144: What’s Working Now in E-Commerce

Hey, it's Sarah here, and I'm doing a dual episode today with one of my biz besties, Susan Bradley, from the Ecommerce Roadmap Podcast. On this episode, we are sharing the top 3 things working right now in ecommerce, and the best news is you can all implement any one of them for your business today. Grab your earbuds and come hang out with us.

Welcome to the Launch Your Box Podcast with weekly tips, tricks, and strategies to start, launch, and grow your subscription box. Now Now here's your host, Sarah Williams. Hey, I am here with one of my very best business friends, Sarah Williams. She is the founder of Launch Your Box. I'm sure many of you know her already, and we were having a conversation the other day and we thought, gosh, we get to see behind the scenes of so many businesses. Sarah, you still have a product-based business. We needed to get together and share with you all what's working this year. So Sarah, tell everybody, just in case they don't know you, a little bit about Launch Your Box.

Well, let me intro you, because if you're listening on my podcast, you probably don't know who's talking right now. And this is Susan Bradley, one of my very best business buddies. We have been friends for years. We talk regularly and we talk a lot about our businesses and our communities together. And so we were doing a dual podcast today. So we are streaming this both on her podcast and my podcast. And so I am Sarah Williams. I am the founder of Launch Your Box. I also have an e-commerce business of 10 years called Framed, where I specialize in subscription boxes, and that has really built my business in an incredibly stable environment. If you guys are e-commerce business owners, you know the feast and famine mode that we go through all the time. And so I built Launch Your Box to help teach what I know about subscription boxes, to help people start, launch, and grow subscription boxes. And so Susan, why don't you do an intro for my listeners?

I'm Susan Bradley. We are great friends and have been for so long. And one of the things that is such a huge benefit of our friendship is all the sharing of ideas. And so I own the Social Sales Girls. I'm the founder. We teach e-commerce store owners how to grow a business that pays them well, how to get sales that you can rely on, how to be able to pay yourself and really create the life that you wanted when you started this business. And we do that inside of our inner circle. Where we take you, walk you through the process step by step. And so I am excited to share what we have with you all today because it's applicable to both, right? Subscription box owners and e-commerce store owners.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's fun because we're gonna really talk to you today about what's working now. Like, we've seen this year— let's just be honest, this year has been full of ups and downs, Susan. And we were talking a little bit before we started recording about how my year has looked, and I just want share that with you because I know that it can feel like when you're down that you're the only one that's down. And I was looking at my year-to-date because I am so close to being up year-to-date, and I was trying to see like how much money do I have to pull out of my hat this month just so I can be up for the year, because it has been a very interesting year. I started out the year really high. It looks like a roller coaster. The year went up, up, up, up, up, up, up, and then all of a sudden down. And I started off really strong this year. I had a really strong January and February. I went into March really, really well. And then April, my business took almost that roller coaster nosedive when you come off the top of the track and you just go straight down. And when you look at my sales, you can see where I went straight down in April and it kind of hung out there in May, June, and it started to pick back up in July. And I started to analyze like what was happening for my business to take a nosedive. Because if I look at the previous year, it was more steady. It's a kiddie roller coaster where it just goes up and down. It's just a little bit of a wave. This was the monster roller coaster. This year. And I was talking with Susan and I said, here's what happened in April. I got really sick. I was in the ER 3 times in April with my blood pressure. I was going through a divorce earlier this year, and that took a lot of strain on me and just a lot of my bandwidth. And so really, I had taken my eye off of my business. And then I go into June, I have my biggest launch. I was speaking at an event at the end of May. I go into June, I have the biggest launch of my coaching business. Again, my eye is taken off of my retail business, my e-commerce business. And then by July, when all the dust has settled from all of that, I'm like, what has happened to my business? I gotta get it together. Like, what is going on? I can't just let it die out. And Susan, you made a comment when we were talking about this. I would love for you to share that, what you said about the control we have.

