5 Simple Ways Boutiques can Maximize Holiday Marketing

In the back. It's so good to see you guys. How many of you guys are Hub members? So you guys know when we get together and I say, here's club members, what do you do? So can I get a. Okay. Anyone here is like, what's the Boutique Hub? I'm just here because I need to sit down, couple people. I'll tell you what the Boutique Hub is in a little bit, right? So my name is Ashley. I'm the founder of the Boutique Hub in the back of the room here with me today is Sarah Burks. She's our director of partnership education. She's Nana White, currently videoing this for the Hub. She's also our leader of retail, which is great for me to be able to do inside of YouTube Hub. So are you guys cool today? We talk about holiday marketing stuff. Yeah. Okay, so like I said, it's going to be super informal, so if you guys have questions along the way, feel free to stop me. Otherwise, we're going to do some Q and A at the end. So I want to make sure we pack this so that we bring as much value as we possibly can in the next couple of minutes. So are you guys all pretty much local? Chicago area? Right. Midwest is the best. Can I get hands up? I need a woo for Midwest is the best. All right. I'm from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, currently. I'm originally from North Dakota. North Dakota. So if you hear any accent come out, that's where it's coming from. Right. So you guys can appreciate Midwest is the best. This is probably like the last nice weekend of the entire year, Right? Didn't you want to soak it in the last couple of days? Yes. I was just camping this last weekend. There's this place in Wisconsin called Wild Cat Gum, which is the middle of nowhere, basically. And we all have horses. Our family has horses. So our three kids, Hadley, Eason and Jade, and my husband and I and my husband's dad, all went camping for the last couple of days. And I appreciate that time together so much because in business, you guys know, with business owners, we're busy, right? And it's hard to get family to end. How many of you guys have kids? Lots of kids. Right. So especially when we come into the fourth quarter and we're hustling to grow our business in the busiest time of year, it's really easy to let family take a second seat to everything that we do. So I told this story at the Boutique Summit this year, and I want to tell you guys the story because I Think it's relevant to what we're going to talk about today. So our three kids, Harley Eason and Jake, they're nine, eight and five and they're super busy. And our business is growing, so it's been super busy. So last, I think last December, I was preparing to go on this trip to the National Finals Rodeo, which is probably not a rodeo crowd, but I'm gonna tell you the story. So when you go to the nfr, which is like the super bowl of the sport of rodeo, women are like big on fashion at the nfr. So I clearly had my outfits planned for like long in advance. I put that first, like high priority. But then, you know, before you go on a trip anywhere, probably for many of you guys coming here today, you're catching up on all of your emails and the last minute social media and all the stuff that you put on till the very end before you have to go on your trip. And that's exactly what I did. I told my kids, I just have a couple things, you know, I've got to finish up and then I'll come in and I'll why don't you go upstairs and brush your teeth? And I'll be up in just a minute. So I send my kids upstairs and my husband goes upstairs to help. And pretty soon I hear one woman like yell over the landing in our house, mom, are you coming? Mom, are you coming? And I holler back, yeah, I'll be there in just a minute. You know, brush your teeth. I know you're lying. Brush your teeth. Right? And it's silent and I keep working. And a couple minutes later I hear another kid yell over the landing, mom, are you coming? And I'm like, get in your bed. I know you're in my bed right now, get in your bed. I'll be up in a min. I know you're lying. So I keep working and time goes by and pretty soon I hear these little footsteps come across our kitchen because I have this home. Like my office is basically our guest bedroom right next to our kitchen. And it's our littlest one, Jade, who's a total firecracker. And she comes across the kitchen and she's dragging her blanket and she comes into the office and knocks on the door because that's cool in the house. Knock on the door. Any of you do live videos? You know what I'm talking about, right? Your kids know they have to knock on the door before they come in the office. So she knocks on the door and she comes in, she's like, mom coming? How'd you even come? She's like, mom, you're welcome. And then she comes and she says, can you sit on your lap? And she brings her blanket and she calls me my lap. And you guys imagine as mothers, you feel about this tall. That moment crushed. The next morning, Eric and I got up and took kids to school. And then we had to go get on an airplane. And usually, like I fall asleep like this on an airplane, not that morning. Because I was so fresh about what had happened, I felt like the world's worst month. So we sat there for the next two hour flight and planned out our all of our 2019 since this was last year and decided that this crap was not ever going to happen again to our family. Right? We started the business because we wanted to have freedom and flexibility. We wanted to have a family. We want to be there for our kids. The business is not going to run our lives in that way and take away from our kids and their lives. So the word of the year for us came maximize. How could we maximize every single area of our business? Automate every single area of our business