[0:09:53] – Tips for leveraging Cyber Monday include setting a goal for the day, testing different offers, using flash sales/promos with countdown timers, sending emails and SMS, and doing some hustling like direct outreach if goals are not being met.

[0:19:44] – Suggestions for direct outreach include messaging past customers who have purchased similar products that are being promoted.

[0:28:47] – Additional tips include using spend and save promotions with gift cards instead of discounts, and adding live chat to the website.

[0:33:47] – The host recaps the tips and emphasizes that they can be applied to other promotions like Christmas sales as well. Getting input from others is advised.

Salena Knight 0:02
Hey there, and welcome to the bringing business to retail podcast. If you’re looking to get more sales, more customers, master your marketing, and ultimately take control of your retail or E commerce business, then you’re in the right place. I’m Celina Knight, a retail growth strategist and multi award winning store owner whose superpower is uncovering exactly what your business requires. To move to the next level. I’ll provide you with the strategies, the tools and the insight you need to scale your store. All you need to do is take action. Ready to get started.

Salena Knight 0:51
There, welcome to today’s episode of The bringing business to retail podcast. I recorded today’s episode, it is cyber monday here in Australia today. And I’ve just realized that we are less than one month till Christmas, we’re talking like three weeks until Christmas, five weeks till the end of the year. Holy cripple. Where did this year go? Surely I am not the only person who thinks this year just disappeared in a flash inside of our home, we have been doing like chipping away at all of those little things that we if you’ve been listened to the podcast for a while, you know that I talked about the fact that we’ll be feeling at home soon. And we’ve been here for 17 years. And so there’s so many little things that need to be done. It’s been just what we all have been just chipping away this weekend, I put up some Peel and Stick wallpaper, I’ll take a picture and post it on my socials and did a little bit of gardening. And good as Oh, and painting. So I started doing that ultimate job of painting and picking out tiles for the front stairs. And last putting all the Pinterest boards together. I love finding the deals. And so actually, this Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I bought all the flooring for our house, I’d already picked it out. And I was just waiting for those deals to come. And sure enough, I think I saved like another 15% Which when we’re talking 1000s of dollars, that is a lot of money. And I have found that this cheese deals a little bit. I don’t know, they’re just not that appealing for me. So I actually did a shout out on Facebook and shared i a whole bunch of retail and E commerce stores that follow us all of their deals. And that led me to today’s episode, which was all which is all about how to leverage Cyber Monday to get the most out of this Black Friday cyber weekend. And as I was recording it, I realized that these tips are perfectly fine to use anytime of the year. And so I thought you know what we’re going to scrap today’s of this week’s episode, today’s episode, we’ll move it down the line a little bit, because I think in this period, when you’re probably going to make the most amount of money ever. All these tips that I’m giving giving you today, you can use right through to Christmas right through to your post Christmas sales. And before I get even any further down the line, can I just say that, please, please, please make sure to have all that Christmas stock cleared out, do not, under any circumstances, think that you should be putting it back in the warehouse or putting it back in the storeroom and keeping it until next year. Not on my watch. I want you to have that stuff cleared out by Christmas Eve worst case scenario by Boxing Day. worst worst case scenario, by the end of December, I want you to have that stuff gone, it is not doing you or your customers or your bank account any favors while it is sitting in your shop, in your store in your warehouse, any of those places. So as we are wrapping up this year, I just want to say thank you so much for being part of this podcast, I get messages from people and you have no idea how heartwarming it is for me to read those messages. Because when I record these episodes, you know, I’m sitting here, it’s like I’m talking to myself, which you know, I do quite a lot, but you don’t get any feedback. And when I get those messages. Yeah, they absolutely make my day and reviews. I love reviews even more. Because, you know, I have this saying you’ve been listening to the podcast, you’ve heard me say it, the more money we make, the more people we serve. It’s the same with