Yeah, I think that so many of us, it's also personal what we do. We think that everything that happens in our business is either we're winning or we're failing, and we take it So personally, and so what I want everyone to know, certainly what I witness, and I know you do too, is we want to share with you that you have way more control over your results than you ever think you do. You really can control your results. And Sarah, I think what you're going to share, um, first is a great demonstration of that. And so that sometimes we take our eye off the ball, or we're maybe working on things that just aren't having an impact on our results, but there there's always a way to come back and get the results that you want. So I would say the same thing, that we have lots of people inside of our Inner Circle, lots of members who started the year strong and had that very same nosedive and have had to find kind of innovative ways to get their sales back. And so I would love it— let's start with what happened in, in your business, because that's such a good way for everyone to see that you actually can control your results.

You do have control over it. And I think a lot of us feel like we're out of control. And for me, it wasn't even being innovative, Susan. It was going back to basics. It's going back to what I know works, what I teach my brand new members. Like, as a new business owner, these are the things that I'm going to tell you to do to get traction in your business. And I think sometimes, like, I'm 10 years in, I think sometimes we think we have to keep reinventing the wheel when actually we just need to go back to what works. And what works in some people's works in your business may not be what works in your business. I know what works in my business. And so there were 3 things when I— it was late July and I thought, I got to get this together so I don't end my year down like this. Like, I really need to make some traction. Like, I'm going into the best season. Fall and winter are the best seasons for me. I have to get my act together. And that was going back to the basics. So the first thing that I did, if you heard me speak, if you listen to my podcast, if you know me at all, you know that I I fully believe in live selling. So for me, I doubled up on my live selling. So normally I go live once a week and I sell things. It's always my biggest sales day of the week. We always have a great reaction from it. It's new things, it's older things that I pair with new things. It's my favorite things. It's the bestsellers of the week. It's whatever that combination of things I show up and I sell it 30 minutes on a Thursday or a Friday, and I do that once a week. Well, I started doing it on Tuesdays as well. So when I take a look back, I started on Tuesdays doing a second one and it was not as big as my Thursday one, but it was more just a fewer products or something new that had popped in. And this started to generate almost double the sales that I was having. So instead of relying on that one live that I was, I now had two and it wasn't splitting the sales, it was actually doubling the sales. So that was a huge thing for me. And so I kind of treated them a little differently. Sometimes it would be $10 Tuesday and I would mark down some things that in the store and I would have everything $10. Maybe it would be $10 off Tuesday and I would have something for $10 off. Or maybe it was new arrival Tuesday and I would show up with something that just came in and I would literally take it out of the brown box and we would sell it like right as it came in the door. So it was just something and it wasn't a whole bunch of things. It was focused on one collection or one product line on that Tuesday. But it was— I was showing up more. I was showing up double the amount. People were tuning in, and that was a way that I started to double my weekly sales, was having 2 lives a week. And I have done that ever since. I continue to do it right now through the holiday season. But that's something that we can do. If you're a live seller, try adding in another live. If you are not live selling, I'm going to tell you to get over yourself, like Susan Bradley would tell you, and just do it. You have no idea what difference it will make in your business. And it may not the first time you do it because because there may be nobody watching you live. Just remember that people will watch you on the replay. And remember, as if you can get consistent with it and do it the same time and the same day every week, eventually people will show up. When I first started doing this years ago, my friends were the only ones that showed up, and that was me texting them saying, hey, I'm about to go live, I'm super nervous. Can you jump on and ask me about my earrings or my shirt or my subscription box, please? Those were the only people that were live with me. And I'll never forget, after a few weeks of that, there were people I didn't know that were live with me. And then I remember one day I had 100 people. I could see it on the little corner of my live. There was 100 people live with me. I freaked out and ended my live. I was so nervous, I freaked out. And now I will have hundreds and hundreds of people live with me every time I go live. You have to build it up. It's all about consistency and there's no reason that you shouldn't start right now. That's number one.

Number one.

