Holiday Sale Strategies: Leveraging Urgency

0:00One thing that in our business to business environment could be good because we deal with a lot of bootstrap business owners would be that we're doing you a favor of a favor of business. your tax write-off this year. So here's X thousand dollars towards any of our products. So just to incentivize you, not only will you get the benefit of this, but depending on what tax bracket in you're in, you might get actually double what you buy. How much more successful would you be if you had lunch once a week with insanely successful entrepreneurs who share their biggest secrets on how they think and achieve success?

0:41Grab your seat at the table because This is Business Lunch with Roland Frazier and Ryan Dice.

0:50Welcome to another episode of Business Lunch. And today's a snackable episode with Roland where he's going to get into some more tactical strategies that you can start using to live a rich and happy life. If this is the first snackable episode you're hearing, I'd encourage you to go back and listen to some of the other episodes that Roland has put out. And if you want to get notified every time we release a new episode, go to the new businesslunchpodcast.com website, and we'll send you detailed notes along with every episode. That's businesslunchpodcast.com, www.businesslunchpodcast.com, and you can sign up for the free email newsletter where you'll be able to get all the highlights and resources from the episodes.

1:25Hey, everybody. This is Roland Frazier and Ryan Dice on Business Lunch. Welcome to the next episode, which we were talking about all things holiday. So holiday sales showdown was kind of what we came up with. And I think it's a really cool... Well, first off, Ryan, how are you doing today? Amazing. Thank you. Thank you for asking. How about yourself? I am fabulous. Thank you. This came about, this topic came about, I think, as a result of we've had some really good successes going from pre-Black Friday into Black Friday and to Cyber Monday. And then right after that, another promotion, right after that, a live event that did well, now going into another promotion this week.

2:14And looking at that momentum, we, in just one of our businesses, pretty much doubled sales in the first 15 days. Like we hit our month goal, actually it's 13 days, into the month of December. And it happened in kind of retrospect because we actually, go figure, we actually planned these interlocking or successive promotion kinds of things. And so then that got us to thinking, well, we've got the whole rest of the year. As we record this, it's December 18th. And so we're going to release it as soon as possible so you guys can benefit. it. But as we're thinking about the rest of this year, not just taking our foot off the gas, because there's a whole lot of time left.

3:04There's 17 days to, is it 17 days to Christmas? No. It's eight days? Eight days. Eight days? Seven days. Seven days. Seven days. Can't do math. This is an unknowable number. But I think that means it's two weeks to the end of the year. And then you've got all of the beginning of the year stuff. So like why stop midway through fourth quarter and not be thinking about how do I push on through, still have my holiday time, but then get into the first part of the year and make January and February as exciting as it was doing the end of Q4 of the preceding year. And while it won't be Black Friday and you definitely have consumer sentiment to think about and things like that, you do have a lot of people that are out there thinking about what they're going to do for the new year.

3:54So New Year's resolutions really from now until the end of January, from setting them, implementing them, and then tracking and keeping and staying on track is a tremendous opportunity. So I thought it'd be fun to kind of talk about what do we do to make that happen? Thoughts, feelings, emotions? Yeah. I mean, we can just go in. I can talk about some stuff that we do at some of our companies that have worked historically, and then just some more kind of broader, you know, sentiment ideas. So where you want to start? Let me, maybe just a couple of concepts for everybody, and then we'll go into our case studies.

4:30So one of the things would be, it's still a really good time to do urgency offers. So deadline funnels and countdown timers and things like that, that really helps us with scarcity. So if you guys are thinking about flash sales, limited edition products like drops kind of things. Whatever can create a sense of FOMO. We've been creating a lot of FOMO around AI and that our offers for different access to AI, GPTs we built and things like that are something that you want to take advantage of, but it's a limited time to get it. Nike did a thing called Cyber Week, which was a whole bunch flash sales with deep discounts.

