What Can You Do Now to Prep for Q4? | Q4 Planning for Subscription Box Owners

Raise your hand if you've ever blinked and suddenly it's Black Friday and you're scrambling. It happens, but not this year. In this episode, I'm walking you through exactly what you can do right now to set up your most profitable Q4 ever. From planning your promotions to building your list and warming up your audience, it's all here. Let's get to work.

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 Launch Your Box podcast. Uh, today we're talking about Q4, and I know you're thinking, Sarah, it's a little early to talk about Q4, but we're talking about what you can be doing right now that's gonna make a difference when we get to Q4. You know that Q4 is the biggest opportunity of the year. And in reality, a lot of sellers make about half of their revenue between October and December. So if you think about your year, making half of your revenue in one quarter makes it a very, very important, you know, part of our business. But here's where most people kind of get this wrong. They don't start thinking about Q4, or they think it starts in November. But in reality, the fourth quarter starts at the— right at the end of Q4. So when we're coming out of September, we're actually going straight into Q4. And if we're not prepped for it by September, we're kind of already behind. We're kind of late to the game and we're not as prepared as we need to be. You know, when I look at seasonality, I'm going into my 13th Christmas this year, and I look at seasonality, things really start to ramp up. They start in August. Typically, we kind of go through a little bit of a summer slump. Things start to pick up when it's back-to-school season. By September, my sales are almost double what they were over the summer, and by October, it is hot. And so we've got to do the prep work now. I want you to think about different types of promotions. If you haven't thought about the promotions that you want to have in Q4, now's the perfect time to just pull out that calendar and let's think about what we want to promote for Q4. We don't have to have it all figured out today, but we do need to have a plan on the calendar. Am I going to sell holiday gift boxes this year? These are one-time boxes that your subscribers are going to just grab instantly. It could be maybe somebody that's never subscribed to you. They want the opportunity to to see what it's like to have one box from you. Huge opportunity for Q4. If that's not on your calendar yet, we got to get it on our calendar. There's a huge opportunity for gift subscriptions in Q4. Do you have plans for gift subscriptions? When are you going to promote the gift subscriptions? We've got to lay that out on the calendar right now. Then there's Black Friday. Then there's Cyber Monday. I like to do a better than Black Friday sale before Black Friday. How are those going to line up with my holiday gift boxes and my gift subscriptions? This needs to be thought out before we get into Q4. Then we've got the ever popular like mystery boxes of end of year closeouts or clearance. Where does that line up? What is that going to look like? If we could just grab our calendars and sit down and map out our Q4 promotions. These are big promotions. These are big revenue generating opportunities. And if you haven't thought about them yet, it's time to do it right now. Do you know where each of these promos are going to fit in on your calendar? Do you know what product you're going to sell at each of these promotions? Where are we going to buy these? You know, what vendor are we going to use? How much product are we going to do? If you haven't thought about that, it's time now. Like, you're— you might be a little behind already depending on how big you want to be, but It's better to start now than to wait even longer. Q4 is not the time to wing sales. It is the most effective strategy season that we are going to have all year long. And if you haven't built in your strategy now, it's time to start thinking about that. So in this episode, we're going to walk through what you can be doing right now to prep for that strong Q4. There are planning your promotions. We kind of walk through, get that calendar out. Let's plan through those promotions. We're going to talk about growing your following and your list, how you can warm your audience up right now and then build out your marketing campaigns. And each of these take time. So I'm going to break them down a little bit. So as we talked about our holiday promotions, think about what have been your Q4 moneymakers in the past. I always love to go into my analytics and pull my top sellers. What were my top sellers in September, October, November, and December in my shop last year? What were the top sellers the year before? And then I think about what promotions did I run last year and what promotions will I run this year? Now, if you've not run it, if you don't have a Christmas season behind you, what one thing could you do this year? Could that be the holiday box? Could it be a better than Black Friday sale? Could you sell some gift subscriptions? Like, what promotions will you want? And so I want you to think about that. If you were going to do a a holiday box, what does that look like? What products would you put in it? When would we start to sell that? Have you ever offered gift subscriptions before? A one-time sale for a subscription for 3, 6, 12 months? Have you ever done that before? Are you going to do a Black Friday weekend sale or maybe an early VIP sale? Are you going to work on mystery boxes, product bundles, clearance promotions? What are you going to do this year? And then I want you to map them out on the calendar. If holiday boxes are going to ship early December, I like to promote in October. That allows me to do a presale, and then I can prep them and ship them out. If you're going to do Black Friday, what does that look like? How many products do I need? And I need to start shopping for those right now. So I want you to ask yourself, do you have product? Do you need to place orders? Can you forecast how many that you will sell? You don't have to know the exact number, but you've got to start somewhere. The more specific you can get with your plan, the easier it's going to be to promote this. And if you don't plan now, you're going to be scrambling in November when things are just selling automatically and you haven't planned out this, and now you're stressed Now you're going to over or under order. Now you don't have a plan and I don't want you to be there. All right. I have this brand new Ultimate Q4 Planning Workshop. It's on sale now. We're going to be doing this step by step together all in one day. I'll tell you a little more about it later, but it's going to be a huge game changer for those that typically scramble, scramble, scramble