While you may have mixed feelings about the use of a religious holiday to promote your business, if you’re going to do it – you might as well do it right.

A local grocery store, which is part of a chain, has Easter down  pat.

In addition to the obligatory coloring page for kids contest, they run another promotion which, while simple, yields some brilliant results.

For the last two weeks, cashiers have been promoting their Saturday morning Easter hunt.  It ran today from 10 am until 3 pm.  When children arrived at the store, they were issued an Easter passport which required stamps to be collected from every department in the store.  Upon completion, each child  received a bag of Easter treats.

The execution of the promotion was simple and required only 1 – 1.5 additional staff since the stamp stations were set up to be completely self serve.  They were clearly marked by a bunch of helium-filled balloons that were easily spotted by my test subjects of 5 and 9 years old.

What made this promotion so brilliant were the benefits that the store gained from it.

Association: Creating the association of good feelings with a well branded grocery store could be incredibly powerful for years to come, especially when those feelings are reinforced with a Kinder Surprise.

Competitive Elimination: Because my children knew about the promotion, it made it onto the family schedule.  There was little chance of going to another store today.

Revenue Management: In Canada, Good Friday is a statutory holiday which requires most employees to be paid at least 1.5 times their regular rate.  Since we had to make a trip on Saturday morning anyway, we postponed our Friday trip to the grocery store. If there were enough other people like me, that would have a significant impact on labor costs for the day.

Employee Morale: Easter Sunday is traditionally spent with family.  While there will certainly be a number of shoppers that will make a last minute trip to the store before Easter dinner, perhaps some of the shoppers will have used their Saturday shopping trip to pick up everything they need.  Ideally, this will require less employees to work on Easter Sunday.

Revenue Enhancement: Every department, including the bakery, pharmacy, deli, dairy, customer service, magazines, meat department, produce, natural foods and the bulk section were included in our trip.  All  all of them had stations with Easter passport stamps.    Because of this, several items which were not on my list, but were needed (such as Kleenex for a house full of colds) made it into my cart.  The result: I probably spent about 25% more than planned.

So, what did you do for your clients and customers this Easter?