so that we could be more present for our kids? So the reason I'm telling you that today is because I know we're on the cusp of the fourth quarter. We're coming into the busiest season of the year. And how many of you guys are veteran boutique owners who've been around a couple years? We won't say how many. We'll just say a couple. Right? So you guys know that this is the reality of the fourth quarter. It was so easy to get caught up in this mess that we forget to get gifts for somebody on our list. Right? We're going on Christmas Eve morning and finishing up the last couple of days or we don't get to take part in the Thanksgiving family traditions that we have because we're busy with a business. But it doesn't have to be that way, Right? It doesn't have to be that way. So today I want to talk about business tips for holidays to help you guys enjoy the holidays. Right? So you can have memories during the holidays. You can spend time with your families during the holidays and not spend all of the time stuck inside of business. You guys good with that? All right, so I'm going to talk about a couple of key things today. Basically making, making sure that we run our holiday season and that our holiday season running us. So before I get into the first tip, I told you I'd tell you just a little bit more About Boutique, how many of you are members? Again, several. So our mission at Boutique is to bring every single resource and boutique owner you need to one central, right? And most importantly, above all else, community. Because I know every single one of you in this room share an experience, right? Where you share maybe what to do or what not to do and you can share that experience with someone else. So the most important thing to us is our community and operating in community over competition where we can work together in the sense that a rising tide is going to lift all ships. So we'll bring together education, wholesale brands, discounts, any tool your business can be under that one simple platform. All right, so tip number one, I'll be informal. I brought this little picture. Also somebody stuck in my suitcase. Tip number one is about starting now, how many of you guys have every single weekend planned through the end of the year? Raise your hands high, I want to know. Okay, a couple of you. So starting the beginning of September, that is key time in holiday marketing, it's getting out a good old fashioned drugstore wall calendar and mapping out your entire season. Tip number one is to start now, which means start yesterday. And if that spending an hour of time in this room and then going back to buying just to jot yourself some notes about how could I map out the rest of the weekends of the year? Do it right. It's the most valuable thing you can do. So what events am I going to have? What collaborations am I going to have? What promotions am I going to run? What do I need to maximize every single weekend or every single promotion through the end of the year? So what I would want you to do is grab a calendar or wall calendar and start by circling all of those dates so that you know you have something going on. And then take that calendar and start to work backwards. So a lot know I have a ladies night out on November 1st, right next weekend. Then on what day do I need to have email scheduled to go out? What days do I need to have photo shoots planned? What days do I need to make sure the vendor that I ordered all this stuff from is actually going to be arriving so I can get all those photo shoots done? So the biggest key to actually getting to spend holiday time with your family is having a plan right right now. And then that calendar, when January 1st rolls around and you're like, I don't toss that thing in the garbage, okay? Every year you can take what worked in your holiday promotions and what didn't work in your holiday promotions and mark them down on that good Old fashioned calendar dollar section at Target. I know they have a zillion of these things right now. Take all those notes, what do I want to remember for next year? And then put it in a folder and next year rip that out and go, you know what? I ran that BOGO offer and it flopped. So this year I'm not going to do that again. I'm going to do it with this brand or this other type of offer. Right. So pre plan every single area you can in your business. Second thing is what numbers are going to matter the most? What numbers are going to matter the most? So a lot of times there's businesses that think about the holidays in terms of gross sales. What's our overall revenue going to be? And they get so focused on just this sale number, they'll do anything to hit the sale number and they aren't looking at margin and all of a sudden they're like, oh man, I stacked up for the fourth quarter and I overbought for the fourth quarter and did all these things and yes, I had the best sales ever, but I had no money in the bank at the end of the season. Anyone made that mistake and want to be honest about it, I live around, right? It happens. So what number are we going to be most focused on? Is it going to be margin? Right. Is it going to be building our average order value? Where are we really going to focus? And then if we have team, how many of you guys have team? You got staff to help you. Yeah. So what number are we going to give them for their goals? Because it's not just total sales. Right. But it what is units per transaction or average undervalued? How are we going to bump our margin up and then what's our budget versus actual how are we going to actually run those numbers at the end of the month to know where we're on track and not just lose focus of getting money in the bank at the end of the season? Buying right, Buying right during the fourth