Number 2 pairs with number 1. I typically, Susan, would send out my email campaign with my live, right? So I would do my live on Thursdays. I would send out my email campaign. I would send a non-open resend. I would send all the things, right? And through the weekend. Now that I was going live on Tuesday, I thought, why wouldn't I send another email campaign? Well, this time I decided to send mini campaigns instead of hitting their email box with a whole bunch of things. I changed up my email to 2 to 3 mini campaigns a week. So this was just one email, no resends, and it wasn't full of product like my Thursday one, because if I was talking about 5 or 6 different things on Thursday, all of those were in that email. These emails were one product. I shared pictures of me wearing or using the product so I could put the face with the product. So again, it's that connection point. I'm already live with you. I'm linking the live in case they want to go watch it. I'm sharing one product from that live, the benefits, the features, maybe a review I've received on one of those products from my website. And those emails were generating so much revenue. I thought, okay, let me stop doing this lengthy campaign. Let me just do these mini campaigns 2 to 3 times a week. So each email would focus on either one collection. It might be cardigans, and I would have the main cardigan I wanted to sell and then a couple of the product ones, some of the different cardigans, or it would just have the one bag and 3 ways to use the bag, or one t-shirt and 3 ways to style the t-shirt. And it was all about that one thing. But I was adding on, I was putting add-ons in that email sequence that went with that one product. It wasn't like it was a bunch of separate things. And that has generated my email. I just looked at it this morning before we got on this podcast, but I just looked— 65% of my revenue is coming from my email right now. And that is from these 2 to 3 campaigns that I am sending every single week. And that was direct reflection of me increasing my lives. Now I was increasing my emails and I thought, are people going to get sick of me? Are people going to unsubscribe? Are people— no, they're not. They're opening, 55% open rate, 2 to 3% click rate. I'm having sales on every email. It is like my ATM. I put content in, I hit send, money comes out in the form of sales. And I want you to just Get over yourself and send an email. We think we have to put all these words in an email. People aren't even reading your words. First of all, a couple good images, short couple 2 to 3 sentence copy, and a button to buy. That's all you need in an email. Do not overthink this. People are visual. They want to see what you have to offer. And if they like it, they're going to click it and they're going to go over and buy from your website. That's it. Stop overthinking it.

Okay.

Number 2.

Yeah, that's exactly— I just thought, oh, all our Inner Circle members' ears are going to perk up because of course we call them mini campaigns inside the Inner Circle. And that's the rule. One thing.

One thing.

Let's go deep.

I think I learned that from you anyway. So that's probably why I call it a mini campaign.

It's a new term. It's a made-up word.

It's now our term. We're just going to use it in this world that we live in, Susan.

We're just going to— It's so effective though. Okay, so let's move on. Number 3, is it related to number 2?

No, it is related to number 2. Okay. Because something that I realized is that my email list wasn't growing and I had taken my eye off growing my list throughout the year. I was real strong on it in the beginning of the year and something happened. That roller coaster just came off the cliff and I just, I wasn't running any list builders. And I thought, why am I not running a list builder? Like, why, why go back to the basics? I tell people every day to do this, yet I wasn't doing it. And it was a direct reflection of my audience not growing. I wasn't growing my audience. I wasn't growing my list. We could really put 3 and 4 in here if we wanted to. But for number 3, what I put down here for our conversation today was that I know free phone wallpapers have typically worked the best for opt-ins in my business. And I know it seems weird because I don't know, it's just a phone wallpaper. But what I do is I take my t-shirt design and I turn it into a phone wallpaper and create an opt-in out of it with a Klaviyo sequence on the back end. And what I do on that sequence is I deliver the wallpaper and I introduce them to my business in that first email. The second email is, don't forget to download your wallpaper and did you know I have a t-shirt subscription? Because this is where this design came from. I'm introducing them. I'm connecting the freebie to my subscription business. And then number 3, I'm telling them all about my subscription and how they can get started and how they can get a t-shirt for $20 a month delivered to their door. So that is my email flow. It is super easy. But what I did was I started making them seasonally, so I didn't have to change them every single month. So if I had a seasonal shirt in one of my boxes, that's the one that I would use for the wallpaper. And so I did this in July with a Good Vibes wallpaper. It was my shirt, and I just turned that into a wallpaper. 1,200 opt-ins that month. Then I did it again in September, mid-September, with my fall t-shirt design and turned that into a wallpaper. 2,400 opt-ins on the fall wallpaper. I did it again with my November box, which I had my Christmas t-shirt in, and started that November 1st. And within, what, 25 days, I have over 3,000 opt-ins on my Merry and Bright wallpaper. Now here's the kicker: 72% of all the opt-ins, um, for those 3 wallpapers are brand new to my list. 72% are brand new to my list. They weren't currently on my list. And here's the reason why: I am running Facebook ads to cold audiences with my opt-in. And here's the thing, you could say just because they opt into a free wallpaper doesn't mean they like your t-shirts. Sure, it might not ever mean that they want my t-shirt, but if it's my design that's on my t-shirt, they are liking that wallpaper. So that means they probably like my design, which means they may like my t-shirts. And even if they're not a t-shirt wearer, I sell sweatshirts and pullovers and bags. And so if they like my my design, they're going to like my products at some point. And that is the goal. So I spend about $40 a day on my wallpaper opt-in ads, and those go to solely cold audiences. And that's how we are bringing in so many new people to my list every single month. And I'm just going to keep it going until it doesn't work anymore. And when it doesn't work anymore, I'll find a different opt-in. But I took my eye off of that. I took my eye off the list building. And I think sometimes You know, I'm 10 years into business. I think sometimes that we think we have to keep coming up with new things and we just need to, we just need to go back to the basics of what has grown our business in the first place and continue to be innovative in that way. Like, how could I create a new wallpaper seasonally? How can I? And I'll do another one after the first of the year and, and we'll just keep, as long as it's working, keep doing it. When it's not working, that's when you need to get innovative and come up with a different opt-in. Yeah.

