Unbox the Inbox | Email Marketing for Online & Offline Businesses

[FREE Money] How To Maximize Q4 Profits Using Stuff You have Lying Around

• Gary Redmond • Season 1 • Episode 52

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Unlock the secrets to skyrocketing your subscription box profits this holiday season without breaking the bank on ads.

Join me, Gary Redmond, co-founder of BusterBox.com, as we explore the treasure trove of strategies to maximize your Q4 revenue using assets you already have on hand. Discover how to turn your email list and excess stock into gold by creating enticing holiday hampers and gift baskets.

We'll also discuss how to attract new customers and engage those who might not typically subscribe, ensuring your year ends with a profitable bang and a skill set poised to benefit your business for years to come.

We'll dive into the art of festive marketing, highlighting the power of leveraging existing customer relationships to boost Christmas sales.

Through strategic weekly emails, SMS campaigns, and exclusive Christmas deals, you'll learn how to appeal to past and current customers who are primed to make repeat purchases.

Emphasize a Christmas feel in your products, even with simple touches like festive packaging or cards, and simplify the buying process with a "yes email" strategy. 

Plus, discover how to awaken dormant leads with irresistible offers, maximizing sales during this critical time. Prepare to transform your Q4 strategy with creativity, resourcefulness, and a little holiday magic.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome back to Unbox the Inbox with me, your host, gary Redmond. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your subscription business using the power of free and mostly automated email marketing, and we'll hopefully have some fun doing it too. I'm a co-founder of BusterBoxcom and also a mentor and coach, helping founders like me and you create their dream life through their online business. So, on today's episode, I want to talk to you about making money. Okay, which is kind of what we talk about in every episode, but let's just talk about it a little bit more specifically this time. So the title of this one is going to be how to massively boost your subscription box profits in Q4, because I want to help you end this year with a bang, and I mean literally, and that's more profits in your pocket without spending a cent on ads and making, giving yourself a nice Christmas bonus and making sure you have a great holiday season this year. Okay, so we've been acutely aware of this for years. Okay, in terms of not leaving anything, any money, on the table, no matter what. Okay, because around this time of year, people go a bit nuts. Okay, that's true, includes me.

Speaker 1:

Everyone like pretty much from Black Friday to Christmas week, you're overspending. You're buying things You're you know you're getting readyending. You're buying things you're you know you're you're getting ready for Christmas. It's a big. It's a big day, it's a big time of year, particularly in Ireland, same in the US, same in a lot of countries, but in Ireland it's a very big time of year. Christmas, like, most people get together. I think Thanksgiving's probably bigger for you, for people in the US, but UK, ireland, countries like that it's an incredible opportunity to turn the assets that you already have in your business into money. Okay, and that means, like your social following, it's kind of, but definitely your email list, your past customers, your current customers, and you need to make sure that you're actually you understand how you can cash in on the biggest and busiest shopping months of the year without spending any more money on ads.

Speaker 1:

Okay, and that's what you're going to learn today. So stick with me and we're gonna dive in. So let me tell you share a personal story to set the scene here. Okay, so we've always known Q4 is busy. Okay, and it's gonna be big because we just have a golden opportunity to turn excess stock into cash and boost our sales in ways that you just don't really see it two or three times a year. Okay, Because, in ways that you just don't really see it two or three times a year. Okay, because if you've people hanging around your business, they're, for whatever reason, not gonna sign up for your subscription docs. That doesn't mean that they're not going to buy anything from you. And if they are gonna buy anything from you, the time is now okay, and in the last few years alone, we've been able to add, like usually, between 30 and $50,000 in one-time sales through November and December, and it makes our obviously our year-end financials look a whole lot healthier. And when everybody on the team gets a Christmas bonus and everybody has a nice Christmas, okay, but it's not magic. It does come down to a few key tactics that I'm about to walk you through in this episode. So I'm gonna talk to you about maximizing the assets available to you to get as many subscribers as possible, to upsell your current customers as much as possible and to maximize sales from your email list, whether it's subscriptions or non-subscription, all while automation is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Okay, so if you follow this guide, not only could you end the year with more money in the bank, but you'll also pick up the skills that you'll need to keep working for you into 2025 and beyond.