quarter. Who's ever been overstocked during the fourth quarter and got to January and wanted to vomit? Right. Been there, been there. So it's easy to think about new arrivals and what's trending in the fourth quarter. But if we really, really know our customer during the fourth quarter, we've got to buy ready for them. So what are the collections we're going to bring in? Right. What are the gift guides that we're going to bring in if we. It's a little bit late in the season right now, but if we're buying, say, at off price in August if we're in Las Vegas, what are the deals that we can bring in, like cheap markdown sweaters that are less than wholesale that we can use as door busters or Bogo offers or something like that during the fourth quarter? What are the closeouts that any of our vendors right now have as you guys are going around and buying? I know we're buying for spring while we're here, but you know, vendors are overstocked just like we are in retail. So if you've got a great vendor that you do a lot of business with, how would you have that conversation with them and go, hey, what kind of closeouts and offers could you have on hand right now? What could we pull in for the fourth quarter if I need to fill in these different areas? So I've got something that you just like, polls, since we're in the Midwest. Like, isn't polls such a deception? You go in there and you're like, it's 25% off. I'm gonna buy all of this. No, they just bought it at a discount. Right? That's your secret too? You have that same opportunity. But you know what? What is the answer if you don't ask? Shout it out. What's the answer if you don't ask? No, it's no. Right? So I love that you guys are at market today because you're able to build relationships with vendors that you're not able to do online. So because you're here because you're building the relationship now, you have the opportunity to ask, what's the worst thing that could happen? They say no, so what? Move on. Right? But it's up to so look for those great deals and those great opportunities to buy right during this time of year. All right? Final thing in pre planning is what's our boundary? What's our boundary? How many of you guys have run into this being a yes person in this business? Right? I did. That's what happened to me with my kids. I was a yes person. Yes, I'll do that. Yes, I'll take that on. Yes. That sounds like a great idea. No, it's a horrible idea. Right? So what are our boundaries going to be? And then how are we going to have that conversation with our family so that they're someone to hold us accountable during the fourth quarter? Right. So if you tell your spouse, hey, I am going to be done working at 5 o'. Clock. I am going to be there for Thanksgiving, I'm actually going to cook a turkey For Thanksgiving, Right? Someone's got to hold you accountable. So what are your boundaries going to be, you know, on? Put it on paper and speak them to somebody so that they can show up and hold you accountable. Right? What are you going to do and what's your staff going to do? What is your staff's responsibilities and how are you going to hold each other accountable? Right. Do you have someone on your team that works for you that says, you know what? I think you should go home? Right? No, you can't do that. Sarah Burks, that's my person, right? We sat at dinner last night and she's like, you know what? I think we need to take more time off. I was like, sounds like a great idea, Sarah. Right? Everyone has to have that person. So you've got some boundaries, right? There's no award for being superwoman in this business, for sure. You know, somebody felt this slide. Shannon Gordon. Some of you guys know Shannon, who wrote a mastermind with Shannon. She actually works for the boutique now. She runs all of our social media. But good point. Don't wait to purchase your inventory for promotions. Having the next three months fully mapped out now is so beneficial for your sanity and your business. Fail to plan and plan a field. All right, so since Sarah's here, I had to put this one into the presentation today. So Sarah's family is huge into basketball, and my family's huge into basketball. My oldest daughter Kylie's in fourth grade, and I coached her third grade team last year, and now I'm coaching her fourth grade team this year. And then I coach a co ed team that my son is on as well. And Sarah's now is big into coaching basketball and rodeo as well. So she always uses this analogy, and I love it. And it's that if you have a team that works for you and your business, your staff, you've got to think about it, like being the coach of your team, right? How many of you guys have staff that sometimes you're like, do they know what hoop we're shooting at? Right. Never happened. But if they don't know what hoop we're shooting at, is that their fault or is that the coach's fault? Coach's fault, right? I asked this to a group of team voters I was working with the other day. I said, you know, if you're coaching your team, then it comes down to overtime, right? You're going into overtime. Who are you going to bet on, what team you're going to bet on? Right? Are you looking for players on the team like They've got Kobe, so I'm going to bet on them. Who are you going to bet on? I'm going to bet on the team that has a coach with the most experience. Right. But when it's 30 seconds left on the clock, who am I going to bet on? It's the coach that knows to run the best play. It's not necessarily the players that are on the floor. And the same is true for your business. So every single week until we go to the end of the year, how many of you guys are running team meetings with all of your staff every week? Nobody who has meetings? Yes. Thank you. High five. All right, so our team at the