5:14I'm not a big fan of discounts. I like bundles and things like that better. And what they did was basically partner with local influencers for live shopping events featuring limited time deals. Are we doing anything like that on the side of the house of the companies you manage? Yeah. So Digital Marketer for years and years has run the 12 days of deals. and it's basically, you know, obviously a, you know, hat tip to the 12 days of Christmas, but every day of the 12 days of Christmas, there is a new, a new deal. It is a new bundle and each one of them goes live and it's live for, I can't remember if it's 48 or 72 hours, but it's live for a couple of days and then that deal expires.

5:58And then the next day, another, a new one appears. So every day after the first, you know, two or three days, every single day you've got something new. You've got something that's, you know, that's expiring. And so it's a bit like an advent calendar where you go and you open the little window and you see like, Ooh, what's the treat for today? And then, um, and you get that benefit of like, of both novelty and scarcity. And the combined benefit of those two just gets people going back and, you know, checking what's, what's going on. So I think a 12 days of deal sale, uh, and again, it doesn't have to be discounts.

6:31Typically they're bundles, but things that are bundled together in interesting ways with a bit of a story around them. That's a good way to do the lean into the season. The other thing I like that you're doing there is that you have, because different things close at different times, there's always something closing. So there's urgency throughout the entire period. Does that start 12 days before Christmas and end on Christmas? When do you start and end that? I cannot remember if we, so it definitely doesn't start 12 days before Christmas because we haven't done it yet. I think it follows the traditional, you know, liturgical church calendar, which starts like the 12 days of Christmas, I believe goes through January 6th, which is a pivot.

7:11Yeah. It starts on the 25th, I think, and goes through, yeah, the 4th or something like that. Yeah. I believe, I believe, I believe that's the case. Maybe it's the 5th if I count 12 days. I think it's the 6th. Yeah. All right. We'll take that. So we're doing a similar thing that is, because I don't like deals, it's giving. So we're basically saying we're giving you during these 12 days between the 25th or 26th and the 5th or 6th, we're giving you different things. And so it might be a$1 access to a thing that we have not introduced yet so that we think you might want. It might be a suggestion of seven books, but each day is a one, two, three, four, five, it goes up to 12.

8:01And so it's the first time that we've tried that, but I wanted to do it more than a deals like kind of as a gift guide kind of thing. And also to encourage people to take these things and give to other people. So kind of trying to get a sharing virality thing going at the same time that they were amazing values and stuff. And we're not selling every, I think we're selling on maybe half of those things. And then the other half is just straight gift, you know, straight value. But I think that's a cool way to go. Another thing that was suggested is frictionless checkout. So Amazon's one-click purchases and mobilized checkout flow and that kind of stuff.

8:51And then buy now, pay later options. So we have done the weekly payment thing, which has helped because we have a lot of high ticket things. So a lot of our stuff now is get started for as little as to try to reduce the friction of maybe sticker shock as to like high priced items that we have in high ticket. We haven't really done pre-filled forms or anything like that. We have definitely done multiple payment options. Are you playing with any of those things? And is there anything else that you might think could be good? So I do think the frictionless payment processing is big. We were not set up to do that years ago.

9:37And because, I mean, the cart was just very, you know, it was very rudimentary. It was designed to kind of sell single off items because we We didn't sell a lot of bundles and a lot of things on different days. So we had to completely rebuild and redesign and introduce a new card structure to allow for it. And it definitely paid dividends. I like it. And anything else, any other strategies that you have seen people using successfully or that you think would be good to mention? Definitely payment plans, buy now, pay later, friction-free pricing, those kinds of things. I think one of the things that you and I talk about a lot is like the challenge that we have when we want to buy a SaaS.

10:20You have to get a demo. That's terribly friction inducing. But I've seen case studies that say that the reason they all do it is that they end up selling more that way than they do through the friction free self-service way. Do you have thoughts on that for like, for like, I guess it would, it would apply to, for us, a lot of things we have book a call as opposed to buy now. And I think it's generally driven by price point, but I'd love to, what could we share with folks that might help them with respect to that, do you think? So typically, let's take a scalable company. We've got our founders board mastermind.

