Maximize Your 4th Quarter Sales

The fourth quarter is coming. Are you ready? Do you have a plan to maximize your sales over the busiest shopping season of the year? I've got 5 ways to help you with that. 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.

Okay, okay, okay. Now that I've stressed you out with my intro, we're going to talk about 5 different ways that you can maximize your fourth quarter sales. And I know it feels stressful. It feels stressful because there's a lot happening in the fourth quarter, especially if you're a gift-based business like myself. There's a lot of things going on. There's a lot of potential for extra sales, extra chaos, extra craziness. But what we can do now is really put together a plan that will help you capitalize on additional sales over the next several months. What we are talking about is maximizing the value of your already existing audience and your subscriber base. So if you have a subscription box already, you've been building your audience, you've been collecting people, you've been loving on your people. And what you're going to do now is you're going to give them more stuff. They want more. They want to buy more from you. It's not just about their October, November, and December boxes, but how can you help them them give gifts this season? How can you provide convenience for them? And really, how can you generate some extra sales during the fourth quarter? So there's really 5 ways that you can do this. And this Christmas will be my 5th Christmas as a subscription box owner, and I've tested and tried every single thing you can imagine, some with a lot of success some with not so much success. So really what I put here together for you today is 5 different ways that I've been successful at generating additional sales over October, November, and December each year. So the first one we're going to talk about is a holiday gift box, and I recommend this at any stage that you're on. So maybe you're listening and you haven't even started your box yet, and so you're like, well, I haven't even started my box. Doing a holiday gift box is one of the first things you can do. It's going to test your audience, it's going to give you some proof of concept. It's really the first hurdle and hump to getting your subscription box going. So if you haven't started your box, I highly recommend that you start with a holiday gift box. Now, if you've already started your subscription box, this is yet another box that you can add to your lineup to generate some extra sales over the next several months. So this is a one-time box. This is not a subscription box. This is a box that someone will gift or someone will buy for themselves. It needs to be different than your December box. So your December box is for your subscribers. This box needs to be different than what's in that box because a lot of your subscribers are going to buy this box as well. So you want to create something different, but you want to keep it similar to what your subscription box is, because the goal here is not only to to gain extra sales. So you're not only having your subscriber base buy this for themselves, they may be buying it for other people. But you want to make sure that if somebody gets this as a gift, there's an opportunity to convert them into a subscriber. So you want to have this box align with all the things that you do on a monthly basis for your own subscribers. I like to price this box very similar to my subscription box. So that it's kind of the same price, it's the same type of items, it's really the same feel as if they were going to be a subscriber for you. So it's a great way to get some new interest into your box. It's also a great way for your current subscriber base who already knows, likes, and trusts you to gift something. They know it's going to be great if they're a subscriber with you and they have been for any amount of time. They know that what you're going to give them is awesome. So they want to gift it to other people. You're creating convenience, you're creating value, you're creating experience, but you're also generating more revenue for yourself and your business. So number one, I want you to create a holiday gift box. Now I like to pre-sell these because as the hustle and the bustle of the fourth quarter comes, I want to make sure that we are on top of this gift box. Because if you're sitting here like me and you know, okay, I've got X amount of subscribers, I got to get a November box out. I've got to get a December box out. Where is this other box gonna, gonna fall? Usually I ship it out at the beginning of December, so I don't want to have to do my subscription box and my— and this gift box really back to back. That's going to really exhaust my resources. So what I like to do is I like to pre-sell these boxes at the end of October or beginning of November. So they go to my following, they go to my current subscribers. I do a huge campaign on pre-selling these boxes. This is my 5th year that I've done these boxes, so my subscriber base knows to expect them. They're looking for them. But so you've got to get the word out there that you're doing this if this is the first time you're doing it or you're new, you're new business. So we, we want to do emails, we want to treat it like a launch. Something's coming, big announcement, do a live, do social media posts, send an email. All those things that you would do to launch your subscription box, you want to do in the very same way to launch your holiday gift box. And what you can do if you're pre-selling them early enough, you can wait and see how many pre-sales you get to determine how many boxes you're going to put together. That's what I did my very first year. I ran a pre-sale in October. I figured out how many people signed up. I added like 30% more to that when I ordered the product. And then once the product got there, I sold the rest of them to what I had left based on the product that I ordered to everyone