boutique hub is all remote, so we have to be so heavily involved in daily communication because it's so easy for us to get lost. So we have Slack channel. You guys have all heard of Slack. It's free to get started with Slack. You can have channels, channels that are, like, designated by different topics. Right? So we communicate slack every single day. We have trello boards that we share that are like running to do lists, and then we zoom call depending on the topic, like three or four different days a week. So we can still see each other throughout the entire week. But the more communication, the better. Right. So Facebook groups. How many of you guys have Facebook group with us? Yes, Facebook groups. Another perfect way just to keep people informed. You guys know what it's like when somebody shows up to work, whether it's warehouse or squarefront, wherever it is, and they've been gone for the last four days, and they walk in and they're like, well, let's do today. Right? Let's do today. And do you have a plan? Like, how are we going to tell them what's new today? Right? So the more time we can spend ahead of time training them every single week, whether it's walking through the meeting, brands that hit the floor, or if you guys have a great, like a wider age range of your customer, right? You've got college girls and then you've got older women, right? They're gonna have different body types. They're gonna wear things differently. So could we have our staff train one another? I'm like, this is what's new in. And if I was, you know, a younger staff member, I might style it this way, right? Or if I'm a woman with curves, I might style it this way. So they're cross edges educating one another. Because at the end of the day, why do people shop at boutiques? Personal attention. And someone just said it. We're talking about this relationship. I think you guys were talking about it. We were talking about style education, Right? I think it was you guys. We were talking about how people like to shop with boutiques because you put something together and you educate people on how to style it. And big box stores don't do that. You're just left to sort through all the racks. Right? So whether you have storefront or proceedings, you're online. Right. You're doing videos, you're doing live videos. It all comes down to how you're educating your customer. So I know if you guys have staff, you've got opportunities to educate one another and train them on those. And then when the holidays come around and I know you've got a different Black Friday deal, then you do a small business Saturday deal, then you do a cyber Monday deal, and it changes so fast. So how are we staying in constant communication about each of those opportunities? All right, checklist and procedures. The only way to grow and scale a business is to get really good at two things. Things creating processes and coaching your team to spot the gaps in those processes. A good coach never stops coaching in the good times or in the bad times. Actually, I think this is another thing I heard Sarah say the other day. She was talking about, you know, many times when we had to let someone go, we had to let someone go. How much fun is that? Nothing. Right. Would it be safe to say that sometimes if we have to let someone go in our business, it comes back to coaching? Right. If there's an unmet expectation. Right. Or there was a communication gap, a lot of times that can come back to, well, did we coach them to their full potential or was there a missed opportunity there? And not all times. I know that there's times where things just don't work out, but the more we can coach and get ahead of a problem before it starts, the better off we're going to be? All right, event roi. This kind of goes back to our conversation earlier about, are we just looking for gross sales throughout the entire fourth quarter, or are we looking for a different type of roi? So I think about the fourth quarter as customer acquisition season, right. Everybody and their mother is shopping for something during the fourth quarter. Amen. Everybody is. So what an opportunity for you guys to meet new customers in so many different ways. So a couple things I want to hit on here now. Number one is this is the time to build your list. Email list, app downloads, text list, Facebook messenger, bot. Hopefully a couple of you guys have worked on that or you have, right? Build the list now. And even if it's a purchase, right? If you're building people who purchase from you, it's a dollar five, it's a dollar ten. Purchase something small. Get customer information as much as you can during the fourth quarter. So you've got huge lists to remarket to the entire rest of the year. How many of you guys have websites and you sell online? Most of you, right? Everybody has a Facebook Pixel installed, right? Hopefully everybody has Facebook Pixel installed. Okay, do need one favor, One favor. Today or tomorrow, go home and make sure you have a retargeting ad running with your Facebook Pixel. That's like gotta be universal for everybody. We're doing so much work during the fourth quarter to build our list, to meet new people, to drive organic traffic to our website. We're pushing and pushing and pushing e commerce conversion rates. 