Speaker 1:

Now let's talk about the problem that most subscription box founders face. They simply don't know what to sell, how to position it or how to get it in front of enough people to make a big impact. Over Black Friday, okay, and over this like that period from pretty much mid-November to mid-December, a lot of people get stuck. They have the stock, they know there's potential, but they don't have a clear strategy about how to do it. Okay, but that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. So I'm going to give you five tips to turn Q4 into your most profitable season.

Speaker 1:

So the first one is figuring out what to sell. Okay, so throughout the year, you've probably built up some excess stock, like we've got toys, seasonal items, like sometimes you even have stock from last Christmas lying around, and that's the perfect time to turn that stock into either mystery boxes or holiday hampers. Okay, the first we're going to talk about is holiday hampers or gift baskets, okay, so what we do is we create, like we ordered in these gift baskets, and we usually create in order. We call them hampers. You might call them gift baskets. I'm going to keep calling them hampers, because that's what we call them.

Speaker 1:

We create like a Christmas hamper and we usually have two or three different pricing tiers. Okay, we have like a small, a medium, uh, you know like sorry, small, medium and large. Last year I think we only did medium and large, so maybe just going to stick with two tiers. But basically it's relatively simple. Shit guys, right, get a basket in order, some red wrinkle paper, you know, christmas cards, maybe, whatever you want to do and then put the, take, take all your stock and package them together and sell it for at least 50 margin. Okay, and people are willing to spend. People's like average ticket and average spend that they're willing to to pay around christmas time goes up a lot.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so we might put in like one and a half to two boxes worth of products Like, say, one and a half boxes worth of products into a gift basket, into a hamper, and sell it for like twice the price of a box. But it works because People just want a simple gift that's just going to go under the tree and in our case it's for their dog. For you, it could be for anybody, but people are willing to spend more for convenience. If they just order from us the dog's Christmas present sorted, same with you. If you're not dogs, whatever your niche is, you can just package these things up and sell it for more than what you'd probably be able to sell them individually or even in your box. So, for example, we've priced hampers before between 75 and 120 pounds.

Speaker 1:

Used to have one in Ireland for 139.99, which included a dog bed, in fairness, but like 140 euro people were paying for like Christmas present for their dog. Even a lot of them were actually already our customers, so they already had a box coming and they were like paying another 140 euro to get more dog toys and treats and a dog bed. So that's one very important and very easy way to turn your excess stock into, uh, into products and into something you can charge a lot of money for. Okay, so that's good for current customers, for non-customers, people who've been hanging around your email list another one here, um, if you're for kind of the smaller, kind of the smaller ticket size but also people from who may be on your email list and who won't sign up for us for whatever reason, right, so people are just not into a subscription box. They have a dog. The dog loves toys and treats, but they just don't want to sign up for a subscription. We've got 200 000 people on our email list and I can tell you now we don't have 200 000 subscribers for our box. So it means there's a lot of people in there who have some interest in probably something that we sell, but don't want to sign up for a subscription.

Speaker 1:

So what do we do? We create a mystery box and it's a christmas mystery box, okay. So again, these can be sold on social media. Get people to comment if they want to get one, or you can just set it to your email list. What we'll do is we'll usually send out an email. I'll talk about the sales channels later in this episode, but for now we're just going to figure out what we're going to sell. So we're going to package things up and we're going to like.