the podcast, the more reviews I get, the more people we can serve. And don’t think of other independent retailers as your competition. I want you to think of them as a part of this ecosystem, that the more independent retailers we have, the more choices our customers have, and it’s not. It doesn’t have to be all about going to the big box stores or going to the big malls. People actually love of shopping ad they love shopping local. So let’s try and spread the word around and keep as many businesses that are independent as possible. Alrighty, so that’s my little wrap up for this week. And let’s jump into today’s episode where I’m going to share with you a bunch of strategies that you can use to make sure that your promotions make as many sales as possible. Alrighty, let’s jump in. Well, we are at 8:25pm, on what is cyber monday here in Australia. Now with that, I know in America, you guys have still got a little bit of time yet. But with that, Cyber Monday is the biggest spending day of the entire year. Now I know not everybody who follows me is participating in Black Friday, Cyber Monday, totally up to you. Personally, I see the benefits in it, because it’s a great opportunity for you to keep your customers because at the end of the day, if your competitors have got a really great offer that your customers like, they’re going to shop with them rather than shopping with you. It kind of is one of those things where I feel like you need to be you kind of need to play the game. But totally up to you whether you would like to participate or not. If you are participating, and I am so proud of some of our 5x and scale your store and efficacy Oh members who have just absolutely crushed it. So shout out to you guys. I’m hearing on the Friday you smashed your your goals. Like everything after that was gravy. Now whether you’ve met your goals or not, well, first up props to you because you have goals. And inside of our programs, we always teach having basic goals and stretch goals. So base goals are the goals that you want to hit and stretch goals. Or if you hit that, like what’s the next what’s next for us, because what you really don’t want is to get complacent. Because if you hit your goal, quite often what can happen is you take your foot off the pedal, which means you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. However, if you have that stretch goal in place, then you have something else to work towards. And it’s always good for your team. Whether that team is you or you and a sales associate or you and pickers and packers it doesn’t matter how many people are in that team. It’s a great thing to have a goal to strive through, strive to. And if you are in any of my programs, or if you’ve bought any of my my nine ways masterclass if you’ve done our scale masterclass any of those things, you will know that I have given you a campaign debrief. And so that campaign debrief form is essential for you moving forward, you know, obviously, over Black Friday, Cyber Monday, if you are doing different deals each day, I would be filling out one of those campaign debriefs every single day. And if you’re watching this live, if you comment debrief, I will get the team to send you a copy of that debrief form so you can have it as well, completely free. If you’ve woken up to Cyber Monday in Australia, or if you’re about to wake up to Cyber Monday, everywhere else in the world. The simple fact is, you’re participating, you want to leverage this day as much as possible. Because here is what has happened. A lot of people are like me, I just spent many 1000s of dollars on new flooring for the house that we’re going to sell. Great opportunity, I got a huge bargain. So yay. But I’ve been just sitting back I’ve got my list. And I’ve been sitting back to see what happens on Cyber Monday. Because the big players know that this is the biggest spending time of the year. So all the deals come out today. Now, the other thing is a lot of people just kind of wait and see because a lot of these deals go through for the whole weekend. So the whole four days. So they’ll just wait. And then what happens is we get to the end and then they go in and they start buying some people holding out to see if the offers get better. Other people’s are just holding out because, you know, they just didn’t make still deciding or they’re not quite sure waiting to see if maybe some of the other brands that they follow bring out deals, or there’s lots of reasons why people leave it to today. But the data shows us today is the today being southern Monday here in Australia is the biggest spending day of the year. So with that in mind, I just jotted down some quick notes on what you can do to leverage today. I know that it might be last minute for you. But whether you’ve hit your goals or whether you are still struggling to hit your goals, maybe some 123 of these will be able to help you.