2%, 2% online. That means 98% of people come to our websites and they. So what are we going to do about that? Right. If we don't have a retargeting ad on our website, those people are gone. Maybe they'll see another Facebook post. Maybe they'll catch an Instagram story going on to be really, really specific and intentional about getting them back. So it's really simple. You can create a retargeting ad. It could be a conversion ad. It's called catalog sales ad is the ad type if you're looking for it on your website or on Facebook. Catalog sales ad, it'll use your Pixel and it'll show them any of the products that they've previously been looking at on your website. It'll continue to follow them and you'll run the that ad for 14 days and then you might pick up another ad. If you like ads manager and you want to get handy about it, you can pick up another ad, a video ad or something like that. Just going to retarget them 14 days off. Make sure you've got something in place. Where we're really retargeting our list during the fourth quarter. Who here has a promotion that they run to get people back in January? Perfect. So you probably do like bonus cash or something like that for January. Cottage Cash, perfect for the boutique. So opportunity. The more people purchase during the fourth quarter, they get whatever your boutique's name is, you can get creative with your name, right? Like cottage cash or boutique bucks or bonus bucks, whatever you want to call it, where they can come back and they can spend that money in January. Right. So the more perks you can give them now, that's going to continue to build then definitely want to build that up. Wish lists. Who here does wish list. I think wish list as well. Yes, you do wish list for men as well. Yeah. Perfect. Perfect Wish list, right? The what? Oh that's awesome. That's awesome. Couple other people do. Yeah. I was thinking about Dear Santa only cuz we're in the mid glasses. This sounds totally normal that it'd be like deer, you know? Do you understand that? Like they're. Yeah, but if you have a lot of hunting, we call them hunting widows. So if you had a deer Santa party, you have people in, right? We have a hunting widows night in our town where all kinds of boutiques and vendors and everyone gets together and then the women fill out wish list because they're a widow. You totally get it. And then we were in la, we had an event we hosted in LA last two weeks ago and there was someone there that had an event called a desperate dudes night that followed up like after the Dear Santa night. Right. And that's like the last week before the holidays, last week before Christmas. And it's time and I know we've got some men in the room. So men, be honest. How many of you guys really plan your gifts in advance? Oh perfect. We got one, right? Oh no, it's okay. I. I've told you guys this in the hub many times that the last gift I ever got from my husband was a popcorn maker. It's like the last minute I got this popcorn maker and he's like last night like popcorn. I'm like, okay, well that makes sense. So give those men an opportunity to shine, right? So I'll give you this little formula. We talk about this in our holiday marketing masterclass. I know a couple of you have taken that. So we use a program called Typeform. And do you guys, what do you guys use for your gift list? Google box. Google box. So that would work. Or there's like Google forms. There's a number of ways to. We use Typeform and we use it for a number of different things, but we've had several boutiques use it where they have like a ladies night or a deer Santa night or somewhere. If you're an online boutique and you're doing a pop up somewhere, you know, same opportunity. Or if you've got a Facebook group with your online boutique, you share that type form. And women can fill out of course their name, their physical address, because we're going to mail them something like a postcard in January because nobody gets happy mail anymore. So that's your boutique. You're going to start mailing your customers postcards. We're going to get the brands that they're interested in, not necessarily the products that they're interested in. Because obviously you're probably going to turn your products too fast for that. You're going to sell out, but you're going to get as much information about that customer as you possibly can for likes or dislikes, for shoe size. And if you want to get product information within the games, you can find some things that similar. And then you're going to get the man's information. You're going to get his name, his email address, his phone number. So now, oh, and don't forget this. Anniversaries and birthdays. How many of you guys have good anniversary and birthday list, too? A couple people, maybe. No birthday. Birthday list. Perfect. So now you've got the man's information so you can start to market to him for holiday marketing. You can say, hey, your wife gave me your information. She asked, repeated that I contact you and I've got these bundles put together. Right. You could give him. Some men like to actually go in and pick things out. Some men are very gifted. It sounds like you're very gifted in that area. This is your planet. My husband would be like, give me options. Give me three options, and I'm going to pick the middle or the most expensive one because I want to be a hero, right? Give him options. And it could be a bundle of know what? It's going to be a sweater, it's going to be a candle, it's going to be a gift card, and it's going to be a piece of jewelry. And it might not be a bundle where you create like, specific, like this blazer specifically, because again, your inventory is going to fluctuate. But if you have, like, price points and you know, you've got some candles that fall in this range or other items, you can mix and match those bundles and say it's, you know, a hundred dollars, two hundred and three hundred fifty. And then you contact these guys and just ask what would work best for you. Your budget this season. And now you've got information for Valentine's Day, her birthday and or their anniversary. Okay. Simple way to build your list over the holiday season. How many of you guys offer gift wrapping over the holidays? Yeah. Yes. Perfect. Sarah