instead before you spend a cent on any of them.
Hannah sees the same pattern every year. Businesses come to us in the lead-up to silly season wanting to beat last year’s numbers, or at least match them, and stand out in a crowded market. And they usually land on the same three ideas: discounting, paid media, or a rebrand.
“These are all really important parts of a strategy going into silly season, so they’re not bad things to be looking at,” Hannah says. The problem is when they’re used as a reaction to fear rather than a considered decision. When revenue starts flatlining or dropping, people panic. So they discount harder, spend more on ads, or decide the website needs an overhaul. Hannah calls them exactly what they are: panic buttons.
Before reaching for any of them, she says the real starting point is stepping back and looking at your business holistically. Who is your customer? What’s happening in their life that makes them hesitate to buy? What are the pain points at every stage of their journey? Discounting eats into your margin. Extra ad spend can just leak money out the bottom if nothing is converting. And a beautiful rebrand won’t matter if the fundamentals underneath it are broken.
Let’s look at each panic button on its own.
New Zealand has a reputation as the discount country of the world. We’re so used to sales that buying something at full price almost feels strange. But that habit comes at a cost.
“The big risk with constantly discounting is that your customers become primed to wait for a sale,” Hannah explains. Briscoes is the classic example. Nobody buys from Briscoes at full price, because everyone knows a sale is always just around the corner. If it’s not on sale today, it will be tomorrow.
That’s what happens when discounting becomes your main lever for buying revenue. It can work in the short term. You’ll likely see a bump. But you won’t hold onto that revenue for the rest of the year when you’re not discounting, because your customers are simply waiting for the next email, social post, or ad that tells them it’s time to buy.
The second panic button usually shows up alongside the first. Revenue’s down, so the instinct is to double the ad spend and run a sale at the same time.
Here’s the catch, according to Hannah: if pouring more money into promotion actually solved the problem, businesses would be doing it year-round, every year, all the time. They’re not, because it doesn’t fix the underlying issue.
“You’re not necessarily putting more money into something that works. You’re throwing a plaster on something that’s already leaking,” Hannah says. More ad spend only pays off if the journey behind it is solid. If your website, checkout, emails, and social touchpoints aren’t seamless, all that extra spend just gets people to the door and watches them walk straight back out.
There’s also a timing problem specific to the silly season. Glenn draws a comparison to real estate: the people who make the most money don’t buy at the peak of the market, they buy in the dip. So why would you spend your entire ad budget at the exact moment everyone else is piling in, driving up the cost of acquisition and eroding your margin? A genuinely smart strategy can mean increasing your ad spend at quieter times of year, when competition (and cost per click) is lower, rather than only ever showing up when everyone else does.
As Hannah puts it, when every competitor is running 50% off at the same time, you’re in muddy water. What actually makes your 50% off more compelling than the next guy’s?
Before any of the three panic buttons, Hannah recommends a sense check across two areas: functionality and consistency.
Functionality means looking honestly at whether your journey converts. Does your call to action lead somewhere clear? If it’s an “add to cart,” how smooth is the checkout? If it’s a form, what happens after someone submits it? Do they get a thank you, a timeframe for a response, any confirmation at all? And critically, is the experience built for mobile first, since most people are now browsing and buying from their phones, not their laptops?
Consistency means making sure your brand feels the same everywhere a customer touches it, from the website to the emails to the packaging to the ads.
Hannah also points out that most businesses only track the big numbers: total revenue, total traffic, total form submissions. What gets missed is everything in between. How many people start a form versus finish it. How many quotes convert into actual jobs. How response time differs between a Monday and a Saturday. Those small touchpoints in the middle are often where the biggest, cheapest wins are hiding.
Glenn shared a personal example that makes the point well. Needing an electrician, he visited three different websites. Two gave him no confidence at all, no promise of a callback, nothing to suggest they’d actually follow through. The third felt sharp and professional, and it was. He got a text confirming a callback, a call within 15 minutes, a booking on the spot, a heads-up text before the electrician arrived, and a QR code for a Google review on the way out. He left that review before he’d even received the invoice.
That’s the compounding effect of getting the basics right. As Hannah says, you typically need seven touchpoints with a customer before they convert, and if the very first one lets them down, they won’t come back for touchpoints two through seven. You’ve lost them before you even had a real shot.
The third panic button tends to show up when things feel stagnant rather than in freefall. Business has been steady for a while, motivation is dipping, and a shiny new website feels like the reset everyone needs.
Hannah isn’t against a great website. A basic build can run anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000, and a more complex one can run into the hundreds of thousands. If you need it and can justify it, go for it. But her point is this: your brand is only as strong as its weakest touchpoint. Before you invest in a new site, you need to understand who your customer actually is and how they’ll move through it to convert.
Glenn gives a great example. If you sell Freeview antenna installations, your customer probably can’t afford Sky, wants free TV, and doesn’t have a big budget to spend. If your site looks too slick and expensive, and a competitor’s looks simple with a clear price and a straightforward call to action, that customer is far more likely to go with the option that looks affordable and easy. A $50,000 website that forces you to raise your rates to pay for it could be exactly what’s hurting your conversions, not helping them.
There’s also a consistency trap that catches a lot of businesses positioning themselves as premium or luxury. The website looks beautiful and on-brand. Then a customer abandons their cart and gets a generic template email with a plain image, some text, and a bright blue button, and the luxury feeling disappears instantly. Every touchpoint, from the site to the email to the packaging, needs to carry the same brand experience. Otherwise customers start to wonder if they’re even dealing with the same business.
Discounting, ad spend, and rebranding all have their place in a solid marketing strategy. But none of them will fix a business whose foundations are cracked. If your customer’s experience is inconsistent, confusing, or slow to respond, no amount of extra ad budget or price cutting will turn that into sustainable revenue. It will just mean you’re spending more to prop up the same leaks.
Before you touch any of the three panic buttons this silly season, take a genuine look at your customer’s journey from start to finish. Go through it yourself. Ask a handful of friends to try it and tell you honestly where they got stuck. You’ll likely find small, fixable issues that have been quietly costing you conversions all along.
Want a second set of eyes on it? Hannah is offering a free, no-obligation sense check of your website or customer journey. It’s not a full UX or CRO audit, just a quick look to flag a few easy wins you might be too close to the business to see for yourself. Reach out to Hannah or Glenn at Connect the Dots to get yours.
Glenn Marvin, Connect the Dots
Hannah Rubery, Connect the Dots
6 minutes
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