else. And the hook really here is if you pre-buy it, you're guaranteed to get one. I might not have many left in November or December, but if you grab it in October, you're guaranteed to get one. You'll have a gift, one for yourself— a lot of people buy them for themselves— or for someone else on your gift list. So that's number one, holiday gift box. A one-time box. I'm sure you can very easily put this together if you already have a subscription box. And if you haven't launched your box yet, this is the perfect time to get a box going and launch a holiday gift box. And then what you can do after the new year is you can launch your subscription box. Number 2, this would be a new subscriber launch, so a special promotion, an open cart. If you have a subscription box already You can really plan a big fall promotion to increase your subscriber base, and I, I call this a special promotion because you could offer a free gift. Sign up now, get a free gift in your first box. It could be something that goes along with that box. It could be something that would be similar to other things you have, but if you do some type of big promotion, I would do this in October or early November, because people are buying this for themselves. When they buy a subscription box, they're typically buying it for themselves. So when you get kind of mid-November into December, people shift their shopping habits. It's not about themselves anymore, but it's about the people that they want to buy gifts for. So if you're going to open your subscription box, um, you're going to open up the waitlist, or you're going to open cart, or you're going to add more subscribers, we need to do that promotion in October or early November. You want to get them excited. You want to go all in with this launch and let them know what the upcoming holiday boxes look like. What is, what is a sneak peek for November? What about a sneak peek for December? Get them locked and loaded before the major shopping events really start, like Black Friday. Cyber Monday, get it all done before all that happens. That's why I recommend October or early November to do a special subscription launch with a special promotion. So this would be adding new members into your existing subscription. Or if you're thinking of launching, launching your subscription for the very first time, again, put it in this timeframe because the further you push it down, it's there's so much noise happening. Like when we think about Black Friday, there's so much noise during Black Friday, it's going to get lost. People in December are not buying for themselves, they're buying for their gift list people. So get your subscription launched before mid-November if you're doing a new launch. All right, so number 1, we have the holiday gift box. Number 2, we're going to do a special promotion to add new subscribers in. Or number 3, gift subscriptions. So this is probably the easiest thing that you can do, and I love it because it is so easy. I do this promotion around Black Friday, and what I do is I take my t-shirt subscription and I offer a gift subscription. So this is the only time throughout the year that they can buy a 6-month or a 12-month gift subscription. It's special in that way. So what happens is you're just— you're, you're selling the gift that keeps on giving, right? So you're not going to fulfill this until January. That's why I tell you this is the easiest kind of promotion to do, because when you're in November, when you're in Black Friday, sometimes you can't even see the end of like your workload through Christmas. So this is an easy way to generate some sales sell some gifts without having to do the work in that moment. So this is the same box that your subscribers are going to get. So this is just a gift subscription, um, just like your monthly subscribers would get, but they're going to pay in full. So if I buy somebody a 6-month subscription, I'm paying for that 6 months up front. I typically give 2 options: a 6-month subscription or a 1-year subscription. And there's a little bonus in there for both of those subscription types. With a 6-month subscription, I give 1 free month. So it's buy 5 months, get 1 free. Buy 10 months, get 2 free. And you might be saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, Sarah, I can't give my stuff away for free. It's too expensive. And I want, I want you to consider your costs. Consider the cost of that, that box, not the value of the box. Say you have a $50 subscription box. We're not giving $50 away for free. Let's say your, your cost on this box is $25 or maybe even $30. If you are going to spend $30, you're going to give $30 away for free, what would you want in return? Here's what you're getting in return. You're not going to have to follow up on anyone's payment for the next 6 months. That involves customer service hours, that involves them maybe canceling in that time frame. You have all this money up front, which is going to help fund your subscription boxes going forward. There's a benefit and there's a trade-off when you're asking someone to pay in full up front. There needs to be a benefit for them to do that versus paying monthly. And I love to give a free box. It makes them feel good. It makes them excited about it. It's a no-brainer promotion. I don't have to spend a ton of money on ads for this kind of promotion because it is a no-brainer deal. So if someone buys a 6-month subscription, they're going to get one of those months free. And if someone buys a 12-month subscription gift subscription, they're going to get 2 of those for free. The best thing about it is all I have to create is a gift card, and this gift card will go to the person buying the subscription. They'll be able to wrap this gift certificate, they can put it on a tree, they can do whatever they want to give it to their gift recipient, but they're giving it to them on Christmas Day. So again, I just told you we don't have to ship a box out in