also has a great tip. I've heard her share a couple of times, bringing in like a 4H group or girl Scouts or some type of, like, local nonprofit where they're also Going to share that, their gift wrapping with all of their members and across their social media. And it's an opportunity to give back charity guys to your community. So see who you can partner with and leverage those types of experiences. And then how many of you guys collaborate? I know you guys do in the same town. You collaborate with other local businesses as well. Yes. You guys have popups together to collaborate with other local businesses. Fashion shop. Oh, awesome. So you guys are all free from the same community. Cool. Pretty cool. So this is a best time of year again, whether brick and mortar, your mobile, your online opportunities for pop ups and cross promoting and events. And it doesn't have to be just other boutiques or, you know, salons or floral shops. It could be a bar, could be a tire store. That collaboration in our community, it could be any type of global business where you're sharing. We have one night, it was the ladies night out. So I used to work, I've been on my shell event before the boutique. So I did a lot of these local events. We had this ladies night out where every business that you went to, you got a coupon for the next business, including like you got a cup and then you could go to the bar for a free drink or you got a coupon to go to the salon, whatever it was. Every local business kind of went in a circle and they gave an opportunity to collaborate with somebody else locally. And I know so many, you guys have local Etsy shops or makers or artisans. Right. Where you can bring those people into your store or you could go into like whether it's a community room, your local library, whatever it is. Those opportunities for collaboration are endless. But make sure you're leveraging one another's social media every time you have that collaboration opportunity. You got joint graphics to share, you're doing a giveaway to follow one another on social media. Right. Maybe over competition. Definitely not just in industry, but in our local communities as well. All right. Ann has been a longtime member of the Hub Sype. She open, has her open house the weekend before Thanksgiving because people are in the mood to start that early on their Christmas list. She served wine and chocolate. She didn't offer specials or have a sail rack. But this does have them draw in a roll to receive a discount at checkout. They get anywhere from 10 to 20% off their total purchase or 30 to 50% off an item. And they all get a gift. Earrings in a bag. They have a great time and they bring their price with. So a lot of times during the holidays we think about blanket sales, right? Has anyone ever been victim to a blanket sale, possibly where you're getting like, oh, smooth, 30% off? Every one of my favorite retail consultants is here in this building. He's repping right over here for a mine. Doug Hill Vicker. He works with Management One. And he once said, you know what? You can't throw out the diamonds with the dirt. And that's always stuck with me. So anytime you think about having a blanket sale, I want you guys to stop and think about the diamonds in the dirt. How many of you guys are every single week looking at your aging inventory? Couple people. More people. Right? Aging is one of the most important reports we can run because we know what's turning and what's not turning. So when we have a sale, especially over the holidays, we want to find what's the dirt, what's gathering dirt, what's collecting dust, what sweaters are growing on the hanger, right? And those are the things that we want to mark down so that we can keep the diamonds in our store. Right? So don't give away the new with the old. Make sure you're focusing your sale, your bogo. If you've got a denim line that needs to go, we're focusing on doing a bogo on the denim line. And all of your new pieces are still at full price, right? So get smarter about running a promotion versus a sale. Right? Get people in the door. How many of you guys have open houses with swag bags? Most people do, right? How many of you guys have basement junk? Basement junk? The things that you just throw in the basement and you're like, like, I'm going do something like this at some point, right? Basement gym. I know your vendors also have basement junk. So I challenge you today, when you're working with your vendors as well, do you. Do you have any, like, water bottles or freebies or, like, what kinds of things do you have that I can throw in my swag bag? Because that's the fastest way for running a promotion to get a line around the door is to have swag bags for the first 50 people in line. Oh, my gosh. I just had this conversation with someone in LA too. They were like, well, what if your number 50, 51. Not everybody gets a trophy. Not how it works, right? Amen. Right? They need to keep score at the soccer game. I don't care if you're six. Keep score. Not everybody gets a trophy. Not everybody gets a swipe bag. Honey needs to get her coffee and get there a lot earlier in the morning. All right, last piece I want to miss mention on sale versus promotion is teaks are not Walmart. Yes, we're not Walmart. You do not have to be cheap to make a sale. Cheaper is not better. I got God bless this woman who messaged me the other day and said, my neighbor down the street's price matching. She's price matching. She's like, show me any boutique online and I'll price match it. And she's like, I'm crushed. What do I do about this? I was like, you do nothing because she's not going to be in business in three months. She's not going to make it past the J months. Right? You're not Walmart. Your women come to you because