5 Profit-Driving Strategies for Q4

Morning, good morning, happy Monday. Today we're going to talk about 5 profit-driven strategies for Q4, and I've got the word profit in there because it's not sales-driven strategies, it's profit-driven strategies. And we're going to talk about why that is, why we're talking about that today. I would love to say hi to you. Let me know that you're here. I think I just sent out the text, but you know, it's probably still delivering. So if you want to get on the text list, let me find the little banner to get the text. We're still using text. We're going to transition over to our broadcast channel very soon. But if you want to get the text on Monday mornings, all you have to do is text the word Monday to 940-200-2000. 204-0023. I'll just send you a quick little text reminder every time on Monday mornings before I go live. That just makes sure that I'm not sending that text to anybody that doesn't want to be bothered on Monday morning, early in the morning, because West Coast, it's, it's 7 o'clock there. So I just want to make sure I'm mindful of that. And when I start texting you, so good morning, everybody. Good morning, Wanda. Good morning, Christina. Good to see you there. I'm live on Facebook. And YouTube at the moment. So let me know that you're watching. Here's what we're going to talk about. We're talking about the profit strategies. Now, I was thinking about what, what should, what could I do to help them build momentum in their business today? And I was thinking about we're already smack dab into Q4 and how can I help them understand that sales is a vanity number. Whatever sales we do in Q4, that is strictly a vanity number. What I want you to shift your focus on is how to drive profit in Q4, okay? So when we think like, oh, I did this amount of sales, did this amount of sales, did this amount of sales, right? Um, that's a vanity number. It's like followers, that's a vanity number. And so I want you to really, when you're planning these promotions, and if you've already planned them, great, as you should, I want you to go back and I want you to think about profit when you look at them. And I've got 5 strategies that will help you take a look at that today. And you can totally pivot, you can totally refine your offer, you can totally add to your offer, but I just want you thinking about profit versus sales as we go into Q4. Because profit leads to longevity. Profit means my business is going to be here long term. Profit means that I have cash flow. Profit means that I can pay my bills, right? So that's what I want you to think about. We are so sales, sales, sales driven, um, in our industry, in our world, that it's all about how much sales did you get. Um, and you know, the, the honestly, the, the thing about it is, is that, you know, I network with some very large subscription box owners. And when we have deep one-on-one conversations, what's interesting to find out is how low their profit margin really is because they are focused on quantity. And for me, that's very different. I focus on the quality and the person and the profit margin to be profitable. Like, there's not a break-even point for my subscription. Like, I don't have to have X number of subscribers to break even. I'm profitable with that one subscriber. I'm profitable on month one. And so I don't want to get you, I don't want you to get caught up in this vanity number of sales. I want you to really think strategically about profit. Sarah, let me tell you what has happened with the feed. So I realized a couple weeks ago that when I schedule Monday Momentum, it creates an event inside Facebook, and therefore I'm only live in the event and it never puts it in the feed. So that's what was happening. But if I just go live without pre-scheduling it, I'm right in your feed. So that's what we're doing from now on. I'm gonna go live right in your feed so you won't see it pre-scheduled. Scheduled. You'll just have to come find me after I send you the text. Okay, um, so let's start with number 1. Number 1 is full-priced products. Okay, so we live in this discount world, right? Especially as we go into Q4. Everyone's got sales, everyone's got 40% off, everyone's got buy one get one free. Every— everything is like discount, discount, discount. So what I want you to think about is let's not get caught up in the discounts and let's focus on some different things. And we're going to give some discounts, but I'm going to talk about that in a minute. Let's talk about full-priced promotions. So right now, just dropped some new fall, a new fall collection, and I dropped a new, new t-shirt last week. It's, it's all gravy, baby. No, there's no discounts. This is a full-priced product. It's a little wonky because I was wearing it for pictures. Um, let me fix it. Full-price product. I'm not discounting everything. Like, we've got to stop discounting everything. And so what I— when I want you to think about what are your best sellers right now, what have been your best sellers in the past. So I love to go back and look at, say, October 2024. What did I sell the most of? I can go look at that in Shopify and I can go see what I've sold the most of. Okay, let me produce some more of that. Was it sweatshirts? Was