137: Give Q4 a Boost by Staying Focused on Revenue Generating Activities

It's happening whether you like it or not. The fourth quarter is here. Listen, we are never as prepared as we'd like to be, but that doesn't have to stop you from making the most out of your Q4. I've got 4 areas of focus I need you to jump into right now. Come listen.

Welcome to the Launch Your Box podcast with weekly tips, tricks, and strategies to start, launch, and grow your subscription box. Now here's your host, Sarah Williams.

Welcome back to the Laundry Box Podcast. Sarah here. Did you know that I've had my product-based business for over 10 years now? I've been through so many changes over the years, and it looked like starting from my home, I was selling on a Facebook page and I was delivering products. Then I started selling products on Etsy and out of another local shop. Then I went to opening my first brick-and-mortar store. It was only about 600 square feet. It was so tiny, we called it the broom closet because it was a tiny location, but it got me out of my home. That was my first location. And then I went to my second location and it was over 4,000 square feet. From that point, that was, that was a pivoting moment for me. From that point, I decided to go online and I started my subscription box. And then during the middle of the pandemic, when my store got shut down, I knew it was time for me to move to the warehouse to an online-only model. This is how my product-based business has evolved in the last 10 years. And I've been through 9 fourth quarters with my business. I have learned a lot along the way. And what I know is that fourth quarter revenue is crucial for any small business. This can make or break our year, and it can give us momentum we need going into the new year. So it's super, super important. In this episode, we're going to talk about what you should be focusing on this time of year to maximize your revenue before the year end. And I've broken them down into 4 different categories. These are the areas that I want you to focus on to really boost your revenue in Q4 and stay focused on the revenue-generating activities. So if you're ready, I'm going to want you to grab your notebooks, write this stuff down, because you're going to want to refer back to this as we go through the next several months. All right, so let's jump in. Let's get started. I have tons of knowledge to share with you. I've, I've done a lot of things in my fourth quarters. I've done a lot of testing, trying, experimenting, and I've got all the good stuff on this episode for you today. So let's start with the first focus area, and that's going to be building your Q4 sales strategy. Okay. Now when we start building our sales strategy, this is the pinnacle of what we do in the fourth quarter. We've got to sell, we've got to sell, sell, sell, and we've got to know what we're doing before we get into the fourth quarter. So the first thing I want to talk about is inventory. You've got to have it to sell it. You've got to manage it to sell it. You've got to create demand for your inventory. And so one of the biggest flaws that I see only in myself and also just in general is that when I don't have enough inventory, when I don't have fresh inventory, we don't have new inventory, when I don't have enough inventory, my sales are directly affected from that. So we have to go into Q4 with a lot of inventory. We have to plan for new arrivals consistently. We've got to take time to pull out the inventory that's existing in our shops right now, pull them out, rebundle them, remerchandise them, take new pictures, repromote them. Like, we have to have inventory and it can't be stale inventory. So having new fresh inventory, having existing inventory we can pair together, we can market together, we can sell together. And what I'm talking about, like in my example, is say I have a new sweatshirt line, maybe it's got 4 or 5 different sweatshirts, and I've got a bunch of accessories that have been stale in my business for a little while. How can I pair the old accessories with the new sweatshirt line? That could be earrings, that could be handbags, that could be guitar straps for purses, that could be lots of different things. And that's just taking some new fresh inventory, giving fresh life to my inventory, and using some of my existing inventory to pair with that. So think about your own industry and your own business, and how can you make sure you have new inventory all the time and pair it and move some of the older inventory? You got to have inventory, you got to manage your inventory, and you have to create demand for your inventory. You can't just leave it sitting on your shelves thinking it's going to sell because it's on your website. You have to promote it, you have to focus on it, you have to show people how they can use it. Okay. The other thing when we talk about our sales strategy, and this is really important, but it's our holiday promotions and it's something that we've been talking a lot about inside my Launch Your Box membership this month. I have 7 dedicated holiday promotions that I went over this month and you don't have to do all 7 of them. I'm going to do 5 of them, but it's something that we need to consider. If you don't have active promotions going on in fourth quarter, you're leaving money on the table. And if you are a subscription-only business, like you don't have other products, this is the time of year that you want to test and try some of these other products. I'm talking about a holiday gift box. I'm talking about gift subscriptions. I'm talking about liquidating some of your excess subscription inventory during like a 12 Days of Christmas sale. I'm talking about Black Friday doorbusters to get people to get traffic to your site. Like there's a lot of holiday promotions that you could be running in the fourth quarter, and we need to have those on our calendar now. We need to be planning for them now. And it's not something that we just create one day in November. Like, we know what we're doing. We have product bought for this promotion and we're implementing a marketing plan for that promotion. So holiday promo promotions have to be part of your Q4 sales strategy. We need to make sure those are locked and loaded now as we go into October. Number 3 on this list of sales