through the fourth quarter. So let's talk about growing our following and growing our list because these are something that we can do right now. Okay. You need both visibility and you need some ownership of your audience. Okay. Social media gets you seen and visible. Email is going to get you sales. So let's talk about social media growth first. We have to get visible. It is the biggest challenge that any business owner right now has— getting visible. If you want sales in Q4, People need to see you now so that, that when they see you in Q4, they already know, like, and trust you. Not when you're ready to sell. They have to know you now. So I don't want you to only rely on your organic reach, but we can do this with some simple ads. Okay. So let's talk about a page like ad. You've heard me talk about this before. You could run a page like ad on Facebook. This would target your ideal customer. This would grow your following for really cheap leads. And it's just not random likes. These are people that are going to align with you because they see your page like ad. You can also run a profile visit ad on Instagram. I've been doing this a lot, and when they go to your profile, they're likely to hit follow. So this is designed to send people directly to your Instagram profile. They check out your bio and your highlights and maybe some of your pinned posts. Post and they choose to follow you or not. So you can do this really inexpensively— I was going to say ineffectively, it's very effective to do it inexpensively. But that's one way to grow your Instagram following, and we've been super successful with this lately. And then the other thing that I'm doing right now is I'm running audience growth ad on YouTube. So if you've got video content, YouTube has so much traffic and you don't have to be a YouTuber to use it. Short videos can build search-based traffic. You can use your reels over there. You can do your lives over there, do some box openings on YouTube, and then you can run an inexpensive ad. And I choose audience growth to really build your following on YouTube. So these are just 3 platforms that you can start to build some visibility before we're in the thick of it, because visibility builds awareness, but more important, it builds trust in you over time so that when you're ready to really sell hard, they're ready to buy. Okay, new followers today could be your buyer in 30 or 60 days if you continue to show up consistently. Now let's talk about email strategies, because you also have to build your list. This is something that you own. You don't ever own your following, but own your list. I really try to double my list every year, and as it has grown, it's getting harder and harder to double that list. But I really focus hard in Q3 so that I have this warm new pool of people before we go into Q4. And this matters is because you, you own this, and in reality, your email is going to drive 10 times more sales than your social media will in Q4. And so I've got some strategies for you that can help you start to grow your email list right now. A fun one would be to do some kind of fall-themed giveaway. We're right in the tip of fall months. People love to switch to fall even when it's really hot outside. So let's run a fall-themed giveaway, put together a box that has some fall themes. In it that would be similar to maybe your holiday box or your subscription box, but keep it simple. Early fall, cozy season is coming, back to school, something like that is really, really beneficial. I love a giveaway on KingSumo. It's a platform for giveaways because it will build both social media and my email list. So, and it encourages a lot of shares. So this is really great for both list building and audience building. So definitely run a fall-themed giveaway. You could actually set up an opt-in ad campaign for a freebie. So we like to do this with wallpapers. That's our freebie. It's a little downloadable for your phone wallpaper. You could do a holiday gift guide. You could do some printable tags. You could do like a fall checklist. You could do a mini quiz. But if you could set up an opt-in ad campaign that would lead to a freebie where you're collecting emails, that's, that's really great way to build your list through the fall months before you get into Q4. But you want to make sure whatever your freebie is, that it's aligned with your subscription box and also your ideal customer. These are really low-cost, effective ads. They drive traffic to your website, to your opt-in page, they deliver the freebie, and then you can put a nurture sequence on this to start emailing them regularly and keep them warm before we get into Q4. Now, we went through growing our following, we went through growing our list, and let's talk about nurturing. Okay. So we need to make sure that we're showing up right now. If you've been a little recluse or a little behind the scenes, it's time to start putting your face out there. We can't just start sending emails when it's time to email in Q4. I want you to start sending 1 to 2 emails every week. It could be a newsletter style where you're sharing behind the scenes and just some great information. It could be, say, and if you don't know where to go, do one of each. One week, one time a week, send kind of an update of what's going on behind the scenes and what's happening. And then the next email in that same week is a sales email. Get them to seeing who you are, what you do, and also in the habit of being sold to. So I want you to start warming up this email list that you're building, and I want you to start emailing twice a week right now, because when we get into these promotions, when we get into 4th quarter marketing, you're going to be emailing them a lot more than twice a week. So I want you to warm up that email list, get them opening it, and get it— collect some sales, grab some connection. That's what we want to do. The other thing is I think you need to be a little more personal. We need to share who we are on our social media. We need to be social with social media. And if you pulled back on that or never done that, now's the time to warm that up because it's going to be so important when we get to Q4, because people's feeds are going to be drowned out by all this marketing that's going to happen in Q4. But what those big brands don't do— they're not personal. And so when your face comes across their feed, they're going to recognize you only if you're sharing that information right now. So I want you to start getting personal on social media just a little bit. Show pictures of you with the product. Show pictures of you behind the scenes. Show pictures of you working at your desk and tell people what you're working on. We've got to get more personal, and that comes along with live video. You got to start going live now because that's what's going to be top of