Winning Items

It's been nearly a decade now since I spent time focusing on what are called "Winners".

Winners are your best selling items. Winners are really, really important. They generate a disproportionate amount of your profit.

Winners are different for different brands. If you manage a fashion brand, a winner might be a new item that explodes in the first month of life, generates sales for two months, and then is discontinued. For another brand, a journey is involved ... new item that performs well for a year, becomes a contending item in the second year, and then is a winning item for years 3/4/5/6 before slumping and ultimately being discontinued in year nine.

A professional once asked me if $0.11 per email delivered was a good metric or not? I asked the individual if they feature new items or winners in their email campaigns? The person couldn't answer the question. That is one of the "sadnesses" of 2023. It would be like a chef asking a diner if the chicken parm tasted good, and the diner said "what spices did you use?" and the chef said "I don't know". In other words, if you populate email campaigns with winning items, you might generate $0.18 per email delivered ... if you populate email campaigns with new items, you might generate $0.08 per email delivered. Performance isn't a function of the channel. Performance is a function of what you show the customer.

If you are a marketer worth your chops, you spend a disproportionate amount of time focusing on two things.

1. Promoting new items that have potential so those new items have a chance to become winners.
2. Promoting winners to squeeze as much profit out of your customer as possible.