strategy items is going to be gift guides. Everything we do, everything we sell right now needs to be giftable. People's buying habits switch over the next 30 days from buying for themselves to buying for other people. So we have to take products that we have or that we've purchased for fourth quarter and show them who they're for, how they're giftable, and who needs this item. Gifts under $30, gifts under $50, gifts for teens, gifts for moms, gifts for whatever. We need to make everything that we sell giftable in some way. And we can do this with gift guides. We can do that on our socials. We can do it on our blogs. We can do it in our emails. But we need to make sure that gift guides are part of our Q4 sales strategy. So that's inventory, holiday promotions, and gift guides. This is how we build our Q4 sales strategy, and that's what we need to be doing. The second area of focus, once we have our product figured out— and that's what the first part is, what we're going to sell— the second focus is marketing and advertising, how we're going to sell it. This is equally as important as having the products to sell. You can't just have the products and not put your marketing and advertising together for this. Leaving them on your website to sell themselves does not work. We have to be marketing them. So number one, I need you to focus on email marketing. The money is in your list and that's your email list. It's something that we've been working on in Launch Your Box all year long. Is building our list. We do it in Launch Your Box, we do it in Scale Your Box, and we do it in my mastermind. And it is a focus that we focus on for the first 9 months of every year. Now it's time to use that list that we've been building. Having a consistent email plan is crucial. We need to know what days we're sending emails. We need to have those emails locked and loaded. We need to make sure that they're going out on time every week And something else that you need to be doing during Q4 is segmentation. So email segmentation is really powerful, especially this time of year. And don't just keep blasting your entire email list day after day. If you sent out an email every day right now, from now until the end of December, that would be powerful. For your revenue. But you can't send out an email right now every day to everyone on your list, and that's why segmentation is very, very important. I want you to think about being able to go in and segment anyone that has looked at a particular product more than once over a 30-day time period. So I've got a water bottle sitting on my desk right here. If I created a segment for someone that has viewed this product more than once over 30 days and not purchased that product in the last 30 days, I could send a dedicated email about that one water bottle to anyone that, that populated for. And you know what? That email is going to convert. It's not going to go to everyone. It's going to go to anyone that's looked at that water bottle. That's the power of segmentation. And if I took one little segment every day from now until the end of the year and sent out a campaign like that, that is money in the bank all day, every day. Email segmentation is so important. I also want you to look at your abandoned cart flow, your browse abandonment flow. I want you to make sure your flows are locked and loaded because those are emails that are working for you while you're sleeping. Those are really important. What do they say? What is in that flow? Check it out. Email marketing, number one marketing driver in the fourth quarter, period. Number two is social media. We've gotta have a consistent social media schedule. And if you aren't being consistent on social media right now with your posting, it's It's time to lock and load. Every post is generating traffic to your website, and it should be generating sales if we have enough traffic. Consistency is king. It's not quantity, but it's quality and consistency. So make sure you set up your social media schedule, your weekly, your daily, your monthly social media calendar, and we stay consistent with that. We get things posted every day like clockwork. It's important, no matter how many other things you've got to do for the day, making sure your social media schedule is followed and is going to be crucial. And it's free. It's free. Organic traffic is free. So if you forget to post today because you got too busy doing other things, you just left free advertising. On the table for the day. Make sure we're following that. And number 3 is paid ads. And it goes right back to our social media schedule. It goes right back to that email segmentation. We should be targeting specific demographics, interests, and behaviors with our paid ads. We should have a solid retargeting strategy. The more times the people see your stuff, the more likely they are to buy. If I see this water bottle one time, I probably won't buy it. But if I see it 3 or 4 times over the past— in the next week and I really like it, it's going to— I'm going to be triggered to buy at some point. We have to keep putting our stuff in front of people and we have to do that in the biggest gift-giving time of the year. We are meant to be selling right now, and I don't want you to get in your head that, oh, they've already seen this water bottle, oh, they don't care about it. Oh, they need to see it over, over, over, and over again. Lots of times they need to be seeing it. So we've got to use paid ads, organic traffic, and email marketing to make sure that we get our things in front of people multiple times. Marketing is huge in the fourth quarter, and it's both organic and it's paid traffic. All right, so area one of focus: building our Q4 sales strategy. Area two of focus is marketing and advertising. And number three is prepping for peak sales days. And you might think, oh, I'm prepped, I'm ready, I know it's going to be crazy. We need to make sure our customer service does not get ignored. We might be so busy fulfilling orders that we don't have time to check our inbox or our DMs or however we get customer service messages. We need to be responding. We need to be taking care of our customers in this time. It is so important our social media response time is going to be critical for our sales. People have a question about the product that we're posting, we