Hey there and welcome back to the Bringing Business to Retail podcast where we talk all about solutions that make more money for your retail and e-commerce store. Now, right about now, there's a better than even chance that you want nothing more than to collapse on the couch and binge watch Netflix.

And yes, even machines need maintenance and you deserve downtime. My friends, you are nearly there. Just a few more weeks and then you will be able to pause and reset. Now, as we head into the holidays, I wanted to bring back one of my most powerful episodes because let's face it, this is the perfect time to reflect and to lay the groundwork.

For an incredible 2026. This episode is called Do This to Get More Sales and More Customers. Honestly, this was the most requested episode on my socials and in this episode you are going to hear three strategies. That most retailers completely overlook. It's a quick one today, but you are going to discover why a lack of customers is often just a symptom, not the real problem.

How using LinkedIn, yes, even if you're a product based business, can drive high value orders. From people that your competitors are ignoring, and how one savvy fabric store owner filled her funnel with a no add high converting event, all while keeping her costs low and her visibility high. Whether you are a bricks and mortar e-commerce store or something in between, these strategies are grassroots, they're effective, and they're totally doable.

So grab a cup and let's dive in. I said that there are three reasons about why people run out of money, knowledge focused and support. Now, this doesn't mean that there is never a time and a place to focus on customer acquisition. Of course, you have to constantly be filling up your customer funnel, and I know for me that is something that we work on every single day and hopefully you can see that sometimes when it comes to something like getting more customers, what we think is the obstacle.

The obstacle is I don't have enough customers and I don't know what to do. The simple fact is they are just symptom and they're stopping us from getting to where we actually want to be. And the key to getting the results that you want and making more money and having the freedom that you want to work on the things in your business that you enjoy, rather than spending hours writing emails or uploading products to the website, the key to success is focusing on the obstacle.

And that obstacle is the limiting factor that is hindering. The business growth. So you need to ask yourself, what is the one thing? If I just worked on this one thing, if I solved this one problem, if I hit this one obstacle and I managed to solve it, would it free up more time or more money, or more resources?

And that my friends, is the answer to what you should be doing in your business. So let us bring this back to getting you more customers. So for this example, let's say that you own a bricks and mortar store with an online shop as well, and you sell Kitchenwares. Think Williams Sonoma. I love that store. I don't buy very much because I don't have the need to spend ridiculous amounts of money on.

$80 bakeware or those cool cocktail kits that cost $60 without the alcohol or the super fancy ice cream scoop that costs $50. So let's say that you run this bricks and mortar store that also has an e-commerce store selling these beautiful kitchenware items. You have got a great conversion rate. Your average order value sits at a really healthy $150, and your team work well and they provide great service, but your sales have dropped.

And you know this because you've been watching the numbers and there has been a significant of drop of people into the store by 30% and online your traffic has dropped 50%. That's a lot. Half as many people coming to the website is going to impact your sales, so you can do two things. First up, you can blame everyone.

Right now, the economy is rocky. The media is telling us that no one is buying. And you'd be forgiven for thinking that you have no control over getting people into your business. Or perhaps you even just posted something in a Facebook group recently about how sales are down. Is anybody else experiencing that?

And a bunch of people jumped in to tell you how crappy business was at the moment, right? So you could do that. You could feel justified that your sales are down because heck, everybody else is suffering right now too. But that. He's a very shopkeeper mindset. Boo-hoo. I have no control of what happens in my business, but you are not that person, are you?

Because you are here listening to this podcast. So option two is that you set about putting a clear plan in place to get more customers already. You have a good social content calendar. You post on Facebook and you post on Instagram, you TikTok with the best of them. You are even pinning recipes and products on Pinterest.

So what do you do to get more customers? Well, a savvy business owner like you goes and looks at the customer journey and who their best customer is. And let's say that best customer is called Kelly and you realize that Kelly. Is a professional woman with a really healthy disposable income. She's got no kids and she loves to entertain Kelly and all of her friends like her are the ones who are dropping $195 on a Be Beautiful tablecloth, my friends.