Salena Knight 9:53
So let’s jump in. Alright, the first thing is If you haven’t already set a goal, I want you to set a goal for today doesn’t have to be, you know, ignore everything else that has happened up until today, apart from using it to potentially create your goals, but I want you to create a Cyber Monday goal, make sure you have that base goal and then as your stretch goal, and then you quite simply want to reverse engineer that. So to hit that number divided by your average order value, how many orders do you have to get how many sales do you have to get. And then if you have a bricks and mortar store, or you’ve got an e commerce Store, you’d have to divide that by how many, how many people do you need coming in the door or to the website, now you have a perfectly acceptable goal that you can work towards. i If you listen to the podcast, you’ll know that I talk quite often about using Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend, to test different offers to see what your customers like. So this is a great opportunity for you to Cyber Monday to be testing different offers. So I’m a big fan of do more of what works simple. So if you have an offer that’s been running that has been like doing really, really well, up until now, I’m not saying get rid of that maybe you’re going to add a few extra things in. But if you are not at your goal right now, or if you need a way to change it up, this is your opportunity because we like we know, lots of things happens on stuff on Cyber Monday. And so this is the you don’t have to know that you didn’t plan this stuff. I have seen flash sales go out every single hour. That’s a bit hard work. But maybe you might use today to release you know, to flash sale options or flash promos I say sale, what I really mean it as a sale or promotion. So maybe you’re not discounting, maybe you’re doing bundling, maybe doing upsells cross sells all that kind of stuff. So this is your opportunity to put them out there and not have your customers feel like you’re deep discounting or you know that they’ve been the, I guess neglected. Alright, so this is your opportunity to change things up. And so flash sales or flash promos are a great opportunity to do that. And then what have you done that worked? And then what can you do to either like, if it’s worked, what can you do to expand on that, or what is a similar offer. So maybe you have done, I know one of our clients does by to get the third free. Now, just quick sidebar here, I see a lot of people inside of our group saying a buy two, get one, three. Now, don’t confuse your customers. Because to me, that is if I buy too, one of them is going to be free. I know what you guys really mean is buy to get the third free. Because you’re going to say, well, if I say buy one, get one free, that’s fine, buy two, get one free. Just remember, customers are looking for a bargain. So they’re going to interpret whatever it is that they want to interpret. So please be really clear in your office. If you are doing a buy two, get one free, but what you really mean is buy to get the third free, please say that really, really logically and clearly. So we have somebody who that offer works really, really well for. So what is a similar offer that you could put together that is in that same vein, and maybe it is in by the shampoo and conditioner and get a trial size hair treatment. And you’d have to sell beauty goods. But you know, what is something that you can add on to make people buy because you’re not discounting? I’m not a huge fan of discounting. There’s a time and a place for discounting. But Black Friday doesn’t have to be all about discounting, I have to say I’ve seen a lot of independent and brands. This year doing lots more value adds rather than discounting and yet fair enough to the economic climate, it is much cheaper to especially if you manufacture your own product to gift a product because the cost to you is so small but the perceived value to your customers is really really high. So start changing out some offers. Maybe you can just get one extra offer or two extra offers. Realistically. You can put that together in your website usually really, really quickly. send out an email, send out a text message. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Like one word. You know for the next two hours. Buy to get the third free buy the shampoo conditioner get the trial hair size two hours only. Which leads me to my next thing is if you are not using countdown timers at a time like now you need to be I use countdown timers in all of my promotions in my most recent promotion that I did, which was for my Ultimate Black Friday sales bundle, which actually showed you how to create Black Friday sales. We had people emailing saying that they had had that product in their car, which I talked about on the podcast, that had it in their cart for weeks, but never actually went through with the purchase until the countdown timer went up. I think I worked out that we had about a 300% increase in sales over the same promo promo last year. And the only thing we did differently was that we put the countdown timer in. So if you are not using a countdown timer, and especially one that syncs to your email, and to your website, then you should be I have a great one that I use a proper link to it below in the show notes. There’s a currently a deal where it’s 57 US dollars, which is ridiculously cheap. That’s kind of what you would pay for a month for most of the other brands. And you get lifetime access. And it syncs across web pages, collection pages, and in your email. So it’s all nice and clean and tidy. And oh, gee, they work. So