Shipping subscription orders early during peak season helps clear inventory and improve customer experience. The video covers using mystery gifts, prioritizing new customer orders, and marketing tactics to optimize fulfillment when demand is highest.
Foreign to share some of my tips for you. So the first one that I'd like to dive into is tip number one. Use your inventory wisely. And what I mean by this is you're typically going to have some products for your brand that sell very, very well. And if you're emphasizing sales of those products, you want to ensure that you have inventory for those SKUs. One of the worst things that you can do is start to sell out on something you're expecting to arrive, but because it's late or really late, you end up with some really angry customers. So try to make sure you're aligning your marketing efforts with what you're trying to sell. The second half of this is actually looking at what inventory you have that is not sold well during the year. So these are going to be your less popular SKUs. These are going to be things that are sitting up, taking up inventory space. And one of the ways you can actually kind of make the most of these is go to your marketing team and tell them, hey, I've got 10,000 of these blue widgets. We should include them as a mystery gift or as a free gift that we're including with all shipments. So it takes a little bit of time just tweaking that to the website so the offer's available. But the point is, is you can actually leverage unpopular inventory as a gift, as an add on to increase the value of what you're selling, especially if you just call it a mystery item. Mystery gifts mystery boxes have been performing really, really well the last two years and something I would highly recommend you use again, undersold inventory for, for mystery gifts. The second thing is if you have subscription orders and subscription customers, I would definitely look at getting those out early. There's a couple of reasons why you want to do this. The first is if you want to let customers know that you're going to be doing this, you can actually send out an email campaign asking them if they'd like to opt in to get it. Get it early. You could add an extra incentive like free shipping or one of these mystery items. You could also just say, hey, avoid the peak shipping times and slower shipping delivery times by getting your order early. You could actually do this without getting or having to notify any of your customers by just doing it. So when you do send out shipments early, it's good to include some kind of insert or explaining why. And you can do a couple things with this. The first is just explaining to people that in order to avoid some of the peak holiday shipping costs or slower delivery times. You wanted to make sure that they got their shipment before the holiday season happened. So people feel like you're kind of doing them a favor. The second part is that you can include upsells as a part of that. So if you have subscription customers, you have these people that are getting recurring orders from you. You can include upsells into some of the best specials or offers you have going, or including, hey, redeem this QR code for a mystery gift. For those undersold items. The idea here is you have this audience, you should be marketing to them in a way that miss it. So you include that as an insert into their gift. Finally, as something you should be thinking about is prioritize new customer orders. So when we're looking at the holiday season, when people have ordered from you before, whether that's a subscription customer or a repeat customer, the expectation around delivery is not going to be as critical as it is for new customers. So if it's possible within your fulfillment system to look at prioritizing new customers first time orders so that those go out first, those go out fastest, those get there fastest, and make sure that they're getting a great unboxing experience.
