176: 4 Ways to Liquidate Inventory before Year-End

Are you sitting on extra inventory as we near the end of the year?

Today, we're going to dive into why liquidating that stock is critical and how to turn it into cash while clearing space for growth.

Come join me.

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.

When I do mystery boxes, I'm not looking for a bunch of profit here. I'm looking to get my money back on the products that I put in these boxes, give a great value, and just get this stuff off my shelf. I'm not looking to make a lot of money, so I want you to think about that when you put these together. This is not a profit gain, this is a liquidation tactic that doesn't have the word clearance in in it. Okay, so here's your action steps for the mystery boxes. I want you to decide on the number of items you're going to put in this box and really the value of these boxes. And remember, you can do a couple different, you know, levels. You could have a higher level at $100, $150, whatever you want, and then some lower levels like $50 or $75. You can do some of each price point there. And then you're really going to set up a plan for this. I want you to tease it out that these are coming. If you can do some buildup with this, they're going to sell really quickly. And that way you can get rid of them. You don't have to do ads with this. This is going to be your existing audience. I want you to do social media posts. I want you to do video of maybe you packing them and kind of hinting at maybe a popular item that could be in a lot of these boxes and make sure that you create that limited quantity, urgency, and exclusivity with this. Emails, social posts, some short videos, some reels, packing, even doing a live announcing that they're on sale. But I want you to do some buildup before this so that they know they're coming and they could come snag them and then they're gone. They're out of your space. You've got money back in your bank account and you don't have to look at this product anymore. Now let's go into liquidation tactic number 4. This is the last one, and I want you to create some social media sales events. And what I'm really talking about is live selling. Social media is one of your best friends when it comes to liquidating inventory quickly. And so when you can host a live selling event, it's great for showcasing your products in real time. They're interactive with who's watching. I want you to be engaging and I want you to really drive those impulse purchases as this is what you have. I only have 3 available. Grab them now, show the product, give them ways to use it, show the value and the deal that you're doing. This is really a great idea. You could also do this in stories, in reels, highlight the items that you're liquidating, pair them with some like countdown stickers in your stories and reels and links to buy. What you want to do, you could pair this with a flash sale, you could pair this with a mystery box, or you could just do a year-end liquidation blowout. We could call ours like I could do this with our warehouse end-of-year warehouse event. I could do this on December 31st. I could go live walking through the shelves, showing the product that's on clearance, showing how much we have, dropping the links as people are chatting and really engaging. We could also, during this liquidation event, we could pack orders as they're coming through. I've done this before and it's been really fun. You can give some free gifts with orders over $100 and you can do that while you're live. You know, like, oh, I see Susie from Montana bought $120 worth of our liquidation items. Let me grab these earrings right here and give them as a free gift to Susie. And Susie might be watching. This builds excitement. This also builds some FOMO. And so you could even do like a fun, like, clear out the warehouse hashtag on all your posts and stories to really build some hype with this. But this would be a fun way to liquidate a lot of things. It's the perfect time of year for people to I want to see this from you. You could do this online, you could do this in store, however you want to do it. But I want you to make this happen for yourself. Here's your action steps for this strategy. Okay, number 1, pick a day and time. Like, let's get it on the calendar. I'm going to do this December 31st. I'm going to go live and I'm going to just promote the heck out of it up until that point. Like after Christmas, I'm going to say year-end warehouse liquidation sale happening December 31st, and I'm going to count it down 2 more days, 1 more day until this. So we're going to create that excitement and that buildup before the event. During the event, I'm going to walk the shelves. It's different than what they see me do live. They see me in front of mannequins and nice displays. This time it's gritty. I'm in the warehouse, I'm on the shelves. It's something different. I'm going to show the products. I'm gonna explain different ways to use them. I'm gonna emphasize the deal of this product, and I'm gonna keep it light and casual and fun. And I'm just gonna connect with my audience while moving around in the warehouse and moving some inventory. So that's your action steps for doing a social media sales event. But it can really help you clear the shelves, and it can happen in one day. It's not something that you have to like plan a launch around. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go through my online inventory. I'm going to pick the products that are going to be part of the liquidation sale. I'm going to have my, you know, staff pull them together so they don't have to walk all over the dang warehouse. And we're just going to have fun with it. We're going to create some excitement and buzz with it. What I want you to think about, we talked through 4 of these strategies at this point. We talked about doing flash sales. We've talked about bundling older products together with newer products. We talked about doing mystery boxes, and now we're talking about doing a live sales event. But with each of these strategies, they need a marketing campaign to be the most effective. And what I mean by that, there's some simple things that you can do. We can't just say we're going to do them and just show up and do them. We have to build some hype. We have to make sure we're marketing so people see that we're doing this. So one of the things that we can do for every one of these promotions is change out our homepage hero image, that image across the top. Right now it might be like year round, it might be focused on subscription boxes. Let's change it out to the flash sale. Let's change it out to mystery boxes. Let's change it out to our live sales event when these are happening. So then when people land on your website, they're going to see that there's something special going on. Okay. I also want you to put a little banner at the top of your website on all the product pages, like mystery boxes on sale now, and put a link to so they can just see that and click and go over and they don't have to search for it. But hero image on the homepage, website banner on your product pages. Next, I want you to set up an email campaign for each one of these strategies. Creating urgency and sending out emails, multiple emails. Emailing them one time is not enough. Number 3, I want you to do a live announcement and dedicated social media posts. So if I'm doing a flash sale, I'm going live. Everything I talk about on my page during that flash sale is all about the flash sale. Don't mix it up with other things. This is dedicated, urgent, 24, 48, 72 hours, whatever you put around it. Make sure your social media, all your social media posts really coincide with that. Be intentional about what you're posting during that 72-hour window so that you can bring the most traffic and the most awareness about what you're doing. And then number 4, if you want to do ads, do some ads, but you don't have to because we're really hitting our most loyal, dedicated customers with this. If you wanna do some short-term ads, boost some posts, things like that, you can, but you really don't need it. When you have an engaged audience. So I just want you to have fun with this and make sure we put it out there in as many ways as possible. Don't sit on unnecessary inventory when you have the ability to liquidate it before the year ends. People are in buying mode right now. Don't drag your old stock into the new year.

Thanks for joining us on the Launch Your Box podcast. If you're looking to grow your audience, head over to launchyourbox.com and grab the 10 Steps to Help You Start Building Your Audience guide. It's packed with practical tips to help you connect with your future subscribers. Until next time, keep launching and growing on your subscription box journey.