they need your help, right? You are their style educator. Some women, I think we take this for granted in boutique land. Like, we love to put outfits together. Like, you look so, so cute. I just keep staring at you because your outfit and your shoes are adorable. You have a gift, right? We're in this world because we get so fired up about this stuff and there's a lot of women that are so intimidated by it, right? So we have a gift that we can share with our community and we can make our women feel so good about themselves. And how many of you guys feel like, oh, dang it, if I can just make one person feel good about themselves today, that's my job. Job well done. That's why. Why te work, right? I don't even know where I was going with this. I was just on a tangent. Good stuff. The point is that's why you're not Walmart. Walmart can't do that stuff. I avoid Walmart like the clay. Do you guys avoid Walmart like the clay? I feel like it's bumper carts and the islands are like this wide. I just hate going there. But that's the point. You guys rise up. Rise up and own the value. You don't have to carry just fast fashion. You don't have to be under $40 to be successful and turn a product right. You've got to instill value. Got to instill value. How many different ways can I wear this item? How many different ways can my customers just going to wear this to a basketball game, a football game, church? How many ways can she wear this item? That's up to us in our marketing and our videos and our social media and our recap posts to do as many different round sessions as we possibly can to show value for something that, I mean, this is not a cheap. I can spend like $30 on this blazer. There's $30 everywhere. I think I spent like 65 bucks on this blazer. Right. Thank you. Appreciate that. You guys all have those same opportunities in your sourcing. So don't do Walmart. I know you're not going to be Walmart. Another tip. I know a lot of you guys know Tammy and R2D. We move old inventory and grab bags since people are out shopping for others and not themselves. Do you guys all do gifts for your own customers? Like an add on sale at checkout? Like hey, I know you're here and you're shopping on your gift list but here's a gift I have for you. Right? Here's a gift for you. So that kind of makes them a jump too. We marked surprise packages for customers and would keep them under a tree as a present for themselves. It was a success. And allow them to, to move over stock. All right, drives. I look like a. This is where I might nerd out. You're welcome. All right. How you guys? Several of you have been in retail boot camp. Several of you here. You've probably seen some of our, you've seen our boutique traffic formula. Who am I speaking German yet? Some of you know what I'm talking about. No. Okay. Our boutique traffic formula. I want you to think about it like this. How much traffic do I need to get in my store or on my website in order to hit the sales goals that I have? So quick little formula. What's our daily sales goal? And you can do this with your team. Please do this with your team. What's your daily sales goal divided by your average order value. It's going to give you how many orders you need a day to hit that sales goal. Self explanatory. Right now we're going to take how many orders do we need per day divided by our conversion rate and that's going to give us how much traffic we need per day in the sales pool. Sounds easy enough to everybody. Okay. Sometimes this is a really eye opening experience for people and the number fluctuates. I want keep this in mind. So an average e commerce store, their conversion rate is 2%. If you're a brick and mortar store. How many of you guys have brick and mortar and you've done traffic counters. Your start traffic pattern double people. So there's, there's a number of ways you can do it. You can just old fashioned like tally them up. Yeah. Flicker. Right? Yeah. So it's eye opening and it depends. I, I've heard Ranges anywhere from like 30 to 60%. Anyone want to tell me their instar conversion rate? Anyone know it off the top of their head? Around 20, right? Over 40, was that 20? But we're in a mall, right? So. So you illustrate my point. Cuz you guys are not the mall. Yeah, you are the mall. Oh, that's actually pretty good for a mall, right? Because a lot of times if you're in a mall, you've got all the looking booths that come in and out, right? So your going to go down. Okay. It's you driving the traffic and not the mall driving the traffic. Gotcha, gotcha. And it's going to fluctuate throughout the year obviously. But if you have an idea of whatever this glass goal is, how much traffic do I need to hit per day? Now all the other numbers that we track in our marketing can make so much more sense, right? If I know that even though my email Open rate is 20%, 20% equals what a thousand people we'll say for, for even numbers. So if I send out another email today, I know I'm going to hit another thousand people on my website. So just do it backwards, right? How many, how many Facebook post do I need? Right? Or what is my analytics on my Facebook post? Where does that need to be in order to get the numbers on the kids, to get traffic to the store? All those numbers are related. This is where my brain is like it's so exciting about this stuff because if you can work it backwards now you've got a game, you got a game plan, you got a social media game plan. How many texts do I need to send out this week? Right. How many push notifications do I need to send? Number of different ways to slice. Notice that. So that was kind of our, I don't know. You guys mentioned the content sanity method, right? Yeah. Yes, let's pick that up. So that was kind of our thought behind Content Sanity was