So some retailers would take this information and start spending a lot of money on ads that focus on professional women like Kelly. Me, I'm kind of more of a grassroots kind of girl. I like to, I'm a tight ass, right? I like to test things out before I spend thousands of dollars. I like to use what I've got first test and measure.

So at this point I would be asking myself, what seems blindingly obvious for me that other people might not be doing or they might not be seeing? And the answer, my friends, is a question. That I have asked retailers who are doing six, seven, and eight figures, you wanna know what the question is? Did you post on LinkedIn?

And the answer is that 90% of people don't. Now, when I owned a store, I was on the, one of my stores was on the fringe of the CBD, and it never really occurred to me that. Corporate gifts were a seriously viable option. Remember, I had no retail training back in the day. I had to learn this stuff myself, and it was a few years in.

When I opened that, that second store and I had a kind of a fledgling speaker career, it was totally accidental. I was doing workshops for local councils and for other organizations because I was the only one doing what I was doing. And so it kind of seemed like a no brainer to me to be posting on LinkedIn and what I was posting was more of my speaking and workshop type stuff.

But of course, as people are interested in things, they look you up, they see you have a shop, and lo and behold, orders start coming in. And that was probably the key moment when I realized that LinkedIn can be used to sell. Remember this was, I'm gonna say nearly 20 years ago. But it was not uncommon for us to get $500 gift hampers for someone who was going on maternity leave.

Now, $500 is a lot of money for one order, and the thing is they don't even care what goes into the basket. They just want it to be great. And so the great thing about those sorts of orders is that one. It brings you in new customers because the people who potentially out there searching, the admin people who are putting together the baby hamper, they're out there looking for new businesses, and then when the hamper gets delivered to the lucky mom to be, then in this case, everybody in the workplace gets to see that hamper and they learn about your business.

It still surprises me to this day that I would say 95% of the retailers that we work with aren't even on LinkedIn. They don't even have a profile on LinkedIn, and so something as simple as posting once a week could be the difference between, one, you getting lots of orders, but more importantly you will be getting.

Access to a lot of customers, and I can guarantee you that the majority of your competitors are not doing this. I don't know why, but retailers seem to forget that. LinkedIn is an amazing place where people hang out quite often for a very long time, and because it is not blatantly selling, then people take an interest in the business.

And so, especially if you are the face of your business, LinkedIn can be the perfect place. For you to find professional customers who work for a living and a very good chance that they have a nice healthy income to be able to spend money with you. I'm gonna say that LinkedIn is probably the most overlooked social media platform for retail and e-commerce, which means if you are using it, then you are going to cut through the noise.

And the great thing is you don't even have to do ads. You can just. Post and people will see your post because it is not as crowded as your tiktoks and your Pinterest and your Facebook and your Instagram. Okay? So that is my first strategy for you to go and get yourself more customers. The second one is, again, one that I think is Bleedingly obvious, but so many people don't do it, and that is collaborating with your suppliers or your distributors Now.

When it comes to collaborations, most retailers will focus on either another brand or using influencers. Influencers, paying influencers to promote their product. The thing is, your suppliers or your distributors have got your customers wrapped up with a bow. Now you are hoping when you team up with another brand or an influencer, that your customers are going to be part of their audience.

But when it comes to a brand, so one of the suppliers that you work with or one of the brands that you work with, they have your customers because your customers are buying their stuff. It's kind of like an, you know, again, it's a no-brainer to me. They 100% have your customers because that is the people who are following them.

So what if you actually, you know, put yourself out there or your marketing person put themselves out there? And actually stopped doing things ad hoc and last minute, and worked with your brands, with your suppliers, with your distributors to create unique offers that drive customers to your website. Not everybody's website.