November or December. Their subscription is going to start in January, so you can let the dust settle on everything. You're ramping up your subscriptions going into the new year, and you're going to ship them their very first box in the new year. So gift subscriptions are really easy to put together because you're not having to pack and ship anything until after the holidays. All right, so we talked about holiday gift boxes— those are the one-time boxes— doing a launch with a special promotion. We talked about easy gift subscriptions. I typically run those around Black Friday. And then our fourth way that we can maximize sales is curated boxes from excess inventory. So how many of you listening have extra inventory? If you're a subscription box owner at all, you have some extra inventory. It's just the nature of the beast. We get product, we don't always sell all the products, we order extra in case we have damages. I'm personalizing stuff, so sometimes I have— I automatically order extras just in case I have mess-ups. With initials and things. So there's always some kind of extra inventory just laying around from month to month with the different boxes. And one of the ways that I'm able to really clear through some of that old inventory is to curate some special boxes during the holidays. And, and, and it's not going to be like 100 of this or 200 of this or anything like that. It might be 4 of this and 5 of this and 3 of this. And I want you think about them as different product listings on your site, on your site. You can even create like a gift box collection page, or maybe it's a page just dedicated to gift boxes that they could send to someone. Someone could scroll through, they could look at different options, they could figure out which one fits their gift recipient best, purchase personalized— for me, personalized— and then we ship that to them. And what I love to do, instead of taking all the excess from, say, a July box and making that now a gift box, I mix and match pieces. So maybe I have 10 cups left over from my July box, and if I mix that with something from my March box or something from my August box, or maybe I buy something new to go with it, I'm going to mix and match. Different pieces from my old inventory, and I'm going to add new inventory to that. So I'm creating something new and special and different. It is not the exact same box that my subscribers got. I want to make it easy to gift. I'm going to add bows, I'm going to add a card, I'm going to repackage it. I'm going to create different price points too, because you know when you give gifts Somebody might get a $20 gift, somebody might need a $50 gift, somebody needs a $100 gift. You want to create different options. Let me give you just some scenarios here. So like last Christmas, I had journals left over from one box and I had pens left over from another box. I put a journal and the pen set together, I wrapped some tulle around it with a little gift tag that hung off of that tulle, and I sold them as teacher gifts, and I sold out of them. Within a few days. I also had a coffee mug that was left over from one of the boxes. I added some hot cocoa packets into that. So I just went to Costco and I bought those pre-packaged, like, Nestlé hot cocoa packets. I put them inside the coffee mug. I put that mug inside a little gift box. I tied a ribbon around the top. I sold those as little gift sets as well. I've taken random shirts in different sizes. I paired them with different accessories. Those would be a great gift for your mom. Those would be a great gift for your sister, maybe your BFF. Um, one year I had some extra blankets, so I bought some candles to go with them and sold them as a little gift set. So I took something I already had, I added something a little new, I packaged them in a way that's giftable. And I'm giving you examples of just 2 items in each one of these, but you could really curate a whole new box. With some different items that you have left over from previous boxes. So think, think about this. Get creative, get creative, make it fresh. You don't want to— what you don't want to do is say, oh, here's my leftover April subscription boxes, buy now. If I come to your site looking for a gift for Christmas and it says past April subscription box on it, I'm not buying it. Probably no matter what's in it, because it feels old and stale and leftover. Rename it. Rename it like, um, Fun Leopard Gift Set, or, you know, Comfy Cozy Blanket Set, whatever. Just rename them something else. Don't let them look stale on your website. Don't let them look like they're leftovers. These are new fun things that you've got packaged to gift and to sell to other people. All right, are you ready for number 5? Let's recap real quick. Number 1, holiday gift box, one-time box. Number 2, a new subscriber launch promotion. Number 3, gift subscriptions that you don't have to even pack until January. And number 4, curated boxes from leftover inventory. And number 5 goes right along with that leftover inventory, and these are mystery boxes. So each year after Christmas, I do a mystery box kind of liquidation. It's almost like that clearance sale. Like, do you know how, like, for me, I really never buy wrapping paper until after Christmas when it's like 75% off, and then I can— I go stock up on it for the next year. That's kind of what we're doing here. We're busy November and December. We're selling a whole bunch of things in November and December, and things that might have been sitting on your shelf for months months. But because people are buying, you really can sell anything in November and December. And so whatever is left, it's really time to liquidate it, especially if it's been on your shelves for 3 months or longer. That's, that's really my rule. It's been sitting here for 90 days, it's got to go after Christmas. So anything that's 90 days and older, we make a plan to liquidate it because I've told you guys before, Having leftover