And I'm going to just say that I bet those opt-ins are really affordable.

Oh yeah, they're like $0.40 or less. They're like less than a dollar. I know when they first start, they're about $0.40 and then they creep up into $0.75. But if this is what I tell people all the time, Susan, if you were walking down the street and you had this shirt on and says, oh my gosh, your shirt is so cute, and I would say, thank you, here's $0.75, would you go like my page? Would you go give me— can I have your email address? You would do that all day long if somebody liked your things. And to get them on your email list, would you give them 3/4? Absolutely I would, because that's your audience. You're building your audience. And we could say number 4, just in here very quickly. I wasn't building my list, Susan, and I wasn't building my audience. My Facebook page and Instagram page had gotten really stagnant with the same amount of followers that I had all year. And so that was probably actually number 4 that I did. I started a page-like ad in the spring and I've been running it since, and I have gained, I think, 6,000 followers in the last, what, 6 or 8 months. And so that was something that I needed. We need fresh eyes, we need new people. We cannot keep selling our things to the same people over and over again. I was doing that with building my list. I was doing that by building my following, and then I was showing up and connecting. And every time I'm live right now, I will have somebody on there that says, oh, I'm new, this is the first time I've seen you live. I'm like, welcome, this is what we do around here. And people in the chat are welcoming them. There's such a connection there when you can go live. That's that know and trust factor. That's when you show up in their email box, they're going to open your email because they know who Sarah is. They watch her live at least once a week versus an email from some random brand that they don't know. They don't know who those people are. That's why I have a high open rate. That's why I have a high click rate. And that's why my sales are increasing. Amazing. So those are the things I've been doing, and I think everyone can do them, Susan. I think that it's actionable. You just have to create some structure for you. Go live when it's convenient for you and you'll show up. Don't go live when you think it's convenient for everyone else because you can't stick to that schedule. Do it for you. Follow it up with some mini campaigns throughout the week, whatever products you're showing, follow it up with some mini campaigns. And here's the other thing about mini campaigns, Susan. If you're not going live, I have people in my audience that don't go live. It's okay. I still love them. Send some mini campaigns. If you're not going live, still send some mini campaigns. What has gotten the most engagement on your page in the last week? Send a mini campaign about that product. What is new? Send a mini campaign about some new arrivals, bestsellers, new arrivals, things like that. Send some mini campaigns even if you're not going live because those are really important and be consistent with them. If you don't have any sales on the first 2 or 3 that you send, don't stop sending them. Be consistent.

Yep. Agree.

Best thing you can do for your business.

Consistency is the most powerful predictor of success, I believe.

Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. That's really good. Okay. Tell me what—

tell me about your students and what you've seen working in that world.