need to answer that. We need to make sure that we have a great social media response time during our peak sales times. So that's a dedication of a time block we need to put in our schedule— customer service time block. If you are your solopreneur, you are fulfilling, you are marketing, you are doing all the things, you can't let customer service slip from that. We have to make sure we have dedicated time for that. And then we have to have a lot of communication about urgency, limited edition deadlines, flash sales. We need to make sure we have banners on our websites with promotional codes, free shipping thresholds, or flash sale like what's on sale today. We need to be clearly communicating our Christmas shipping deadlines to create the urgency and scarcity, but those things need to be clearly communicated on a regular basis. Creating urgency, scarcity, and exclusivity is going to drive sales, but we have to communicate it. We can't just show up on December 15th and say, hey, today's the last day you can get guaranteed shipping for Christmas. That's not going to drive a lot of traffic. But if you've been talking about it for 5 or 10 days— hey, we have 5 more days, hey, we have 4 more days— you're going to be consistently driving traffic to that urgent deadline that's coming. Don't overlook that. Don't create a flash sale and not promote it. Don't give a free shipping threshold and never talk about it. We need to be communicating these because these will drive traffic. Number 4 area of focus is managing our logistics and fulfillment. We can have all the inventory, we can market the heck out of it, we can be prepared for customer service and communicate effectively, but if we drop the ball on fulfillment and logistics, that's a problem. A lot of times in Q4, we will have first-time buyers, and their experience with us in this time, their very first shopping experience with us, will dictate whether they're a return customer or not. We need to clearly outline our shipping and processing times on our website. When will my order ship? When can I expect it? How long will it take? That is a decision factor in people buying from us. And if people have never bought from us, they don't know what to expect. If I go buy this water bottle, am I gonna— is it gonna ship in a couple days or is it gonna take a couple weeks? What are our shipping policies and what does our timeline look like right now? You need to ensure that you have staff to take care of the influx of orders. You can't treat this like a regular month out of the year. If you know your orders are going to increase, you have to increase your staff. You have to increase the amount of hours they're working. Maybe that's temp staff for the next few months. Hey, I need extra Christmas help. Who needs extra Christmas spending money? I could use you for the next few months. Maybe that's extended hours from your current staff. Okay, we normally get off at 3. Look, we're going to work till 5 on these particular days. We're going to work an extra day this week. We're going to work a half day on Saturdays from now until Christmas. What does that mean for your business? We need to plan for that. We can't get into the weeds and then realize we need help in the middle of December 5th. It's too late. We need to plan for that. Supply inventory. I need you to take an assessment of your supplies right now. Do I have enough shipping boxes to last till the end of December? Do I have enough poly mailer bags to last? Do I have enough shipping labels and packing tape and shopping bags for my in-store customers? Order now because you're going to be so busy over the next few months it's going to slip through the cracks, and then you're going to be ready to ship out orders and you're not going to have the things that you need to get that shipped. So do a supply assessment now of what you're going to need to carry you through the fourth quarter. And the other thing when we talk about logistics and fulfillment is holiday packaging. How are you going to uplevel their experience this season? Do you have a special holiday box? Do you have a special color bag that they're going to get? Do you have an insert? How are you going to uplevel the packaging? That's going to be important. There's really 4 focus areas that I want you to focus on: building your Q4 sales strategy, marketing and advertising, prepping for peak sales days, and managing logistics and fulfillment. What you can eliminate from your day-to-day so you can focus on these revenue-generating activities, that's what you need to put in place now. What can I eliminate? What can I take off my plate? What I don't want for you right now is starting a blog or a podcast you've been thinking of, creating a new ebook or lead magnet or an opt-in. I just got off of a one-on-one phone call with one of my mastermind students and she's got a punch list of all these things that she didn't get done, you know, in the second and third quarter, like creating a new lead magnet for her membership or she's an SLO offer for her product-based business. Now's not the time to do that. Now's the time to focus on what we need to be selling over the next few months. Not building a new website or planning for 2024. Focus on sales and the activities that directly generate them. I promise you won't regret pouring your time into these 4 areas of your business over the next few months, even if that project that you've been trying to work on all year doesn't get finished. We need to be selling, period. Stay focused. Stay the course, show up and sell. And all these other things that aren't generating revenue that we need to build our business, we can do them later. But don't miss out on this really short window of opportunity to make enough sales to one, put you in the positive for the year. If you've been down in sales this year like so many people have, now's the time to change that. We have the power to sell, sell, sell. Let's not lose sight of that. What we do in the fourth quarter is more sales than we do for half of a year normally. That can make or break a small business. We don't want to lose sight of that. We don't want to take our eye off that ball. If this podcast episode was helpful, go ahead and drop a review for me. I'd love to know your thoughts, and I'll be back next week for another great episode.