Episode 36 Transcript

Hey everyone, it’s Lisa. Welcome back to another episode of the other 99%. Today I wanted to chat with you about being holiday ready in your business. After being in the industry for 18 plus years, there’s one thing that I know and it’s the fact that the holidays sneak up on you quickly and then it’s such a hustle and bustle during the holidays that they’re over before you know it. And if you don’t go into the holidays prepared for your business, they could just pass you by. So in this podcast, I’m gonna give you 10 simple tips to help you think about and prep your business for the holiday season. So they’re not in any particular order, it’s just what I’ve put together. So there’s nothing, like I don’t have it set in importance and to least important. So just go through and grab some of the tips that you think would help you prep your business and you don’t have to apply all 10, you might. pick two or three, you might pick eight, you might pick all 10. But I just wanted to give you some ideas to help you start to think like a retailer and to get your business up and running and prepped for the holiday season.

So when I say think like a real retailer, if we go into stores right now, I’m recording this on mid September. And You go into the stores, you’re going to have your Halloween decor. It’s been out for a while. A lot of stores are starting to put out their Christmas decor. In Canada, we have Thanksgiving sneaking up on us quickly. So there’s a lot of things that you have to think about when we get to this time of the year. So let’s start off by going through my top 10 tips to help you get. ready for the holiday season.

So number one, I recommend, I definitely don’t recommend picking up inventory if that’s not something that you typically do. However, you might wanna start grabbing one or two extra items so that you can show people how to gather your items and use them as gifts. You might wanna grab some things that might work well as a stocking stuffer and you could display them and take pictures of them inside of a stocking that you might have got from the dollar store. You also might want to use them as demonstration, whether you’re doing live in-person events, whether you’re doing virtual events. You might want to say, oh, look at this, you know, this is how your person that you’re giving the gift to could use the item and show the benefits of your product. You also might want to show, for example, I have Epicure and I might want to show how you can use our products to prep for holiday gatherings. So not necessarily giving as a gift, but it’s going to help you get holiday ready because you’re going to be able to have some more appies for when people come over and stuff like that. So think about grabbing a couple extra items to either use as gift displays or demo products just for specific holiday-type styling or events.

Number two, create holiday marketing plan. Now, marketing plan, I should say. Now this is probably should have been, if I was putting them in order of importance, this would be like number one You want to grab a simple calendar. It can be something that you printed off. It could be a planner that you actually are using. And you want to create like a content calendar of what things are coming. So my recommendation is to take it, your calendars, do October, November, December, start marking out all the important holidays, start marking out any events that you have. Start marking out time specific for your family, whether you have like family gatherings that you know you always go to every year, or you might already have those dates planned out, but get those things on the calendar so that you can create a plan. You might wanna think about things, for example, a space in your calendar where you might wanna do a flash holiday sale. Remember, you don’t always have to follow your company’s leads. your company will have items come out and flash sales come out and big drops during the holiday season. Those could be extras, but what you wanna do is you wanna plan your holiday calendar out so that you’re not working your business so reactively. You want to be proactive, you wanna plan out what you wanna do and then if your company drops something, you’re like, hey, yeah, great, I can incorporate that, no problem. but you might wanna do something, let’s say the second week of November, you might wanna do a big sale for like a customer appreciation holiday sale or something like that. You might wanna create special bundles for the holiday that you offer to your customers at either a discount or if they buy it, they get an extra little bonus. You might wanna do something where you’re doing maybe a week. worth of posts on how you could show people gift giving ideas with your product, stuff like that. But you want to take that calendar and you want to try and plan out the best that you can. And like I said, just remember to include your holiday time. That’s the biggest thing that I want to stress here.

Tip number three, personalized outreach to your customers. So think about what you want to do. So do you want to send holiday cards to your customers? Do you want to look at your the past 12 months and send maybe an extra thank you card and maybe a little gift to your top purchasing customers? Do you want to have an email campaign that goes out to your customers over the holiday? Are you going to be doing any like

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special gifts maybe for your top hosts or something like that. You know a way to build relationship with your customers during the holiday season and definitely a way to strengthen your customer relations with your existing customers. Maybe offer a holiday referral program or something like that where if your customers refer you to a friend or family member they’re gonna get an extra special bonus during the holiday season. There’s just so many ways to create that loyalty and say that extra thank you to your customers because you want this relationship to carry into 2025.