I would agree with everything you said, particularly about doubling down on what works for you. I agree with you 100% that sometimes we forget, we get so far into our search for the next big thing that we take our eye off the ball with the thing that really works. I think that's important to choose what your things are, identify what works, be consistent with them, and doubling down on them is not a bad idea, not a bad strategy. But what I wanna share with you is some of the things that we've been working on that have really paid off for our members this year, and they're a little bit innovative. They are really just finding a way to work within the system that pays off. Everything changes in our business. It's a very noisy space that we're all in, and how do you get noticed? And so the first thing I want to share is building your audience, a good way to build your audience, and it's with using a brand video strategy. So we brought this strategy to our members early in the spring this year. And really, a brand video is just a short 90-second or less video that gives the viewer a high-level look at your brand, your products, maybe a few of the benefits, and a super soft call to action to learn more about it. And it really just is just a really— doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be super Pro. Yeah, it's something that you can make in Canva. You can describe your business, you can feature some products, and it's really designed to attract your perfect audience. And this is something every store owner can do, and they work really well at that very same thing, Sarah, building your audience. Because what happens is they attract— excuse me— your perfect people, and you can tell this by how long they watch the video. So the longer they watch the video, the more they know about your business. And it's really like a pre-qualifying, a warming up of these people. And then you can go ahead and retarget those people. You can put them in an audience and you can go ahead and retarget them with a stronger call to action. So you could do a little Facebook ad from your— with your— using that audience and retarget them, asking them to take an action, and know that they're not entirely cold. You can build an audience of maybe 4 or 5, 600,000 people that I know a little bit about your brand and then hit those people with the next action, which could be join my list. It could be go visit a product on my site, but you're going to know that they have some recall because they have watched your brand video. And of course you can use these videos in other places. So you can create an ad, but you can use them regularly on social media. You can use them on your website. You could use them on a landing page. You You could even use them if you were collaborating with someone.

Yeah, I could see this on Reels, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube Shorts, like all those places that you need to build content for. Yeah, I think that's really great.

You don't even have to say a word, right? It can be a bunch of different screens and it can all be captioned because we know people don't read. They have short attention spans, but this allows them immediately to see if this is something that they want to onboard and then it gives them a capsule story. Of your brand and your products. These have worked really well for our members, and, and we have many members who've, who've done so well with these videos in building huge audiences of hundreds of thousands of people, also in actually getting people to click through and go visit your website and even get some sales. So I would say this is our number one best working strategy that we have come up with this here and so affordable. Like, a VideoView ad is super cheap, a couple dollars a day. So that's the first thing. The second thing is what you talked about— lead generation. Like, we forget that leads are worth money in your pocket. Leads are dollars in your pocket. When you said 72% of the people that join, uh, from your wallpaper are brand new people to your business, I'm gonna say I bet you 3 or 4% of them become customers in a very short time period. And so leads are really important, but we are having some success with a different way. We all have our pop-ups on our sites, but a different way for finding those people that are most likely to be first-time buyers, and that's by using a quiz for lead generation. And so it's just a few simple questions with an outcome that requires you to submit an to get your whatever you are.

So is this quiz on your pop-up?

So this quiz is usually an ad. You can put it on your site, you can put it on your site and it can be whatever. Say if you have skincare, it's find your skin type, or if you— but we have people who are doing it with jewelry and doing really well. But these quizzes are basically designed to find you new customers because what you talked about with your sales decrease is you're exactly right. Like if we just keep marketing to the same people all the time, we're basically gonna cannibalize our sales. Like we're gonna have our lunch for breakfast and we don't have any new growth. So these are designed to attract that new person, get them to buy into your brand, warm them up a little bit, get their email on a list. And then what's amazing is you can actually show them what, what they're likely to be most interested in.

Can I ask you what software or plugin or app you're using for the quizzes? What your group is using?

The easiest one to use and the one that actually integrates really well with Klaviyo is ShopQuiz.

ShopQuiz. Okay, great. Yeah.

Yeah. So they're a little bit of work. They're a little tricky. I'm just gonna tell anyone who wants to do this that you need to start with the end in mind. So you don't start, what are the results gonna be? What are you gonna show them? Outcome for those results and then create your questions. And don't have too many outcomes because it'll make you nuts.

So just don't. Okay, good advice.

Yeah, yeah. But we are really seeing affordable leads, like in the neighborhood of what you're talking about, 30, 40, 50 cent leads. They're a little warmish, right? Because they know that they've answered the questions, so they're a little bit warmish. And, and they are turning into customers at a great rate. They're more qualified than the average person that you maybe would get from another way of getting a lead. And I think it's really important because to get a lead that's a little bit pre-qualified and an affordable lead is really a big deal. The other way you can use these is to collaborate with someone. It's just maybe you have somebody who shares an audience with some similar characteristics and just say, hey, I just made this new quiz, would you email it out to your audience? You can maybe send an email for them, and that way get new eyeballs without spending a lot of money. Yeah. So these are working really well. And that video view audience that I talked about are the perfect people for that quiz.