10:59And typically you would only hear about that if one, you had already come through another program or if you were referred to by somebody else. But one time a year and it's around this time. And this kind of speaks to another point. This is the time of year when people are making decisions about what groups and things they're going to invest in next year. Now is when people start thinking about identity, not just what am I going to do next year, but who am I going to be? And so this is the time of year where we just flat out ask people, hey, if you want to mastermind with us, if you want to group up with us, then you can go here right now and you can just straight up apply.

11:35And we're going to be doing we've got a team that's going to be doing rapid application reviews. We can review your application and accept you without even getting on a call unless you want to talk. And so we make it very clear that if you want to leap to the front of the line right now, you can do that. and we don't do it all the time, but this is the time of year when people are making really big and fast decisions. And so I would, to the extent that you've got those things in place right now, that kind of good, healthy friction, now's the time when I might consider backing off on some of that and see if you can't push more through the pipeline.

12:08I like that. The other thing would be not buyer's remorse, but like card abandonments and things like that. What would, I don't know what the best way to call that is. So somebody, this is a time of year, I think, when a lot of people are shopping by putting things in carts. So number one, I would have persistent carts. If your cart empties out every time somebody comes back, you've just lost most of the people that I know in my family because they don't want to go back. Like they're hunting, comparing, and then that's going to decide. They're going to go back and forth and decide and make a buying decision.

12:44So if you've lost that, that's unfortunate. but also cart abandonment. When they do close that cart, running those cart abandonment sequences around the products that they were thinking about buying to offer perhaps a discount, perhaps a bundle, perhaps a user, like a testimonial kind of social proof type things, or even just tips on how to use that thing that will then be benefit driven that will cause the person to say, ah, I really should have gotten that. I know that we're doing things like that. Anything else along those lines that you think might be good to think about? Yeah. Now's the time to invest in proactive human to human outreach as well.

13:24So if somebody's added something to a card and they've started some type of a process, and let's say normally you're not set up for, you know, for doing, you might do retargeting. You might have an automated abandoned card campaign. If you're B2B, you might, you know, follow up with people who start an application, but who don't finish, but you don't always do it. Now is the time to be very, very, very proactive with that. The, you know, hey, you know, I saw you started your order. I've actually got a coupon code, you know, for you if you're interested, if you're willing to finish today. But it does expire today.

13:58Don't send them a coupon code. Get them to reply back and go, oh, yeah, I'm interested in that. And now is also the time if you can, if you've captured their email address somewhere, see if you can't connect with them on social channels. Yeah. Especially if you're retail. So you can't do a DM outbound direct message. Yeah. And we've been, you have to have had them opt in, of course, but we've been through the new business that you and I started, AIFI, mybusiness.com. We've been doing outreach with AI agents where it's actually somebody, an AI agent, not a real person that's calling and having a complete conversation with somebody.

14:40And that is using that platform through AIFI My Business. The other thing that we are running right now that we just started this weekend was there's a text chat version that's AI powered to have those same kinds of conversations on text and WhatsApp. And we're doing that through a company called Max, M-A-A-X.com. We're not affiliated with or anything. But so far, it's been pretty good in our beta test where we're like, I get the message or somebody in the company does it. So that'd be something to look at. Do you do any kind of gift collections, like a curated collection of gifts for any of the businesses that you're...

15:24So much of what we do these days is B2B that we haven't. But I think it's really smart. I mean, I know when I go to websites, I mean, if I'm thinking about like jewelry for, you know, my stepmom or something like that. Like I'll go to a store and I'll click on like the gift ideas. So it's just a really good place to start. What I found, though, is most of them, they don't, they're like, oh, here are some things that would make some good gifts. And there's not a ton of thought put into it. If I were doing this, I would have a story around it. Because when you give somebody a gift, you don't just want to give them a present.

