Salena Knight
Welcome to the Bringing Business to Retail podcast where we talk all about solutions to make money and grow your retail or e-commerce store. I'm Selena Knight and thank you so much for joining me. Now every retail and e-commerce store owner that I have ever worked with has what I call a marketing graveyard. It is full of bundles, those gift with purchase, the promos that you ran once and you watched almost nothing happen with, and you mentally filed them under that doesn't work for my store.

I've done it too. You try something, it doesn't land, and the story that you tell yourself is that your customers just don't want that product. And so you move on, you try something else. And the cycle repeats. More effort to create more marketing and more product in the hopes that they'll sell. Here's what gets me about that. Most of the time, what I see is that you have no idea whether it was the offer or the product that actually failed.

Or whether you just never gave it a fair shot. You felt like it flopped, and that feeling becomes the verdict. And nobody questions the verdict because it is your store, it is your gut, and your gut has earned the right to be trusted. Except your gut might be the most expensive person on your team. And the part that nobody talks about is how tiring this gets. You can run offer after offer and stay busy. You can keep trying things and still not be able to tell what is the stuff that actually moved the business forward and what is the stuff that you talked yourself into calling a win or a loss. And that's what I want to get into today. This is a short episode. It is pulled from a live strategy session with the powerhouse retailer Jill from the Stitchery Fabric Store in British Columbia. Remember, where focus goes, money flows. So let's get into it.

Jill Schuler
I was wondering, I've tried a few where you do like bundle deals and gifts with purchase and can't quite seem to hit on the right mix. And I'm wondering if you've ever tried like something that has a bit of choice in it because we're a maker store. So people are putting together their own things or is keeping it simple.

Salena Knight
I think just tell everybody what you sell

Jill Schuler
Fabrics and patterns and kits and things for sewing and quilting.

Salena Knight
Okay, so a couple of things. Why have the other ones not quite landed? like looking at the data? So we're always going back to the data. It's never about I feel, right? Like if you ever tell me I feel something, I just slap you and say come back when you have the data. Like it doesn't matter. Because usually what you feel is actually wrong once you show me the data. So we go back and look at out of the things that sold, what were the things that that they had in common?

Like was it because I know your business? Was it that, it was the ones that had Liberty Fabric? Is it the ones that had a print and a plane or a print and a pattern that went with it? And pattern by that I mean like a sewing pattern, not a patterned piece of fabric. Like looking at what did the things have in common? And then are the things that didn't sell the same or were they different? So for example, you might say,

Okay, the the bundle that we did well was if you bought the fabric and the sewing pattern, that did really well. But when we did buy three fabrics from this range, it didn't. Which basically tells us the person who's buying wants like the the solution of everything in one versus just some choice. Does it make sense?

Jill Schuler
Yeah, I need to go look. I think that's the problem. I haven't figured it out because each one has had so few hits that so I need to go back and look and see if I can figure out some patterns.

Salena Knight
Okay, so what I would then say is coming back to the data, is did we not just get enough traffic? Like are we making this? Are we making this decision off the fact that not enough people saw the offer? In which case, if our data point is like five sales, we don't have enough data to make that decision. And so we have to go back even further and say, going back to all the way back to the beginning of.

Was it the right campaign? Was it aligned with what my customers wanted? If I looked at the messaging, was that what they were looking for? Okay, you know, tick, tick, tick. Did enough people see it? Yes, I look at the data. Tick, tick, tick, I'm good there. Did we use the right campaign type? Tick, tick, tick, I'm good there. Of those people, does it make sense that the people bought. Because I'm gonna hazard a guess. There are things along the way, but I know you've ramped up the marketing.

But there were probably things along the way that if we would have done them differently, we may have gotten a different result. But in saying that, I would still take the sales that you did have and look at if it's, you know, if it's not a huge amount of amount of sales, like look at the people who bought and then go, ⁓ okay, you know, that was Sarah. Sarah bought the pattern and the thing, but actually when I look at what Sarah buys, she clearly loves to make X.

And that was the only thing that we would have had in that range that would have appealed to her. Yeah. So it's just getting this data. And I'm happy to help you go through it once you have it, like bring it and we'll go through it and look at what that is. Because when we know what those things are, we can just repeat it. But in the meantime, it might mean just testing some different things to see what actually hits. But we have to have enough sales to make it work.

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 thecelenainight 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.