Speaker 1:

The word mystery, by the way, just drives conversions through the roof for some reason, and again, when people are in buying mode, they usually want more stuff, not a cheaper price. So if you can give like oh, our standard box has five items, but our Christmas mystery box has seven, it's upgraded, and it's the price of a box. Or box has seven, it's upgraded and it's the price of a box, or like in our case it would be a little bit more expensive than our six or twelve month subscriptions. It would be like, probably priced around the one month and but instead of giving a discount, we give more things. Okay, because again, it's kind of the time of year where people are willing to spend, but if they can give them better value, um, it kind of that's a better offer, usually, in my opinion, around christmas time, than giving discounts.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so we've got hampers, you've got mystery boxes, but you don't need to limit yourself to what's typically in your box. Okay, like you can think about what else your customer might need. In our case, we have customers with dogs, so they might need beds, collars, portraits. We sold one year, like other things, that outside of the box or outside of hampers and boxes. You can think about other things. Another one is is gift vouchers? Okay, so after the 15th of december we don't have any more shipments going usually. So what we do is we'll send a blast in the last week of december and be like oh, your gift vouchers, you know, you know, if you, if you forgot to get someone a present, you can order a buster box gift voucher. So, again, think about other ways you can leverage and you can make it easier for people to get simple presents for their family, for themselves, whatever it is, and you'll figure out exactly how to make more money.

Speaker 1:

Another thing what you can do is, once you've decided what to sell, is to actually obviously this is an obvious one okay, but put the word Christmas in there or, like make it feel festive. So even if you're using your products, like sometimes our Christmas boxes may contain one or two Christmas toys, but it's Christmas packaging and it's a Christmas mystery box. We don't say every item is going to be Christmas themed and we get very, very few complaints, at least if it's one or two of the items are Christmas themed and we've just changed the packaging, maybe, and include maybe a Christmas card, and the more Christmassy it feels, the better it will sell. But again, we're just turning over stock from our warehouse. We're turning stock into cash at Christmas time, the best time of year when people are willing to pay, and it works every single time. So that's the fourth one, and the fifth one is then just how we're going to sell these. Okay, this is the fifth step.

Speaker 1:

So, once we've decided, we're going to package up. We're going to make high ticket products. We're going to make a high ticket hamper. We're going to make mid to low ticket mystery boxes. We're going to figure out what our customers might need, whether it's dog beds whatever in our case or gift vouchers which could be for you. We're going to make them Christmas themed and then we're going to sell them.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so the best people to sell to are people who are already giving you money or have already given you their email. Okay, because these are the most people likely to buy from you, because they've already had a positive experience. They haven't unsubscribed from your email list. They haven't unsubscribed from your box. Hopefully, and this is the best way that we found to maximize that potential, potential cash in your business, and the best time of year to do it is now.

Speaker 1:

So the first thing, the first way we do that, is we have an online store totally separate to our subscription box, different url. We don't mix the messaging. We have our subscription box website for subscribers. What we do is we do have an online store on Shopify and what we do is we'll send emails at least once a week leading up to leading up to Christmas and actually, like, we do sales or we might do a pretty, you know, an early, an early bird discount, or we might do like a small discount on the hampers, or I mentioned the fact to get an upgrade, an upgraded box or whatever it is we essentially send, we put these products into our store and we send emails to our list and to our customers. Okay, that's the first way. The second way, um, is what we do is we'll send a yes email. Okay, basically, what it means is we'll pick a specific product and we'll basically have a story about the product. We'll have some, we'll have a reason why they should buy now, and then we'll have some urgency and we'll ask the customers to reply yes. Usually this is only going to go to your customers, and the reason why is because you already have them in your stripe or in your subli and you can build their card automatically. So when they reply yes, they basically consent for you to add this to their next shipment and it works obviously really well november, december. So, hey, we have a christmas hampers, we have mystery boxes if you want to get one for a friend, or we have this upgrade that you can get. Just reply yes and we'll add it to your next shipment. They reply yes and we usually get hundreds of sales, sometimes 200 and 250 sales. We got from a christmas advent calendar in september this year, so it's really, really valuable.

