156: Is Your Business Too Vulnerable?

What would you do if you lost social media for a day, a week, a month, or even permanently? Let's assess how vulnerable our businesses really are and make sure we take action towards a strong, healthy marketing channel that makes 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. Today we're going to talk about something that I really want 10:00 AM, Facebook goes down. Now, I didn't realize that Facebook was even down because I was working on other things, and then all of a sudden my phone starts going off. It's my team members I can't get logged into Facebook. I don't know what's going on. Then I see a Voxer chat from my mastermind students panicking because they need to go live, they need to do their Facebooks. And I had just gone live. I'd just gone live on my retail page with some new arrivals. I was like, Facebook is fine. I was just live like 10 minutes ago. And so I didn't think anything was up. And then as more and more messages were starting to come in, I start to turn to the internet to see what's happening, and I'm like, okay, Facebook is down. Facebook and Instagram is down. Meta was down. And so for me, I never like panic in these situations because they're big enough companies that, hey, they'll be up soon. Y'all go— I sent a message. I knew my students. I knew my students were probably panicking. They, they think they got locked out of Facebook if they're working on there. They're not understanding what's happening. So I immediately sent a text out to all my students and I said, Meta is down across the world. It's logging you out. Don't panic. It will resolve itself soon. It's not just you. It's all of us. Go be productive in real life. And that's what I sent out because I need my students to not be spinning around trying to figure out why they can't get logged on Facebook for the next hour, panicking that they're locked out, someone's hacked their account. So I knew what their reactions were going to be. And so I sent that out. I got hundreds of responses back on my texting platform that said, oh, thank goodness. Thanks for letting me know. I was panicked. Some were like, I didn't even know this was happening. But it got me thinking. This situation got me thinking. We were only down for about an hour, but it got me thinking, what if Meta was down for the day? What if it was down for the week or even the month? What if social media suddenly went away for good? What if we lost Facebook and Instagram for good and it couldn't be recovered and all of us had to start over? Do we have systems in place to reach our audience? So I want to talk about how vulnerable your business is because there will be more social media outages. There will be. What happens if we lose social media? What happens if we lose a platform? and I want to make sure that you have a healthy business that is not solely reliant on one marketing channel. So that's what we're going to talk about today, just so that you can assess where your business is. And what if worst-case scenario happened? What if we lost that? Affect your business. And I want you to think about that right now, honestly. How would it affect your business if we lost Meta for the day? A day probably is not going to make and break you. A week, if you went a week with no Meta, what would that do for you? What if it was an entire month? What if it went away, we couldn't get it back, and we all had to start over on new platforms? How would we operate? So let's go over 3 things that's going to help us prepare the health another platform. It could be anything. So how do we make sure that we don't go through storms? If you are only on Meta, so if you only are on Facebook, where would you post? Where would you talk to your audience? How would you show up? So let's make sure we're on something else, because we don't want to put all of our eggs in one. Don't get me wrong, I still believe social media is one of the best places that we can market and grow our businesses. I love social media. I don't— a lot of people think negatively of social media because we feel like it's a hassle. That's why we think negative. We're like, I gotta go post, I gotta go do this, I gotta do this. We didn't have those opportunities. The ability to target our perfect person before social media. So I don't want you to look a gift horse in the mouth here, and I really need you to understand that our businesses are thriving and growing rapidly because of social media. So we have to put our eggs in different baskets. If we're only on Facebook and Instagram right now, that's a problem. We need to be diversified, so we gotta get on something else. Maybe that's TikTok, maybe that's YouTube, maybe that's Twitter, maybe that's Pinterest. Whatever that other platform is that is not owned by Meta, that's what we need to do. And we need to be actively building that following. We can't just say, oh, I set up my account on TikTok. I never post on TikTok because if things go south with Meta again, we have to make sure our audience is over there. So we have to be actively building a following on another platform that is not owned by the same company. So I want you to think about the diversification of the platforms you're on. If you're only on Facebook and Instagram, let's get a third platform. If you have a platform outside of Meta, what are we actively doing to build that following? It's not good enough just to have it. We got to get our people over there. Okay, so that's number one. I want you to be diversified in your platforms. Number two, your email list. How easy is it to send an email? When we've been building our list year-round. But the problem is, what I see, especially from our newer entrepreneurs, is that we don't understand the power of our email lists, and so we aren't actively building our list year-round. As a business owner right now, in this economy, in this world, you should be actively building your email list every single month. What I mean by that— I'm going to give you some different ways that you should be building your list. If you can sit here, and I'm going to go through 10 ways to be building your list, and I want you to check them off. Yep, I'm doing that. Yep, I'm doing that. If you're not doing these things, or maybe you're only doing one or and you're not doing anything, you're vulnerable. You're way too vulnerable. We need to be actively building an email list every single month of the entire year, and we're going to talk about 10 different ways. So I want you to think right now, just take a minute. What am I doing to build my email list right now? And if you don't know the answer to that, then we got work to do. Okay, so let's talk through 10 ways that you can build your email list. Number 