Okay, tip number four is plan a holiday themed event. Now, If you’re going to do a holiday themed event on your own, maybe if you’re in the party plan, you’re going to maybe offer your hosts a holiday themed event in their home. You could do these like an open house style. If you’re doing it at your own home, you could do them virtually. You could do them in person at someone else’s home, but think about ways you can incorporate holiday themes into your events. I know that one year I did and it was in November, we did a soup in a jar workshop but it was based on like the holidays so it was for gift giving. So we did the soup in the jar recipe then we had a nice little card that was attached to it and we dressed the we brought all the little fixings so that our customers who attend it could wrap up their jars and have it ready to give as a gifts o something like that that just gets people together, having fun, is just a way to have more interaction around the holiday season. And who doesn’t wanna come to an event that, you know, they’re leaving with something that they can give to a friend or, you know, to a teacher or something like that. So think about holiday themed events and how you could tweak them and how you could create that excitement for your customers and their friends.

All right. Tip number five, content creation. So if we’re talking about social media, I want you to book out an hour, two hours, however long that you’re, you think it’s going to take you, but sit down again with that same calendar that I mentioned earlier and create out like a content plan using the holidays that you’ve already scheduled in, what kind of content do you want to schedule around these events and get as much of the stuff pre-scheduled on your social platforms as possible. So the idea is you want to have everything pre-scheduled or as much of it pre-scheduled as you can so that you take that little bit of the stress out of your business over the holidays. Because let’s face it, things get busy. So a couple kind of content ideas that you could think of. And this goes for everybody because let’s face it, everybody loves recipes. You don’t have to be just in Epicure to do this. So think about sharing like a holiday recipe that try to relate it to your business. I mean, if you have something like with bath products or something, well then maybe the recipe is on a nice relaxing beverage that they can have while they’re having a bath. Something like that. It doesn’t have to be using your products, but you’re providing value to your customers by giving them that little something extra. It could be a great example for content is like a gift guide. So again, using your products, showing them as, and this could be like content that you’ve created to go out maybe over a week or two in your social media accounts where each day you’re giving a like a gift idea that you would just wrap up and then maybe give suggestions on who it could be for. Like for example, if you have teas and you’re wrapping up a gift for maybe a teacher and you use a little bit of a play on a word, say, you know, and include a card that says, you are a T-Rific teacher. Thank you for having me. Happy holidays or something like that. But give them ideas on what they could put on the cards and all that stuff. So think about content in that way as well. Like not just your everyday posting, but how can you give value to your

Another good thing is maybe a little bit of a behind the scenes look about how you prep for the holidays. Maybe show your holiday decor and maybe show some of the gifts that you’re wrapping up and bonus points if they’re using some of your products, like if you’re gifting some of your products yourself, things like that. But a nice little sneak peek around behind the holidays. Maybe it’s….Again, if you have, and I’m sorry guys, my head always goes to food because it’s like, I’m Epic here, that’s what I do. We do food, right? So maybe you make a specific little Appie for yourself while you’re wrapping presents. So show yourself making this Appie and then sit down and start wrapping presents. And I mean, it’s something you could even do on a Facebook Live. You can make up this little Appie and then just sit there wrapping a couple of presidents while you’re talking to your customers on Facebook Live. And it could be about anything. It does not necessarily have to be about buy my products because again, you’re giving them more value.

Okay. Tip number six, create a VIP group or holiday club. So think about this. I mean, if you have top customers or if you have loyal customers that shop with you frequently, maybe do a special offering. It could be through maybe a Facebook messenger party where you’re offering them holiday collections or maybe special deals, just as a thank you for being such valuable customers and helping you grow your business over the year, not necessarily the holidays but just to thank you during the holiday time for being such a valued customer. You could even invite them, like give them a little bonus for instead of making it a special deal, you could even give them a little bonus gift if they purchase something during the little event that you’ve put together for them. Could be anything like that. Tip number seven, if you’re able to, and if you have local customers, then you can offer a gift wrapping service or a delivery option. But if you don’t have local customers and you do a lot of ship direct, then maybe you want to do like a special a little zoom or Facebook live or something like that where you show your customers how to take the gifts that they’ve purchased and wrap them in a creative way. Okay.mSo it’s just those little bit of extras that you’re gonna do, offer them ideas on how to put little personalized touches on their gifts, like handwritten notes with the little quirky sayings like I was saying earlier. And just again, just to give them a little bit of extra value and not always be there like buy for me. It’s like, thank you so much for purchasing from me. Now I’m gonna give you a little bit of something extra just to thank you again for being such an amazing customer.