feed when it comes to Q4. And these big brands don't go live. So this is your superpower to be able to go live. But you got to start doing that now so that people are in the habit of watching you live. So this is your opportunity to build in some really healthy habits for your business to get visible, get in front of people, have that connection with people right away, right now, so that when Q4 comes, it sets you apart from the big brands and people already know, like, and trust you. So I want you to work on nurturing your audience now and building momentum going into Q4. Now, we gotta talk about content. You don't need a complicated plan for all these promotions. You really just need one good solid strategy. You don't need to have every caption, every email, every ad set built right now. But if you know what you're promoting and when you're promoting it, everything else gets It's easier. And so that's why it's important to start planning this stuff now. Your content doesn't have to be fancy. Matter of fact, I just came off of a launch and my best ads were just behind the scenes photos. They weren't graphics. But what your images need, it needs to support what you're selling. And the biggest mistake I see is trying to sell something to your audience when they don't understand it. So we need to work out those kinks. We need to start working on our content plan. And where most small business owners struggle is that they wait too long to come up with the plan. They end up doing everything last minute with no clear plan. They're overwhelmed trying to post everything everywhere with no real strategic structure involved in it. And that's where things can change for you. If all you do right now is plan your promo dates, outline a series of emails, you don't even have to write them and figure out how much you're going to post and go live. You're way ahead of most people. And if you actually start to work on all of the assets that you need, that's the next level. That's what I'm planning inside my Ultimate Q4 Planning Workshop. So in this workshop, it is a 1-day workshop and we are going to map out your entire Q4. So if you feel overwhelmed by that, together we're going to plan your promotions. I'm going to walk through every promotion and what makes sense for you. We're going to map out your entire marketing calendar. I'm talking about open carts, pre-launch, email campaigns, social media ad sets, all the things. We're going to map that out for you together. We're going to identify what emails need to be sent, the content of each of those emails, and when to send them. And then we're also going to talk about all the social media content that you're going to need. So basically every promotion that you want to execute, you're going to have a game plan step by step, piece by piece of what needs to be done. And we're going to do that together. We're going to be able to talk about how much inventory you need. Some of the key dates around getting that inventory in. So in this workshop, it's one day and you will leave with everything outlined, ready to execute without scrambling, without feeling behind, without chaos. And you'll be able to do it now so that when you're in the hectic Q4, you're not having to like think about all of this, like what's next? You're going to know what's next and you're already going to have your assets built for the next thing. It's one focus day, and we're going to have your whole Q4 game plan together. We're doing it on Zoom, we're doing it together, and we're going to get it done. So if you want this kind of clarity in your life for Q4, if you want this kind of calmness in your life, um, as you head into the busiest season of the year, remember that season that could produce 50% of your yearly revenue I'm just going to invite you to come to my brand new Q4 planning workshop. It's on September 5th. The link is in the show notes. It's the first time I've ever done something like that, and it's going to be a game changer for you. So let's just recap what you can be doing right now, because there's 4 things that you could be doing right now so that you have a clear understanding of what your next steps are. Plan your promotions. Figure out what you're going to do and when. Step number 1. Step number 2, grow your audience and grow your email list. Do not wait. Do not sit on this for months and months until it's no longer— you no longer have time. Grow your audience. Get visible. Collect the emails. We've got to have somebody to sell to. And then instead of just sitting back and being busy, I need you to show up and I need you to warm up the people that are paying attention right now, because if you can warm them up right now, they're going to be solid buyers in Q4. And then step number 4, I want you to start building out your marketing campaigns, ones that support these promotions. And you don't need to do all of this right now, but you need to start thinking about this and you need to start taking action. You need to start today. You won't need to sit on this another day. If that's growing your audience, what can I do today to grow my audience? I want you to ask yourself that. What can I do right now after I listen to this podcast to grow my following? I've given you several tips. What can I do tomorrow to start growing that email list? Because I need that email list in the best position possible before I start selling. How can I show up differently starting today so that my audience can know, like, and trust me? How can I keep this audience that I'm growing warm? That's what I want you to think about. And then pull that calendar out. Saturday morning, grab your cup of coffee, pull the calendar out and think through when does your subscription box go out? When can I promote my holiday promotions? Which holiday promotions do I want to promote this year? Which ones did I do last year? What did my sales look like last year? What did I sell the most of last year? Start collecting that data so that you can create a plan. And if you want help actually doing this together, block off your calendar and join me on Friday, September 5th for my live hands-on Ultimate Q4 Planning Workshop. It's not another webinar or recorded training. It is live training with me for the entire day. We're going to work on your promotions. We're going to set up your calendar. We're going to outline all your emails and socials. You're going to have a plan on what you need for inventory. All of Q4 planned strategically by the end of the day. You'll walk away with an entire roadmap for Q4 that feels clear based on your goals. It feels doable based on the time you have, and it feels totally aligned with what you want to do. All right. So if Q4 feels like chaos, it's time to change that. It's time to start now. So grab your spot to my workshop and I'll be back here next week for another great episode.