it hoodies? Was it long sleeve tees? Was it fall driven? Was it Christmas driven? Like, what was I selling at this time last year and how can I drop some new stuff at full price? So that's the thing I want you to think of. And they're limited edition. This is a limited time only. You can get this shirt, it's not here forever. And so we have to do limited stock Early access, no restock. Like, we have to create urgency around our full-price products, um, so we need to do that with the products that people already love. That's why I want you to think about your best sellers. What are your best sellers in your shop? How can we highlight them more? How can we get them on social media? How can we make sure we're sending an email about those? Um, those are our full-price products, and we need that profitability right now. So I want you to keep pushing that, and I want you to think about what can you create in a full price promotion right now where we're not giving a discount. That's going to help your bottom line tremendously. Okay, so number 1 is your full price promotions. That's, that's strategy number 1. Strategy number 2 is to add strategic upsells. Okay, I'm going to show you— let me share my screen real quick. I'm going to show you this shirt. Which we sold a ton of since Thursday, and on the shirt, on the website, we've strategically, it's not discount, it's $32 for a t-shirt, yep, all day every day, I'll sell 'em all day every day at full price, even though my t-shirt club is $20 a month, do you see, like, this is a full price promotion, and then what we have is an upsell, Every product that we highlight, every product that I do a live on, we send an email about, we post on social media for the day, we strategically have an upsell on it. And so here are the earrings, and we've sold so many pair of these earrings with this product. What would be even better is if I had the earrings on with this. This is a mock-up, but I think I have a picture of me in the earrings, so we just need to add it to this um, to this product. But we need an upsell because these $18 earrings, they only cost me $3. I have a huge profit margin not only on the shirt but on this $18 upsell. If I'm already buying a $32 shirt, it's likely that I'm going to put the $18 earrings in my cart too. And so this has been sold together quite a bit. And there's an app that we use and I'm gonna show that to you. Let me go over here, share this tab. So this is the app that we use. It's called Frequently Bought Together. And go ahead and write down CBB. It's like this mustardy color because there's several of these with different letters at the end, which I've realized. This is the one that we use. And so it's Frequently Bought Together. You can have them just automatically put upsells. We do manual bundles. I wanna pick what's going with something. I don't want them to just figure that out. So I go in here and I manually bundle that together. But this is the app that we have in Shopify that allows us to put an upsell right on every product from the shop. So we need to add strategic upsells sales because, um, it's kind of like how they put like ketchup and mustard next to the hot dogs at the grocery store. Like, you might need the condiments, right? Um, and so they're help— it's, it's like a convenience factor. Let me go ahead and put the ketchup next to the hot dogs. You might be running low, it might not be something you thought about. For me, my mustard's always expired because I don't use enough of it. I need a fresh mustard. Um, and so That is what we're doing here. Let me go ahead and add the cardigan. Let me go ahead and add the earrings. Let me go ahead and add a bracelet that matches this t-shirt so that you're more likely to purchase that because you see it matches. Um, so we need to add strategic upsells. It's going to increase your AOV, it's going to increase your profitability. I told you what my profit margin is on those earrings. Um, so it's a full price shirt and a full price pair of earrings, and so that's going to create a lot of profit margin in my business. So I want you to think about strategic upsells, and you don't have to go through your whole shop and do that. But if I'm scheduling my social media for this week and I know I'm going to promote like whatever products, go in and add an upsell to them. You'll be surprised what you see when people check out. And there is also a tag when people check out that they clicked on the Frequently Bought Together item. So you can see it working for you. Okay, so number 1, full price promotions. Number 2, strategic, add strategic upsells. Okay, number 3, we're gonna do profit smart sales promos. Buy one, get one, half off of this. We're gonna see it nonstop for the next 2 months. I want you to do that if you can afford to do that. So what I like to do— I'm almost over this cough, almost. I'm on week 3 of this dang cough. What I want you to do is I want you to look for deals on from your vendors that you can then give a deal on. Okay, so like we did $20 purses last week and they've been in my shop, um, so I needed to kind of liquidate them, but I bought them during a deal from one of my vendors and I paid $8 for them. It was a deal. It was, you know, vendors have Black