especially if we’re going back to these flash sales and flash promos, or something like that, being able to know that regardless of when it goes out, because let’s be honest, let me just check my email here. I think I woke up to my personal email, too. What have I got 2468. So I’ve got 10 on screen 1234. But I probably got 50 emails today. Now, let’s be honest, not everybody’s going to open every single email. So making sure that your subject line and even that little preview text is the reason that someone will open. And so what will happen now is email servers will be full, they are going to be on overload. So there’s a good chance that if you send an email out a specific time, it doesn’t actually go out at that time happens all the time, it may go out 15 minutes later, half an hour later, an hour later, even a couple of hours later, depending on your email service provider. So taking that into account, something like a countdown timer is going to be really, really clear. So instead of saying it ends in one hour, or what happens if the customer doesn’t get that email for an hour, whereas if you say ending soon, and there’s a countdown timer is really, really clear when the promo is empty, empty, empty, not empty, ending. So if you want that, I’ll put the link in the show notes. And also, we’re live. I’m live streaming this under Facebook right now. So I’ll pop it into Facebook and in the Facebook group. All right. I just talked about email, and SMS. This is your opportunity. If you haven’t used it before to use it. If you’re using it, you can send it again, I can’t even tell you how many SMSs I’ve received in the last couple of days, I didn’t unsubscribe from any of them. Because I was interested in what the deals were. Nobody spammed me. But this is your opportunity to send one, if not two messages if you’ve got a really loyal following. Now, just going back to the promo that we ran recently, for that Black Friday deal. What we did is, instead of replying stop to opt out, which was still there at the beginning of the promo, which was required to be there. What we then did is said on the end of each email, reply purple to opt out of the Black Friday deal messages, something along those lines. So what it meant was people could unsubscribe from this promotion, but not unsubscribed from our list. So we just had they just came out of the segment, if they replied purple. And the great thing about that was yes, we did get people replying purple. For the amount of people that we have on our on our email and SMS list, it was relatively small, but that gave them the option. And so they could opt out stop to get everything removed text messaging, or they could opt out purple to get rid of Black Friday. And so maybe that’s something if you didn’t do that this time around. Maybe that is something that you could do next time around. But please, please, please be emailing. If you have my ultimate promo run sheet, I walk you through how many emails you should be sending out, then it’s probably more than you think. And definitely be sending out one if not two SMSs. And maybe you even just send out that second SMS, to your bargain hunters. If you have segmented your email list. You know who those sale hands are the ones who are always looking for the best deals, maybe you just send it out to them. They’ll actually be happy that you sent it to them. Okay, my next thing is if you are

Salena Knight 19:44
not quite at your goal, and you want to hit it, now is the time that you do a little bit of hustling. I’m not a huge fan of hustling but every now and then I want you to do it. And this is the time when you can take that little bit of extra opportunity So what I would love you to do is if you’re, if you’re struggling to meet your goal, go and look at the people who generally buy the things that you are promoting. So inside of your own customer database, do other people who buy the things that you’re promoting. And if they haven’t bought this time around, I want you to wait for it. Send them a DM, send them some kind of message, maybe just reach out personally with a personal SMS. Or I’m gonna go away for it, pick up the phone and call them. I know. I mean, I love picking up the phone and calling people but not everybody will necessarily answer the phone. But this is the opportunity where you could go in and send a personalized SMS that says something like, Hey, Sarah, I know that you love X brand, just wanted to let you know, we have a promo on for them ends today, click here, make sure you put the call to action. But if you are going to hustle and this, honestly, I have seen these make 10s of 1000s of dollars. If you’ve got a team, get them onto it. But even if they each message or called or spoke to or DMS, five people, how many extra dollars could that bring that might bring you in an extra 500,000 $2,000. I am all for getting out there and doing the work when you need it. So, send the DMS, pick up the phone. And the other thing I was my next next thing, go through my list, I have two more things. The next thing if you haven’t already considered it is the whole spend and save. I am a firm. I don’t like discounting. I don’t like taking money out of your business. Because most of the time, it’s pure profit. And it’s generally not an amount that customers would have chosen to shop with you anyway, they did some some research and the amount that will make a customer decide to buy something in Black Friday that they wouldn’t maybe necessarily buy the thing that the day number, the magic number that swayed people was a 38% discount. I think that’s what it was often maybe more, but it was pretty sure so yeah. So