15:59You want to give them a present and then tell them the story about the present. So I think if retailers in particular would spend a little bit more time building a story around why this isn't just a good gift, but it's an interesting story to tell. so that that's what makes it an interesting gift, they would find that it was far more effective. On the gift-giving front, though, the piece that I wouldn't forget about is people buying gifts for themselves. And I think leaning into that as well, like you're buying so much for other people, you know, this is a gift guide for you. You know, treat yourself kind of thing.

16:31And one of the smartest ad campaigns, I saw a jewelry, I forget the jewelry maker that did it. And I haven't seen this in years, so maybe it didn't work. But they basically ran this thing and they said, your left ring finger is for the person you love, to show your commitment to someone else. Your right ring finger is to show, you know, you are who you are and your commitment, you know, to your, you know, to yourself. Like left is for them, right is for you. And they were, and I think the problem is the execution was very good. Like the jury was kind of like, meh, but I was like, oh, that's a really good thing to lean into.

17:07And so I think applying that same type of thing of like, you know, you've invested this much in other people. Don't forget about you. Right. Don't, don't. Yeah. My, my old, uh, business partner in the diamond buying business, who, you know, uh, Chuck, uh, constantly reminds my wife, you've got 10 fingers. You've got 10 fingers. I was like, that's the, you can fit multiple rings on it. I was like, stop saying that. There is, so Uncommon Goods kind of did something along the lines of what you're talking about. They curate different gift collections based on personalities and interests. I think that what would plus that for them would be if they could tell a story about that person.

17:54Like, this is the adventurer, you know, you're the adventurer, everything, blah, blah. And then talk about that mindset and, you know, you're not afraid of tigers in Africa or whatever, even though they're in it, I don't think. Lions in Africa. How about that? You're not afraid of these kinds of things and you're in it, but flows over, spills over into your entire life. So for the adventurer in you or the person that you know, and then curate that, I think would be cool. And I guess, and I don't know these, you might, but one of the suggestions that I've seen is partnering with gifting platforms like Gifterry or Gift Card Granny to expand reach from the traffic they've already got.

18:33Um, so that'd be something that would be worth, uh, reaching out and checking. We, I think, I think a lot of our stuff doesn't really fit there, but if you've got retail and product type stuff, I think, I think it could be really good. Um, let's see. What about, um, any kind of holiday themed content? Are you guys doing any of that? It's kind of hard because we want to be non-denominational religious kind of stuff. Yeah. there's the aforementioned like 12 days of deals. I know that, you know, Airbnb's got the 12 stays of Christmas. That's pretty cool too. That's good. I mean, they don't do this as much like to me anymore.

19:14Cause I'm not, I'm not as much like the face of digital marketer, like, like I was, but as silly as like, we would, some of our highest open, most engaged email campaigns. It was like me in a badly Photoshop Santa costume. him. And so I do think that it's good to have a little bit of fun. Like this is a time when, when, when you can play around, you know, you, you can have some fun. And, and so I, and I, and I loved it. I thought it was, I thought it was great. People were like, Oh, are you mad? I was like, no, I mean, because it made us more money and people, you know, people liked it. So I, those little things like that, I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't forget about that.

19:51I've also seen people send out holiday cards and family things. Like I've, there are people that we give lots of money to, you know, they're like coaches and consultants that we lean on for help and, you know, add people, add your clients, your high level clients to your holiday card list, your Christmas card list. If you, if you send that out, that those kinds of things, you know, make a difference in sending into the year holiday gifts. I mean, I got like, I'm just a fricking cool letter opener from the guy that does, you know, that, that, that helps us one of our consultants that have paid.