Friday deals, they have Q4 deals, they have specials going on, so always look for those. So I got these purses at $8 and last week I sold them on $20 Tuesday for $20, but do you see I still have more than 50% profit on them because I got them for $8? And my audience got a deal because this purse is really a $35 purse. If I were to buy it full price from the vendor, it would have cost me $16. They had a deal, so I got a deal, so I was able to give a deal, and now I'm still profitable on my sales promos. So when you think about what you're going to discount over the next 2 months, I want you to think about how you can get, um, how you can get a deal from your vendors so that you can give a deal and still be profitable. Think about— there's, there's different promos. There's stuff on our shelves we need to liquidate, and we're going to do that. And I don't care what your profit margin is on that. We need to liquidate that. We need to get that cash in our bank. But when we're buying things for a special promotion, make sure you still get a 50% off— you still have a 50% profit, even if it's a deal. Okay, so don't just buy things at full price to discount them to make 10%. I don't want you doing that. That doesn't serve us in any way possible. It's going to cost you way more in energy, time, labor than that 10% is ever going to pay you. And that's not smart. It's not about your sales numbers if you don't have any profit in the bank to show for it. So what I want you to do is I want you to think about how can I get some deals from my vendor so I can turn around and do a profit-smart sales promo and still get a 50% profit margin for myself. All right, number 3, profit smart sales promos. Okay, number 4, I want you to do some smart bundling to increase your average order value. And what I mean, like, you probably see this on my page often, but I do bundles and I do a smart bundling. I'll take a slow seller, um, that I want to get off my shelf, and I will combine it with a high margin item or two. And so I've got margin in a couple of the items, I've got a slow seller, and when I bundle it together, I'm still profitable. All right, so I want you to do some smart bundling. A lot of my bundles are $39 or $49 or $59. Um, but I want those to be profitable for you too. So take something that's a slow seller, pair it with something that has high margin so that you're building profit into your items, and then I want you to make it giftable. Okay, so a cozy night in, a holiday bundle, like whatever. I want you to make it giftable because that's where people are at. We're going to be, we're going to be selling gifts. Right now, people are still buying for them. So if you're selling right now, sell to your person. And then we're going to make the shift in November to start selling for people on people's lists. So right now, I want you to continue to sell to your person. And then next month, I want you to sell to your person who your person has to buy for. Does that make sense? We're still— even Black Friday, we're still buying for ourselves. How many times have you seen Black Friday deals and you're like, oh, I gotta have one of those, oh, I need those? We still buy for ourselves up until Black Friday, and then it really completely shifts from Black Friday through December. People are now buying from someone else. Okay, Julie, so you're vend— like, vendors, your vendors that you're using. So who are you using to fill your box? Products with, who are you using to buy products for your store. Every vendor that I've ever known has a sale tab on their wholesale site. So, and if not, ask them, hey, do you have a sales section? Do you have a list I can look through? Um, every vendor that you use for your business has markdowns just like you. So that's where I want you to look for. It's not like a specific place that I go and look for markdown products. It's with the vendors that I use all year round. So whatever you're using for your boxes, whatever you're using for your shop, whatever you're using to buy products, they typically have sales products. They have products that they want to liquidate and get out so they can get their cash back just the same way that we do. All right, number 4, smart bundling to increase your AOV. And remember, you're really providing convenience. You're really providing The fact that this all goes together in a bundle, it's highly giftable. Not just products, you're providing convenience for them. Giftable convenience. Think about that. Number 5, this is probably the most important of all of these. Number 5, I want you to tap into your repeat buyers. For many of us that have subscriptions already, these are your subscribers. If you haven't launched your subscription box yet, this is gonna be the customer that, that has bought from you before. So tap into your repeat buyers. Your customers, your current customers are your most profitable audience because a lot of times we don't have to advertise to them. We just have to email them. We just have to send post on social media. We just have to send a text or throw it in our broadcast channel. But this could be something like early access just for you. When our customers feel special, they are more likely to buy. So when they get early