Tip number eight, collaborate with other sellers. So we’ve done this, a group of other drug sellers and myself have done this for the last, I would say two to three years. we get together and we do something that’s called the Holiday Express. So we have a little event where we set it up and we have our customers travel from group to group to group and we do special promotions and stuff like this for the customers who join us on the event. There’s a giveaway and all that stuff. I actually have a Holiday Express toolkit available for purchase I’ll drop the link in the show notes if you want to take a look. And I mean, it’s just a fun way to introduce your customers to other products. And it’s also a fun way to get your products in front of new customers. It’s a win-win for everybody involved. You build your business, the other direct sellers build their business. One thing that I will caution you about though, when doing this, make sure when you collaborate with other sellers. you’re picking people who treat their business and their customers the same way that you treat your business and customers. And the reason why I say that is because you don’t want to introduce your customer to a, um, a direct seller that doesn’t really value their customer base. So you want to make sure that it’s somebody that you know, like in trust and would want to recommend to your customers. So I’ll just leave it at that.

Um, Number nine, now, leveraging text marketing. Now, if you don’t do text marketing, I highly recommend checking it out. Now, the reason why I say this, and I know people have different views on text marketing, but think about yourself. What is the one thing that you often, one notification on your phone, let’s say, that often goes, a short period of time without you at least opening and reading it. Now me, if you look on my phone, my text app always shows zero. I have no unopened text messages. However, if you go to my email, even though I’m a big believer in email marketing, and don’t get me wrong, I still think email marketing works. But I have like, I think it’s like 19,000 unread emails right now. Now, I will say I sign up for every newsletter or everything that I can because I’m an information junkie. So that’s probably why my email is so high because I only open the subject lines that catch my attention. But back to the text marketing. Text marketing is a great way to stay connected to your customers, but it is a way that you can send out quick special offers, quick last minute deal reminders. holiday shopping deadlines. And it’s a way to keep the messages personalized because people often, even if you’re using, like tools like Project Broadcast and you’re doing like mass automation messaging, it still comes across as a personal text message. So people are more likely to respond to a text message than they would be to an email. So look into text marketing if you are interested in doing something like this, but I highly recommend it. It is a great service to offer, especially around the holidays. I have a recipe club that I do through text marketing, and I send out a recipe each week. So there’s no sales in this text that goes out. It’s just…recipes and I have customers who sign up for this recipe club I call it and they just get recipes each week. I have a number and it’s unbelievable how many will respond. I have a number of customers will reach back, oh my goodness Lisa that looks so good and then again I go back with a personal message. I know right like let me know when you try it I’d love to hear your thoughts. I had a customer last week saying, oh my goodness, I was just gonna place an order. Now I gotta add that dip mix to the order because that recipe is a must try. So it’s just ways to, and I didn’t even try to sell in these recipes, but it’s just ways to increase your sales, increase your customer retention because you’re providing them extra value. And I’m just pulling recipes off of my e-commerce site that. Epicure already provides for me and I’m just putting it in a cute little message in a text message and I’m sending it off with a nice little personalized little greeting and leaving it that. I’m like not saying there’s no call to action to order now, nothing like that, but it does still get me sales. So I love text marketing.

And then number 10, and I did mention it briefly at the beginning, but make sure you schedule time in for self care. Schedule your family time, schedule where you’re gonna, like no work time, like Lisa is off the clock for sure, because you can easily get burnt out over the holidays. So make sure that you do schedule in time for self care. Maybe say, okay, once I’m done with the November rush, the first week of December. I am going to schedule myself a pedicure just to relax and enjoy me and celebrate all of the wins that I had over November. So guys, I hope that you enjoyed this little walkthrough of the top 10 tips to help you get ready for the holiday season. There is a ton more information. I could probably do two, three, four more podcasts on holiday tips on how to get holiday ready in your business. And we’ll see what I can come up with. So I wanna thank you so much for joining me on another episode of The Other 99%. And we will see you again next week. Take care, bye.