inventory on your shelves is like walking by that shelf and just seeing stacks of cash just sitting there. Like, that's your money sitting on those shelves. And the longer it sits there, the less time you have access to use it. Like, it's— you can't do anything with it. If that's just sitting there, you're losing money. If you could liquidate it and get back at least what you paid for, that's ideal. If you could make a little profit on top of that, that's wonderful. And that's just the cherry on top. So when you get through the holidays, like I've had a retail store for 6 years now, and like literally the week of Christmas, you could put anything out on the floor and people are just grabbing it and buying it. And that's how I feel about online sales too. Anything on the website, people are buying all the time. It doesn't matter, just show it to them. It doesn't matter if you've had it for 8 months, people are buying it. They think it's new. They don't care if they're buying a gift. And so when you have leftovers from the big rush, the big shopping season, it's time to liquidate them. I put together these mystery boxes. And so I usually do 2 sizes of boxes. I do like a smaller box and a bigger box. You could really price them at like $40 versus $80 or $50 versus $100 or maybe $25 and $50, whatever the price point really is. The The trick here is that it's got to be a no-brainer value. If I'm going to buy a box of stuff I don't even know what's in it, it needs to be packed with value. I fill these boxes up like my $75 mystery boxes probably have like $200 worth of stuff in them because it's all about liquidating this and getting some cash back for this product. You can even divide these up by size. So last year when I did was I put a bunch of boxes out on the table, I pulled a bunch of stuff off that I needed to liquidate, I went through and made them by size. So this box was a small, I had like 8 small boxes, I had 12 medium boxes, I had— and these are not like size of the box, but it's the size of the clothing that were inside the box. So if you have variables like that, you can break them into sizes. But this is a great way to really get a fresh start on your inventory going into the next year. People love these mystery boxes, and once you do it one time, they cannot wait for you to do it again. You could even do like a mystery grab bag. Maybe you ship your stuff in poly mailers. You could stuff it with 2 or 3 shirts, um, for $30 or something like that, and they're just gonna get something. But really really use it for your benefit. We're not looking to make a lot of profit here. It has a huge value to your customer, but you're, you're not doing it to make a big profit. You're doing it to clear your shelves, free up your cash, and move into the new year with a fresh start. So that is number 5, mystery boxes. Now I don't want you to think that you have to do all 5 of these. As a matter of fact, I don't want you to do all 5 of these. I really want you to pick 2 or 3 of them and create some really special experiences for your customer. Going through this, what I've decided to do this year is one, a holiday gift box. I do it every year. I have to do it. They're looking forward to them. I'm going to be in big trouble if I don't do that. So I've got to do my holiday gift box. I have that planned out already. I've purchased product for it. Some of it's here already. So that's really great. But I'm going to be able to sell those in October. And the best part about that is that in between my boxes— so in between getting out the November box and then having to get out the December box— I'll have some time that I can prep these boxes, pack them, so that I'm not scrambling in December to get 2 boxes out back to back. So I'm going to do a holiday gift box. I am going to do number 3, the gift subscriptions. Again, it's super easy. It takes very minimal effort on my part. And number 5, I'm going to do the mystery boxes. So I'm doing number 1, number 3, and number 5 this holiday season. I'll start one in October, that's the holiday gift boxes. I'll do one late November, that's my Black Friday gift subscription promotion. And I'll do one in late December, that's my mystery boxes. That will just be clearing out my shelves. So October, November, December, I have a good plan for all of those. They're not all lumped together. I don't want to do all those, like you don't want to do something week after week after week. It's too much. It's too much for you. It's too much for your audience. So you can spread out some things. Um, you could do number 2, you could launch your subscription in October if that's what you're wanting to do. Let's get it launched first. So you could plan a really fun launch promotion in October. You could do a Black Friday gift subscription sale, or you could do a Black Friday holiday box sale. Then you have something in November. And then if you wanted to do a mystery box clearance after the holidays, you could do that as well. Or if you wanted to clear out some excess inventory that you might have had from the year, you could just create those special curated boxes and add them to listings on your site. People love not having to do anything with their products. So if you can make it 100% giftable from the minute it leaves your door to their porch, they're, they're going to come back and buy over and over again. They don't have to do anything. So that means put it in a box, put a ribbon around it, put a card inside, something to make it giftable so they don't have to repackage, they don't have to add to it, they don't have to do anything. You're creating a convenience for them. So I want you to Remember that as you're planning these special promotions, and even if you get one or two of these on your calendar, you're going to maximize more revenue this fourth quarter than you have in the past. 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. Don't forget to join me next week right here.