Okay.

So last thing is very similar to what you talked about, and it's email automations, but it's innovating a little bit. So we all have, and we teach, of course, all the basic email automations that you need. And those really, like you said, 60% of your revenue is coming from email. That's really common if you're doing a great job with email, but really at least 30% of that, like 30%, so half of that actually should be coming from automations. And it's going a little bit deeper with automations. And so automations, for anyone who doesn't know, is really just where you're setting up emails to go out to people based on an action that they took.

Okay.

It could be an action. They signed up for your pop-up, they signed up for your wallpaper, they took your quiz. And you would send them automated emails. So it's not like you have to run into Klaviyo and set them up. They're there and these emails will go out to that person and they are really specific to them because they're based on the action that they took. And this is how you create more of that reliable revenue, like those sales that you can count on that everybody wants. Because we all know, you said it, you can't keep reinventing the wheel because that's exhausting and it doesn't always work so well because One of the things we know is that when you set up automations, it creates frequency and recency. And so it's just like you talked about with your mini campaigns. They're hearing from you often, and it's close to the time when they actually saw the thing or they signed up for the thing. And that gives you your best chance of getting a sale. And so it's really important to set up as many of these automations as you can. So everyone can do this again, and the best time to do it actually is when you are before you grow, so that all that effort you put into growing your email list or whatever it is, doing your lives, the best time to do this is before so that all that effort is paid off. You're getting an ROI on it. But here's an example of how I've seen our members use this really well. So someone fills out the quiz, they submit their email, they get their result, and then you send them personalized emails, but automated based on the result. So the quiz, yeah. And so they see exactly what is meant for them. And that, it, it's so good in, in a bunch of different ways. First of all, it's really good at converting new customers because you're giving them what they're interested in. The other thing that is so important is that it allows you— say you have 3 outcomes for your quiz— it allows you to see where the money is. What do I need to double down on? Who is that person that is most likely to actually convert? Say I have skincare and I've got somebody with dry skin, somebody with old skin, and somebody with acne. Where's the money for me, right? Where's the money? And so it allows you to see what's working and do more of that. But you can use quizzes for so many other things. They can be fun and lighthearted How many ways do you wanna wear, how many monograms do you wanna wear today? Or whatever it is, you can come up with something for pretty much any business. But that's the first way I would say becoming innovative with what's already working is I'm seeing that pay off big time and in identifying new customers and getting them converting quickly before they go cold, because we know people go cold if you don't do it. The other thing that I think that is another automation that a lot of people don't think about or they forget, and it's, it's when somebody buys a particular product or they buy a product from a collection. So say they buy product A, you should really put a specific automation in place that offers them product B because it's the natural next thing. And I think a lot of us, we cover our bases, we do the, the basic automations, but we don't think about how do we dig a little deeper and get more money in the bank, really, with the assets we already have. It doesn't cost us anything. It's really something that everyone could sit down and do, and it would generate some revenue over the—

Absolutely. I love that because I can think of things like right now, if you buy this t-shirt, I've got a flannel that matches it perfectly, or earrings or a bracelet or all three of them. I think that I don't do that enough, and I really should. And it's just a matter of blocking some time out on my calendar and making it, you know, doing a couple a week. If I just did a couple a week, can you imagine how— what I would build up inside Klaviyo for automations? That would be great. Yeah.

And so those are— they're innovative, but they're the same things that work already. Building a big audience, letting them know who you are, what's in it for them to follow you. It's getting them on your email list, then it's finding ways days, but to put offers in front of them with lots of consistency, so frequently and quickly until they actually convert and become a customer. So good.

I love this.

The other automation is— I'm just going to tell you one more that I think is good— is that if you have Klaviyo, you can make a segment of people who have been on your site recently. You can pull a segment of people who have been on your site in the last 7 days. You could even say twice in the last 7 days. Those people are I mean, this is a video, but they are this close to making a purchase. Set up an automation for them. Set it up. Somebody's been on your site that many times, automatically they get— I don't know, maybe it's 10% off, it's your pop-up or offer, or maybe it's some little freebie that you have, gift with purchase. But give them that one more thing to go off and actually press, kind of tip them over the edge to make the purchase.