Speaker 1:

Another tip you can do um and actually no. I'm going to talk about that in a second. So the third thing you can do is use sms. So I mentioned about this before in one of my previous episodes that SMS is very important for us, usually the last Friday of the month when people get paid, okay. So what we do is we usually blast our past customer list and we ask them to resubscribe, um, but around Christmas time what you can do is you can, you can do past customers and you can do current customers, because you have their phone number as long as they've given you consent, which should be in your privacy policy when they sign up. We'll basically like same thing, same same, same, exact thing. It's either going to be a link to the store or reply, usually with with the sms. We just link them to the store, but again, it's the same thing. But sms has a much higher open rate than email.

Speaker 1:

So we'll blast either our current or past customer list usually our past customer list getting to come back and we'll say, like, come back, get a christmas box for free if you sign up for six and twelve months. Really good offer, really good timing, because they want to get something for the dog for christmas and it works really well. The second thing we do is blast our customers and tell them you know last time to order, or you know, you know we're running a payday sale and all of our christmas gifts head over here and buy again. It's just following up with the people you've already got access to and you can already contact. Okay, and don't forget the dormant leads which, as I mentioned, another thing you can do is to get subscribers around.

Speaker 1:

This time of year is again, leverage that Christmas messaging, leverage that you know we miss. You. Come back, you gotta get a box for Christmas. You know it's November. You know it's November, you know it's the last chance to order a Christmas box. Reactivate now and we'll give you X free gift or X free box, but you have to sign up for six or 12 months, okay. So this is all the ways you can reactivate your past customers. Sell things to your email list if they're not willing to sign up for your subscription and sell more to your current customers.

Speaker 1:

Okay, all these ways work so well. We've literally made thousands and thousands of dollars and euros and pounds every year doing this, and I have no problem telling you about this because it works for me and I'm gonna be doing it this year too, and we're gonna get a nice Christmas bonus and, if you wanna do it, implement what you learn on this podcast episode, okay. So why does this work? Okay, and why is it so effective? It's pretty simple, because you're taking the assets you already have your stock, your customer base and your email list and you're just leveraging them in a way that feels fresh, festive and making it easy for your customers and more convenient for them to solve a problem around Christmas time, okay. And the beauty of this approach is it costs you almost nothing, but it has the potential to add thousands to your bottom line. This might make your business profitable for the year. Okay, thousands to your bottom line, this might make your business profitable for the year, okay. So I said, november and december, for the last eight years running, has been our most profitable months of the year, and we always get a christmas bonus, and so does our team and we always get a really, really nice end of the year. January might be a different story now, of course, because everybody wants to get cancel their subscriptions in january, but at least in december you can build up some buffer and have yourself ready to ride the wave in January.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so to recap, here's the five steps to boosting your subscription box profits this Q4. Number one turn your excess stock into high ticket hampers. Number two create a Christmas mystery box for one-off buyers on your email list, people who won't sign up for your subscription. Number three think of other things you can sell to your customers outside of your typical subscription that they might love. Number four make everything christmas themed to make it convenient and make it relevant for your customers at this time of year. And number five sell to sell it to them using your online store yes emails and also sms, and literally that's all you have to do. So if you put these strategies into action, you not only have more cash in your pocket by the end of the year, but also you'll actually develop these skills. We continually use yes emails and store emails then throughout the year not to the same level, because obviously people go into a frenzy this time of year, but it is a skill that you can use to continually find ways to make money from your customer list and your email list into 2025 and beyond.

Speaker 1:

So, if this sounds interesting to you guys, I am running a workshop on this, on this entire process, on October 23rd 2024. And if you want to get access to that, you can email cashfriday to gary at garyredmondnet, or you can message me on Facebook or whatever and let me know if you want to get access to the workshop. Or if you're on my email list, you will receive emails about it. And if you're not on my email list, you can go to subboxsecretscom and you can sign up for my list there. We'll also get my subscription box launch bundle. So I'm running a workshop. It's called cash friday, october 23rd to 25th, three-day workshop. You'll work directly with me and feel free to join my email list or message me or ask me in the group if you want to get access other than that. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. If you have any topics you'd like to recommend, and I'd be happy to hear from you. And other than that, I will see you on the next episode of unbox, the inbox. Have a good week.

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