access, when they get holiday perks because they're on our email list or they're a subscriber of ours, this is our most profitable audience because all we have to do is send an email. So I want you to tap into that early access because you're on my email list, early access because you're a subscriber. But I want you to set up email campaigns that go out to your list and your current buyers are going to be the ones that pick up from that. Tap into that. Tap into if you already have subscribers, hey subscribers, you get first dibs. Hey subscribers, you're the VIP in my business, we're gonna sell holiday gift boxes tomorrow, but I'm gonna let you shop 24 hours early. Hey subscribers, we're gonna do a better than Black Friday sale, but I'm gonna give you 24 hours early access to shop first before everyone else. If you make them feel special, they're gonna buy. They're gonna be like, oh, this is exciting, I've got perks here. And so I want you to tap into those repeat buyers. Whether it's just a customer that's repeat buying and you can segment that in Klaviyo, someone that has bought from you in the last 60, 90 days, segment that out in Klaviyo and send them early access. Or if you've got subscribers, go ahead and segment out all your subscribers and say, hey subscribers, because you're a subscriber, you get early access, or set up an early access list. We do that. Let me show you. I didn't have this pulled up, but we do that every year and we encourage people to get on the early access list. Right now we're doing it because we're going to drop our holiday gift boxes this week, but it's another way to build your email list. And it's just, it's, it's just like a waitlist page, but you're just saying if you join this, I'll give you early access. I'm going to show you mine really quickly. Share screen. So I'm promoting, hey, get on the list right now. And this is the page, super simple. It's a page of me with some of our— a stack of our gift boxes. And it says, join our early access list and be the first to know and the first to buy when we dropped holiday boxes, better than Black Friday deals, 12 Days of Deals, and more. It means you have 24 hours to buy before anyone else. And so all they have to do is give me their name. There's nothing else on this page. This is the entire page. You don't have to overdo it. We just have to collect them. And then you're building your list, you're creating excitement. And when you email them, they're going to be the people that are going to be buying because they know they have early access. Okay, so let's recap today. Number 1, promote full price bestsellers. Number 2, we want to have add-ons and upsells to our products that we're talking about. So any— and just take it day by day. Okay, what am I promoting today? Okay, maybe this purple shirt. Let's add these purple earrings to it. What am I promoting today that I could do an add-on for? Okay, Stephanie says, I never gave my email so fast when this dropped in my inbox. I emailed yesterday saying y'all better get on the early access list because you are going to want to be first to know when my holiday boxes drop on Thursday. I'm not running an ad to this. The only place that we're promoting this, Wanda, is in my broadcast channel. And I can, I can show you guys that in Launch Your Box if you would like me to. And then I am, I did it in my Sunday hot mess email yesterday. I do a personal email on Sundays and then we're gonna be posting it on social media, I think starting today and we'll be posting it several times this week. And then even after this first promotion's over, we'll promote it again before we launch the next holiday promotion. So every time we talk about what's coming up, we build that excitement, then we wanna drop the link for the list. Okay, um, okay, promote full price bestsellers, add upsells, run profitable sales promotions, create smart bundles, and market— tap into those repeat buyers. That's your strategies. I don't want you being so proud of all the sales you got for Q4 without thinking about your profitability. Okay, and Nikki, it's easy. Here's the thing, there's no super secret website for them to shop at. In all reality, the website's open once we send it out to our early access. Nobody has links, so you could go find it on My Website Wednesday if you knew about it. But if you're on the early access, I'm going to send you a link because here's the thing, we just want to sell the things, right? So I'm not, I'm not creating this login or weird access or anything. Um, I'm just giving them, hey, it's live, you've got 24 hours before I go live tomorrow and send the email to everyone. So that's what it is. Just make it simple. Uh, Wanda, it's for Framed. My personal email is for Framed, um, and so that's what I send out every Sunday for Framed. It's called my hot mess email. It's not a Launch Your Box email, it's for my retail business. All right, that's what I got for you today. Um, let's make plans to be profitable for Q4. And if you're not set for Q4, we still have time. There's still time to put some promotions together, there's still time to get product, but I want you to be profitable while you're making your plans. All right, y'all have a great day. I'll see you soon. Bye, guys.