Yeah.

But here's what I want to leave them with, everyone with. And I'm sure you will agree with me, all of the time you spend on those things is far more likely to lead to the results you want than running off and finding some new thing that somebody said somewhere in some Facebook group that worked for them. If you just spend a little time maximizing what you have, yeah, and start thinking about it the way a customer would You too, you can control your sales. Really.

Yeah, you can control your sales. And we can see that in my own business where the roller coaster dipped down and it took me lifting that roller coaster back up for the second half of the year. And had I not done these things, I wouldn't be close to beating last year right now. And I'm real close. I am, I am like half a percent away of beating last year right now. And I'm going to do it because—

Oh, I know you will.

Oh, I'm going to do it because there's nothing in me that won't allow me not to do it. But we have control of that. And I know I have control of that. It's when we get in our mind or in our head and saying that there's nothing I can do and we give up on ourselves or on our business that we won't make those goals. So if you learn nothing, like we gave you like a solid 6 or 7 ideas here today. If you've done nothing, take 1 or 2 of these ideas. Ideas and just get them implemented. Write them all down because eventually I want you to get to a place where you're doing all of these things because they're all working. They're all working right now. They're working with our current businesses. They're working. We're seeing them. Susan and I, we teach thousands of students every single week, and we are seeing these things work across the board with our students. So we know they work. They're proven to work. It's not something we just dream up and we just decided, oh, we're going watch this today because this might work for somebody. No, they're working for people. They're working for a lot of people. And if you can just get consistent with a few of these at a time and build in some habits, like, it's like these opt-ins. I only have to change them every 3 or 4 months. Let's get one going now. I'll change it in 3 or 4 months and I'll be really consistent. It's about cloning that flow. It's about— it's just really easy to rinse and repeat when you build structure around your live selling, when you build structure in your email templates, when you build structure with your automations, it's all about building that structure in your business so you can just keep rinse and repeating it. You don't have to keep coming up with brand new things all the time. You don't have to keep recreating the wheel, but you can just be super consistent at a few things and really make some traction in your business.

And one last thing is that you have to pay attention to your data. It doesn't lie. I saw a post over the weekend where somebody was disappointed with some results, and I was like, okay, let's go back to what happened. All these reasons why they didn't get the results they want. Let's go back to the facts. What are the facts? The facts are how much traffic did you get, what was your conversion rate, and what was your average order value, and compare that to your last year's results for this very same time period. And that's going to give you a big clue as to where you drop the ball. And so don't forget, use your data if you want more opt-ins, set yourself up a spreadsheet and track it every week because that'll make sure that it happens. You don't want to be like, oh, what's my feeling? It might not be working. You'll have the physical proof. Absolutely.

Yeah. What I love about Susan and I is that if you love listening to one of us, you're going to love listening to both of us because you've seen a little bit of it today on this episode, but we teach actionable strategies that you can implement in your business all the time. So if you've not listened to my podcast before, you can go find that. It's called the Launcher Box Podcast. I'm bringing you real marketing strategies for your subscription box business, but also your e-commerce business, because I have both. Susan's the same way. Every week she produces content that's actionable and strategic, and you can find her on the E-Commerce Roadmap Podcast. So just go subscribe to both of our podcasts. When you need a little inspiration, when you need a little motivation, when you need a little tactic to keep you going for the month, you can tune in to, tune in to either one of us or both of us, and we'll give you something to keep going.

Um, and we'll give it to them in the show notes. They'll be able to see.

Yeah, absolutely.

We should do this more often.

We should do that. We should make this like a regular— the Susan and Sarah Show once a quarter or something, because we get to see We do.

And we store it all up here, but if we don't share it, it's not, it doesn't, it's not as helpful. So we should do it more often for sure. Anyway, good to see you again, my friend.

Good to see you. Thanks for listening, everybody. We'll be back on our podcast with another great episode next week. Make sure you subscribe to the Launch Your Box podcast. I'd love for you to take a minute to rate and review it. Let me know which episode is your favorite so far. Far. Don't forget to join me next week right here.