we wanted to create a, a spreadsheet when the views are overwhelmed with like how many Facebook posts do I need to make and when do I make them and how do I keep track of them. Right. That was us. And between running things for the boutique of business and boutique style, we had had stuff scheduled all over the place. So we built this huge spreadsheet that managed all of our content across every single channel every day of the week. And now we've kind of like reformulated that for boutiques. And then we layered that with six essential pieces of content that boutiques can create every single week to lay that into your marketing. So I'm gonna go off my slides and go off tangent, but who here has like one day of the week, social media day? You've got one girl, right, that's constantly up. I'm making a batch creation because I've been in boot camp. So you heard all this, right? But I'm big into batch creation. So Mondays is social media day for us. So we sit down, we plan out the entire week, we plan out the next week. We see, are we getting all of our things in this month? Because there's so many things happening. If you're in the hub right now, you should see this calendar. It's a nightmare because we're coming here. We were in la, Our boutique box planner is coming out in a couple of weeks. Like all these things are all happening at once. And we want to make sure you guys don't miss any of those those things that are coming up. So the content sanity method really just kind of takes those six essential pieces and shows you how to batch creative everyhm six such pieces of content. I'll give you this off the top of my head. Live videos, try on sessions, product photos, like individual product photos, both new photos and then aged photos. So looking at my aging report and going, okay, what didn't sell? Why didn't it sell? And how can I restyle it and repost it based on product photos, quotes, personal stories, and then the collection of weed. Those are the six essential pieces content. So if you can sit down Mondays and you can batch, pull all of those things and then map them out into your calendar, now you can spend the rest of the week kind of going back to the beginning of this. Like with your family, you have some time to maybe spend with your family. And you can spend more time simply engaging with your content versus always creating new content. Can you repeat those six? Yes. Live videos, try on video, product photos, quotes, personal stories, and collection of the week. Thank you. Can you guys hear me in the back? Okay. Okay. All right, So last piece. I already went on a Walmart tangent, so we're done there. But it's the same thing. Why are they going to shop you over Amazon? Right? And that's going to be the way that you show up in collections throughout the entire holiday season. Your gift guides, your try on sessions, your personal service, your return policy. Who opens up their return policy liner during the holidays, Right? You have to, right? I think it's easy to get so caught up in, well, my inventory is going to be off. I'm going to have something Come in. That's going to be a one. I hear that all the time. But what's worth it at the end of the day? Is it acquiring the new customer? Is that more important? Or having a onesie twosie that you might have to mark down? To me, this entire season, this entire strategy is about how can I possibly acquire more customers this entire season. All right, guys, who feels like I have at least one new idea today on how they're going to strengthen the holiday season? Awesome. All right, if you guys have any questions on specific holiday promotions, holiday bundles, strategy, traffic, inventory, I'm more than happy to answer any of those questions. I wanted to give you an opportunity to have a product called the Holiday Marketing Master Class that shares all of these things in pretty good detail. Then you have lifetime access to a girl of that program. So if that's something you're interested in, that's the link to grab that as well. Do you guys have any questions about quality marketing? But. So her question is about the six pieces of content. Yeah. So most of the that we've worked on this with, a lot of them will have a social media person that will work on those pieces. But you do reschedule it. So if you're using like we schedule everything needed from Facebook like that you have desktop now. They took away the option on the wall. Do it there or else. On Instagram we use planoly to map everything out. Planoly we used to use later before we use plan. But yeah, we schedule everything out that we possibly can and then we'll have days like you're just checking on Facebook ads or working on specific email like funnels or whatever. We just sort of map it out like just kind of goes back to time and like batching your time. But our days are all weaned by a certain task that needs to be nice and fitness. Thank you. Yep, you bet. Any other questions? So our question, how many of you guys do live sales on Facebook? Several of you. So the question was are live sales with the algorithm, will live sales go away and we'll transitions replace that. And I honestly don't think live sales are going to go away the way that they are right now. I think it will change. I mean a lot of you use comments sold. So I know going live in the app, that's going to be a game changer for a lot of people. But the try on session thing is huge. I think that's just as important right now as live sales and whether it's on Facebook, Instagram, your Insta stories where if you want to send it out in emails that I've seen a lot of, like the fast little TikTok videos. Have you guys been seeing this in marketing now? Like, quick little TikTok videos that are, like, in and out. Those are huge as well.