1, add a pop-up to your website. You've got to have a pop-up on your site where you can be capturing email lists at all times. Number 2, create an opt-in on your website with a way to serve your audience. Give them more information about something. Maybe it's a box opening with a freebie. Maybe it's additional information like a style guide or a free printable to go with your home decor box, a checklist to go with the beach theme box, tips for caring for your pet with your pet box. Think about the industry you're in and what you can provide to serve your audience and create an opt-in, create a landing page, and get that on your website. Okay, number 2, run a giveaway. Great way to build your list, especially when you're new and quarterly list building as you are a more seasoned box owner, running a giveaway is constantly going to fill your list. Number 4, post a lead magnet on social media. So a lead magnet could be that opt-in that we talked about in number 2. It could be a free printable to go with your home decor box. So I can post that on social media, I can run ads to that, and everyone that's interested in that printable is going to go and get that freebie from my website and they're going to give me their email address. So post that lead magnet on social media and run ads to it. Pull— it's like there's so many ways to do that. Okay, number 5, this is super easy, and if you don't have this one done, you can do it today. But you need to add an email opt-in at checkout. You know those little boxes that check to say, would you like to be added to our email list? We have be on your email list. Number 6, create a fun quiz that requires an email address to get the results. Make it something that your audience really wants to share, like something fun and entertainment. It doesn't always have to be serious, so think about how you can create a fun quiz. Number 7, offer a discount or a free gift. Use this carefully. To prevent training people to only shop with you when you have a sale or discount. But we see this all the time. I was at HomeGoods. I don't know where I was at. I was at one of those stores and I saw this sign out of the corner of my eye. It says, get 15% off your first order by joining our email list. You know what I did? I went over to their website, I joined their email list, and I got my coupon. I bought my things and I checked out. Now I'm on their list. Now I'm getting regular emails from them. So offer a discount or a free gift. Number 8, host an event or a workshop. A free or low-dollar offer works great, especially if you're like in the DIY space or crafting. Think about this, when I offer Coaching Week, it's a low-dollar offer and all of those people are opting in to get my emails at that point. So when you host a workshop, a bootcamp, some kind of free or low-dollar offer, you're going to build your list that way too. Number 9, tease sneak peeks or get exclusive behind-the-scenes content with an opt-in. So you could put like a sneak peek and it's all blurred out, and you could have them drop your email to get to reveal the sneak peek of the next box. It really is fun and it creates a sense of exclusivity. So you could do that for opt-ins as well. And number 10, get in front of new audiences. Collaborate with other brands, businesses, influencers maybe who have the same customer but sell different for a joint giveaway or a way to serve each other's audience, and you create this pool of people opting in. I have a group in my mastermind and they do this thing called Jingle and Mingle, and they opt in and they share that email list, and everyone knows that they're opting in for this group. But these are 10 ways that you can build your email list. Add a pop-up, magnet on social media and run ads to it. Add an email opt-in at checkout. Create a fun quiz that requires an email opt-in. Offer a discount or free gift. Host an event or a workshop. Tease sneak peeks or exclusive behind-the-scenes content. And number 10, get in front of new audiences. So I hope that helps you. Maybe you felt stuck in a way of trying to build that list and you're not sure what you should be doing, you could do any one of these, but the key is doing it all year round. So you could do one for a couple months, do something else. Like, you want to be list building all year round. Do not stop. Never stop audience building. Never stop list building. It should always be in your business as something that you are regularly doing, just as if you were packing subscription boxes every month, you should be list building every month. So don't stop doing that. All right, so we talked about diversifying your platforms, we talked about constantly growing your email list, and number 3, text messages and SMS. Because I had thousands of my audience members on a text list, I was able to reach them immediately, and that's powerful. So I was able to reach my students immediately So that was something that I could do, but I could also sell to my audience through text messages and SMS. If Facebook or Instagram was down for longer than a day, or longer than an hour, like if it was half the day or longer, I probably would have sent out a text to my framed list and said, "Missing social media? Don't worry, here's a discount code to go shop on my website," or, "Here's a free gift with your purchase of $100 or more today in my shop." I could use it to my advantage because I have the text list. I could text it out. I could also email that out if I wanted to. The great thing with Klaviyo is using it as an email CRM is that it also has built-in SMS list, you could build your SMS text list with it as well. So because if we lost social media for any period of time, we want to make sure we're diversified. We want to make sure we have a strong, healthy email list. And another way to do that, I'm sending them a heads up. But you know what I got? I got— I gave them reassurance that everything was okay. Stop spinning your wheels and just go do something productive and it'll be back up soon. And if it's not, I had a way to communicate with them. Hey, it looks like Facebook is going to be down for a little bit longer. How are we going to, how are we going to work this? And I would have given them these tips. Go get on TikTok, go get on YouTube, send out an email. Let's drive sales and interaction in another way. And I would be able to communicate that to them and help them through whatever this time period looked like because I had access to them. I had access to them on texting, I had access to, didn't even know because it was such a short window. But it opens our eyes to the weaknesses to build your business to weather whatever storm comes our way. We saw— don't forget to join me next week right here.