And again, so many retailers don't do this. They just rely on the brands to tell them what the next promotion is. Good brands will work with you to create a promotion that drives people to your business. And remember, they have your customer. That's why your customer is following them. And one of our five x retailers did this for Black Friday.

They teamed up with a supplier to create a really unique Black Friday offer that was not discounting. And the great thing was the supplier was able to direct a lot of. Customers to both their store and their website because nobody else had this offer. So the supplier sets themselves apart. The brand sets themselves apart because they have some exclusivity going on with different stores.

They get to use the content, they can use it for their social, they can use it for their newsletters, and the retailer gets something nobody else has. One access to all these people coming for this amazing brand's offer, but two, something that sets them apart from their competitors. I mean, heck, just making sure that you are listed as a stockist on a brand or supplier's page drives free traffic into your store or to your website.

And you would be surprised how many retailers never bothered to check that they're listed as somewhere. As a stockist, as somewhere that people can go to buy this product and there is no more a qualified buyer than someone who is sitting on a brand's website. Am I right? Alright, so let's just quickly recap one, let's look at using LinkedIn.

Two, let's look at starting to work with our brands and our suppliers and our distributors to get access to their customers. My third and final for today. Way of you getting more customers is one that Kimberly has used really successfully. So Kimberly has an e-commerce store that sells fabric, so you might think, Hmm, okay, where is sell going with this?

Kimberly has realized that her traffic has dropped and before she spends any more money on ads. She wanted to try out a few different things. I mean, ads are expensive right now, so I asked Kimberly, like, who are your best spending customers? I was actually quite surprised at the answer because she said millennials.

I thought she was going to say older ladies who loved to sew. But no, she caters to millennials, and millennials right now are balking at fast fashion, and so Kimberly knows what is trending right now. Probably because she watches way too many TikTok videos. And so one of the things that we put together for Kimberly was to hold an online event.

Now, events are usually the domain of bricks and mortar stores, and if you are a bricks and mortar store and you are not holding events, that my friends is something that is going to drive new customers into your store. But you can also do it if you are a pure play e-commerce website. So Kimberly decided to hold an online class on how to sew your own jumpsuit.

Me, I love me a jumpsuit. Uh, not quite sure if I would spend the time and effort to sew one, but clearly Kimberly's people are happy to do it. And so what she ended up doing was a complete promotion around this event, just like she would do with any other product, launch of fabric or sewing machines or anything like that.

She promoted on social media, including LinkedIn. She listed it on as many event type websites, put a Facebook event up. She teamed up with one of her suppliers to have the fabric for the jumpsuit donated, and when she mentioned it to one of her sewing machine companies, they offered to sponsor the event and give away a sewing machine to one of the people who attended the class.

I wasn't expecting that, but I was just like, hell yeah. We are going to make this thing huge. And so as you can imagine now, when it came to promoting of the event, not only were the fabric and the sewing machine people promoting it to their customers, but also this off opportunity to win a free sewing machine valued at a couple of thousand dollars, brought a lot more people into the event.

All righty, so let's bring this one home. You've just heard three strategies that are going to help you get more customers in 2026. First, get yourself on LinkedIn. I don't care if you think that it is boring or corporate or your professional customers with healthy disposable incomes won't buy from it.

They will and your competitors, I'm almost gonna guarantee they're not showing up on LinkedIn. And that means you get to cut through the noise with zero ad spend. Second stop waiting for your suppliers to tell you what the next promotion is going to be. Get proactive. Work with your brands and distributors to create exclusive offers that drive their customers who are already looking to buy those products straight into your store or website.

You've got leverage, use it. And thirdly, those events. I know events can be hard work, but honestly they can bring in so much money. And they can also bring in a lot of new customers. If this episode gave you the little kick that you needed, please do me a favor and leave a review on whatever platform you're listening on.

The more reviews we get, the more independent retailers that we can help to scale, and that's a win for you, a win for your community, and a win for your customers. You have got what it takes to make 2026 your year. Now let's make sure it happens. 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 Selena Knight 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.