if you’re not offering those kinds of huge discounts, which if you’re reselling other people’s products, you don’t have the margin to do that. If you’re making your own product, then you probably can do that. But that number is, it’s insane. And this is why I don’t advocate you trying to do discounting for things like Black Friday, unless it’s sales stock that you really need to get off your hands and just cash it in, that’s fine. But something like spend and save, so spend and save, just in case you’re not familiar, it’s called something else where you are, that is where you might say, you know, spend $200, get a $20 Well don’t not a $20 discount, you want to give them a $20 gift card. Okay, so that money never actually leaves your business. And that $20 to you, if you have a margin of 50% is actually only worth $10. And if you’re paying $10 to get a sale freaking he’ll do that every single day of the year. That is a cheap cost of acquisition. So spend and save, spend 200, get a $20 gift voucher spend 300, get a $30 gift voucher. Now these gift vouchers here in Australia, when you buy a gift voucher might be different where you live, you have to give that gift voucher a minimum of three years lifespan, which is huge, right? That’s a huge liability to be carrying on your balance sheet. But that’s the way it is. However, these promotional gift vouchers, they can have whatever timeframe on them that you want. And so what you might be looking for is which of those slow periods that you know that you struggle to get people in? Can you say, spend $200 and get $20 to use during that, you know, maybe it’s July and August to use during July and August. Random I know, but you could give it a try. Or you just simply put a 60 day limit on it, or maybe even a 30 day limit on it. Like it’s totally up to you. Where do you need the cash flow in your business? Do you actually want to spread it out? So we use use this all the time in our business and it always worked well. And we always used to say you know keep it for yourself or gift it now because it’s a gift card, you can give that to a friend. They don’t know you didn’t pay for it. So maybe you know you’ve got the Secret Santa coming up or you’ve got the you know, the gift for the teacher or something along those lines. The spend and save doesn’t have to be spending spending save in a gift voucher doesn’t have to be for that person to come back and spend. In fact, let me let you in on a little secret. When I had my stores. We used to double that amount if it was gifted to someone else. Let me explain the logic behind that. If I gave you a $20 gift voucher to come back in us, great. cost to me around $10, fantastic, you’re happy you got $20, you come back you buy something. However, if you give that to a friend who’s never been to my business before, then my cost to acquire that new customer is $20. So going with 50% margin $40 gift card. My bet cost to me is $20. Because the cost price essentially one comes in whatever they buy, I’m only paying my wholesale price. So $20 to acquire a new customer do that every single day of the week as well, because that is a brilliant cost per acquisition. So maybe be thinking about is that an offer that you can put in place, which is if you gift this to somebody else, you got to work out the logistics, I don’t know what systems you’re using. But maybe they just submit it, you know, maybe they submit their gift card into a form and then it generates a new one, you can automate this process. But is that something your competitors aren’t doing that? Trust me, I’ll be reading all the offers, which is why I’ve got 50 emails already this morning. I’ve been watching the offers, that offer is not out there. So maybe that is one you could you know, cash in your gift voucher to give to a friend and they get double. Kudos, that might be something that works for you. Alright, and my last one is, do you have live chat on your website, because I need to buy some fancy pants, LED lights to fit behind this ledge wall ledge that I’m going to be building in one of the bedrooms before we sell. Now, I’ve been looking at LED lights and I don’t want the ones that look like little dots. I want the beautiful kind of warm glowing ones. And so I’m looking around Black Friday deals Cyber Monday deals awesome. I found a brand. I don’t know if it’s the one that I want, because the pictures they show on the website are never quite the pictures that you actually get now. Great. I can give them a call today. And hopefully they can answer my question. But if they had live chat, I would have bought those already. So whether you have live chat, outsourced to a VA or you do it in house in your team, I could have at least sent the message and known that somebody would get back to me today, maybe the answer would be they’re already in my inbox. So live chat is going to significantly reduce the friction of somebody purchasing. So if you don’t have live chat on your website, then I would 100% encourage you to get that put on putting myths like Facebook Messenger. That’s kind of my favorite because now we’re building like a Facebook Messenger list. And we could be DMing people, all that kind of stuff, topic for a different day. But putting something like Facebook Messenger onto your website, even if you have nothing else, at least means that you can communicate with your customers. Alrighty, so let me just quickly recap how you can leverage Cyber Monday. First off, make sure that you have your goals set out even if it’s just for today. Maybe if you maybe do really, really well. And it’s time to like re renegotiate those goals, like go back and set some new targets, I want you to think about changing it up. If you’ve got an offer that’s working, keep it but if maybe the offers that you put out weren’t necessarily working, this is your opportunity to maybe put one, two, maybe even three different offers out there today. Or if you have an offer that did work, maybe you throw something a little bit, a new test out there to get people back. Think about using this opportunity to do those flash sales or flash promos just for a few hours, which means you’re gonna need a countdown timer. I’ll pop a link below. Remember that these are, I’m saying

