Let me introduce you to Emma. Her 2026 resolution is to be consistent with her marketing. January the first hit and she was ready. New year, fresh start. This is going to be the year that she gets consistent with her marketing. She posts on Instagram seven times in that first week. She sends an email to her list about all of the new arrivals. She even goes live on Instagram to show off some new products. Her engagement is up.

She's getting DMs, people are clicking through to her website, and she feels good. And then January the 15th rolls around. A big inventory shipment arrives. She's buried in the operational side of the business, receiving stock, updating the website, chasing up with the supplier because part of the order didn't arrive, dealing with a payment processor glitch, and marketing? Well, she pushes that to the bottom of the list. It'll have to wait.

until things calm down. Three weeks go by. Emma's marketing is radio silence. In February, she comes up for air. Valentine's Day is just a few days away, so she puts together a promotion, 15% off. She posts it on Instagram, she sends an email, and she waits for the sales to roll in. And nothing. Her post gets four likes when they normally get 50.

Emma gets three sales from an email list of 2,000 people. She's confused, she's frustrated, and she thinks, well, why didn't anyone show up? Why didn't I get any sales? Does this sound familiar? Here's what Emma didn't realize. Inconsistent marketing is not just about missing a few Instagram posts here and there. It's actively training your customers to forget that you exist. And in a world where your customer is seeing literally

thousands of messages every single day from other brands, from their friends, from random TikTok videos. Being forgettable is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make in retail. Today, we're talking about the real cost of inconsistent marketing. Not the obvious stuff like, well, you know, you miss some sales. I'm talking about the invisible costs that are quietly draining your revenue, that are eroding trust with your audience,

and making every single marketing effort that you do 10 times harder than it needs to be. Welcome to the Bringing Business to Retail podcast. I'm Selina Knight. And on this podcast, we talk all about strategies that will make you money for your retail or e-commerce store. So here's what most retailers think. Well, I posted last week and I sent an email two weeks ago. I mean, that's pretty good, right? Like I'm doing marketing. But marketing doesn't work on a pretty good scale.

And the cost of inconsistency isn't just the sales that you miss when you're not showing up. It is everything that happens in between. So let me break down what I call the three invisible taxes of inconsistent marketing. The first one is the visibility tax. Every time you go silent for one, two, three weeks, you're not just pausing your marketing. You are resetting a customer's awareness clock back to zero.

Think about your own behavior as a consumer. How many brands do you follow on Instagram and TikTok? 50? 100? Maybe even more? Now, if one of those brands doesn't show up in your feed for three weeks, do you notice that they're gone? Do you think, gee, I wonder why Emma's Boutique hasn't posted lately? There's a pretty good chance that you don't. In fact, there's a pretty good chance you don't even notice. They just disappear from your awareness. Your customers are human, just like you.

Social media algorithms are designed to show people content from accounts that they engage with, accounts that post regularly. But if you go dark for weeks and then suddenly pop back up again, the algorithm essentially says, oh, you're back. Good for you. And that is why Emma's Valentine's Day post gets four likes instead of 50. So every gap in your marketing, you are going to be paying that visibility tax. You are starting from scratch.

Every single time you try to show up again. So tax number one, the visibility tax. Or should I really call it the invisibility tax? Maybe I should call it the invisibility tax. Tax number two is the trust erosion effect. The second invisible tax is what I call trust erosion. Sporadic communications, whether it's in email, whether it's on TikTok, whether it's on Instagram, it doesn't just make you forgettable. It makes you seem.

unreliable. So think about this from a customer's perspective. If you can't count on a brand to show up consistently in your inbox or in your feed, why would you count on them to fulfill your order on time, to have great customer service or to stand behind their products? Now I know this sounds harsh but it is psychologically proven.

This is what is happening in your customer's subconscious. They may not even tell you if you ask them. But subconsciously, this is what is happening. Consistency signals professionalism. Inconsistency signals the exact opposite. It signals that maybe your business isn't that serious. Maybe your business may not be around next week. Over the Black Friday, I got emails from brands that I had never even realized I had signed up to. I would literally open my inbox and go,

I've never heard of you. Maybe at some point I have. But November rolls around and this happens every single year and suddenly there are emails after emails after emails about Black Friday from brands that I have never remembered to sign up for. And as I was unsubscribing from their newsletter lists, honestly, I was confused why I was even on that list. But I was getting really angry about the whole thing. Where did you get my email address from? And so there was no hope of me buying from them.

Consistency builds trust. Inconsistency erodes it. So that is the second tax that you're paying. Okay, so if we're inconsistent in our marketing, we're paying the invisibility tax or the visibility tax. The trust tax is our second tax. And our third tax is what I call, I give these really cool names to things that I'm very does what it says on the box. Our company is called the Retail Strategists.

The bootcamp is called the marketing that works bootcamp. I don't know, maybe I'm not creative. Maybe I just like to tell it like it is and make it really clear. So my third tax is the abandoned cart of attention tax. Do you like that one? The abandoned cart of attention. So you would have heard of the rule of seven. So there's a marketing principle that says that every customer needs to see your message seven to times before they take action. Well, that was then.

This is now. In 2026, it's more like the rule of 20, sometimes even 25. Your customers get hit with so many messages that it takes way more touch points than it used to for something to actually stick. But here's what happens when you're inconsistent. You build momentum for a few weeks, touch point one, two, three, four. And then if you go dark, when you come back, you're not at touch point five.

you are back at touch point one. You abandoned the cut of attention that you were building. In bootcamp, one of the things that we talk about is this principle. If you are not tired of talking about your offer, you haven't talked about it enough. And honestly, every single time I say this, store owners push back on me. I don't want to annoy people. I've already posted about this sale enough times. I posted about it three times.

Well, three times to an audience where maybe three to five percent of people actually saw your post. Meanwhile, remember, we need 15 to 20 touch points before they're even in the headspace to consider buying. So you're not annoying them. They just literally haven't noticed you yet. But when you post three times and disappear, you never build enough momentum for that message to land.

Look, the best products in the world don't matter if nobody knows that they exist. Inconsistent marketing isn't just leaving money on the table. It makes everything harder than it needs to be. When you show up consistently, everything gets easier. Your customers remember you. Your offers convert better. Your launches work better. You stop feeling constantly behind. 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 TheSelenaKnight 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.