20:23And it's like, that's cool. Probably going to run in with this guy. Yeah. Loyalty, um, loyalty program rewards. I think anything to take care of your customers or the people that are in your loyalty program, it could be anything from just acknowledgement to a gift, to a discount, um, but, uh, to, to a handwritten letter or a phone call, not from a robot. Uh, those, those would all be things I would think would be good, just general goodwill builders, right. This time of year. I should say there's a particular jewelry store. I'm not going to plug them because they need to pay me. But there's a particular jewelry store that I've given lots and lots of money to over the years to buy presents for my wife and mom and things like that.

21:06And every year they send me like a thousand dollar gift card. Now I could go into this jewelry store and use this gift card to just buy a thousand worth of stuff. Right. And probably people do. Yeah. But not once has that ever happened. You know, I typically go in there and as I go back and I look, it's like, oh, you know what? This is anywhere from about 5%, you know, to 10 % of what I would spend in there in a typical year. Right. And so what is it really? It kind of functions if I'm going to buy like I've always bought, it functions like a 10 % off coupon. But in reality, I wind up spending more.

21:49Yeah. And so I think something like that of like, hey, you've got a$500 credit or a$20 credit. Or if you, like you said, if you do points, hey, for the next, you know, until the end of the year, we're going to double your points. It'll go back to this at this time, but we're going to double your points. I think giving your people money, cash that's burned in their pocket that they can only spend with you is a great way to make sure that they do actually spend with you. Yeah. And not with other people. Yeah. I like that a lot. One thing that in our business to business environment could be good because we deal with a lot of bootstrap business owners would be that we're doing you a favor in terms of you need to get your write-off, your tax write-off this year.

22:33So here's X thousand dollars towards any of our products. So just to incentivize you, not only will you get the benefit of this, but depending on what tax bracket you're in, you might get actually double what you buy, right? And if you compare that with what we call the 13-month year offer, where you say, go ahead and invest now, you get the tax write-off, and we're going to give you an extra month included so that we realize that you're not really going to have time to get the value from this today. And even when you come back, it's going to be a little bit crazy. so you won't be rebuilt until X amount of time.

23:10That combination of, oh, so I get the tax write-off now, but I don't feel guilty for the fact that things are so busy that I can't do anything with this. The 13-month year is another good thing I'd throw in now if you're B2B. I like it. So lots of fun things to kind of think about. The biggest thing for everybody here is we've gone through lots of different ideas, but thinking about consciously, intentionally, don't take your foot off the gas now. You're on a big roll of momentum. And I know that your people may have worked extra hard and you may have worked extra hard to get all the things done and built and launched and out that you just did, but you've got momentum now.

23:51So don't let it slide. Drive through the end of the year. Think about your holiday promotions. Think about what's going on the heads of your prospects and your existing customers. How can you reward them? How can you entice them? How can you get them to make more purchases by the end of the year? And then how do you encourage them into the beginning of Q1 so that you're sustaining all of the momentum? And we already have this natural New Year's resolution, restart, get things going. I'm going to do this differently, or I'm going to do this thing, or I want to start something new. That's all stuff that we should be capitalizing on and putting out in our marketing campaigns to drive sales.

24:29So finish strong. And I think that's it for this episode. Anything you want to add before we take off? Don't forget about the first part of January. First part of January is every bit as profitable, if not more so. But for this reason, most businesses, especially in retail, are spending up in December. They want to get that holiday shopping. And so ad costs go up for everybody. They are at some of their lowest levels the first couple of weeks in January. So it is a time when you still have maximum attention opportunities, but the cost to capture that attention is lower than it has probably been in months.

25:05And I don't care what industry you're in. It's lower than it's been in months. So this time is all about monetizing the ones that you got, you know, getting more from the relationships that you already have. January is going to be about expanding market share. So make sure that you got some campaigns queued up that are entry point, that are low barrier to entry, that are there to go out and gobble up all this market share because it's not going to be a better time in the first part of January. Love it. Hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Go get those holiday sales and we'll see you next time on Business Lunch.

25:35If you like this, please share it with a friend and we'll see you next time.