Salena Knight 28:47
as I go through these, I’m saying them for Cyber Monday. But if you are running any kind of promotion, maybe you’re doing a product launch, maybe to be your your January sales, anything like that your run up to Christmas, everything I’m telling you you can use for those promos as well. It doesn’t have to be Cyber Monday that just happens to be when I’m going live today. But all of this stuff you could be doing on any multi day promotion that you’re running. Okay, so go change it up flush though. Countdown Timer. Make sure you sending out those emails and SMS is, trust me you’re probably not sending enough. Send those DMS, pick up the phone, send them a personalized SMS is if you’re going to do a spend and save. Make sure it’s as a gift card and think about when you want that gift card to be redeemable. Maybe you’ll throw in that extra offer of doubling the gift card if they gift it to a friend and making sure you put live chat on to the website. Alrighty, I hope that this has been super helpful for you whether it is for Cyber Monday when you’re listening to this live or if you’re listening to this. Oh, I think I might replay this one on the podcast this week. I think it’s really beneficial going into the Christmas holiday period. So you can use all of these same things for your Christmas promos, your January promos, any promo really. And if you need help with this stuff, then please reach out and talk to myself on my team and see if we can help you because this is the best time of the year for you guys to be making money. And realistically, if you don’t have someone to bounce ideas off of, if you are going into this blind, then you’ve got to wait another 12 months. There’s no do overs for this year. And it’s funny because I see people at this time of year saying, Oh, I’m too busy, to, you know, to turn up to a call with their coach, or I’m too busy today, you aren’t too busy, right? If you aren’t too busy, then you’ve got bigger problems at hand. But if you are not leveraging that board of people around you, who can help you to grow your business, and to leverage what is working and to stop hemorrhaging the things that aren’t, then, you know, I’m going to say that that’s not really thinking with a CEO mindset that’s thinking with a very shopkeeper mindset, because right now, I am using this time, and reaching out to everybody that I know, oh, I want to run this, should I do this? If you think that you don’t need help at the busiest time of the year, I want you to just, you know, maybe just have this percolating in the back of your mind. Because what you’re really saying is, you don’t want this to be the most successful time of year for you. Because if you did, you know that old saying of when you say you’re too busy, what you’re really saying is this is not a priority. If you think this is not a priority, then we need to have a really serious conversation this time of year, or 99% of you listening is the priority. And if you don’t have that community, if you don’t have Yeah, I’m not saying you need to have a coach. But if you don’t have I call it your personal advisory board. You don’t have that advisory board around you who’s telling you stop spending money on their ads or start spending money. Oh, that really worked. You should be doing that? Oh, yes, let’s check your emails, all those kinds of things, then, you know, I want you to weigh out what you want for next year. Because this is the time when you make the money. And if you can’t see that, and if you can’t appreciate that help to leverage these times of yours is what any good business person would do, then maybe you’re not all in on this. I’m just saying. But with that, if you’re watching this live on socials, make sure you watch the when I when I put this live on the podcast, we always you know, throw up the reel and whatnot. If you comment debrief, I will send you that campaign debrief form. And if you need some help growing your business, reach out, send me a DM, I’ll get you want to call with someone from my team, and we can see if we can help you already. Let me know. Now you go over Black Friday, Cyber Monday. I love hearing all the stories. And I love seeing all the offers. Alrighty guys, thank you so much. Make this your best Cyber Monday yet. So that’s a wrap. I’d love to hear what insight you’ve gotten from this episode, and how you’re going to put it into action. If you’re a social kind of person, follow me at the Selenite and make sure to leave a comment and let me know. And if this episode made you think a little bit differently, or gave you some inspiration, or perhaps gave you the kick that you needed to take action. Then please take a couple of minutes to leave me a review on your platform of choice. Because the more reviews the show gets, the more independent retail and E commerce stores just like yours, that we can help to scale. And when that happens, it’s a win for you. A win for your community, and a win for your customers. I’ll see you on the next episode.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai