Hello and welcome back to the Tizzit TV
show. Today I want to talk to
you guys about Black Friday.
Black Friday, Thanksgiving
and Cyber Monday are around the corner
and it's the start of the holiday
shopping season which is a
really important part of the year for
you, handmade shop owners.
Now, there's a lot of advice out there on
how to make the most out of this holiday
season for your shop
but there's three tips that I think
aren't talked about enough
and that's what I want to cover
with you today.
Tip number one is all about
the way you promote
and market your products over that weekend.
And I know you're going to schedule posts on social
media. If you got an e-mail list you
probably going to send a newsletter to
your subscribers announcing your discounts
and your special offers,
maybe you own products
or whatever promotion you've decided to
run.
But there's something that I don't see enough
and that's really powerful;
is to actually give people
a reason to buy.
And I know that sounds really obvious
but not many people do it
and it makes a really
really big difference in your conversion
rates. The reason for that is that
as humans,
we like to be told what to do.
When you send an e-mail about your Black Friday
promotion you need to give them
a reason to buy because even though they
may love your products
and think that wow,
that's a good discount,
if they don't know exactly why they should
buy it they're probably won't.
Now what you have to remember is that
the Black Friday weekend is really the
start of the shopping season.
We're getting to Christmas
and people are going to have
to buy stuff
and to buy presents for their friends
and for their family for Christmas
and, you know, the holiday season.
But you have to remind that to
them. So you want to send them a newsletter
or you want to create one little image
per recommendation
and recommend product gifts
to them. So it could be you know oh
look at this necklace 30 percent off.
A great gift for your sister.
Or you know say 50 percent
off dad's Christmas presents
with Black Friday sale
or whatever it is that you can advertise,
really.
But try to make people think
about why it's a great idea
to buy their Christmas
present now while it's Black
Friday and try to explain to
them that this is great for their best friend.
This is great for their mom.
This is great for their daughter so that
they, yeah,
they have a reason to buy.
Tip number two it's all about
pricing.
You don't have
to run a sale on Black Friday
or Cyber Monday
or even Thanksgiving.
It's great if you can
but I don't want to do it unless
you know your numbers really well
and you're very clear on how much
discount you can afford to
give away while still making a profit.
So if you're not sure I want
you to go back to your pricing strategy
and to your drawing board
and really understand what
profit margin you have for each product
and for which one it makes sense to
have a sale and for which one
it doesn't. Now unless you,
you know, you actually want to get rid of some stock
then that's fine
but please don't feel
the pressure of having to do a big discount
because everyone else has
unless you know that it's actually
still making you money.
Even a discounted item
should be making you money.
I know it sounds really obvious
but trust me I work
with many makers
and most of them aren't clear on
the profit margin they're making on each product
which means that making a
sale happen can be actually very
dangerous and detrimental.
So it's really important that
you know exactly how the price
of your product is broken down
so that you're really confident
that selling those items at this discounted
price makes sense for you
and you're not just going to,
you know, be working like crazy
building up some stock
and shipping some products for not
much return.
So make sure that you're clear
with your pricing strategy
and don't feel like you have to discount
everything in your shop because your
competitors are doing it.
My last tip is about
paid ads and they are wonderful.
I do think that paid ads are a
great, great way to reach a wider
audience, get people to your shop
and turn them into the customers.
Now I want to give you
a couple of tips
here regarding ads
because although I think
they're fabulous, I think you shouldn't
be using them in a few cases.
The first one is if you are
not experienced at all
with Facebook ads
or Pinterest ads or any sort of paid ads,
don't start on Black Friday unless
you get help from a professional
or you have time to invest into
training and doing some experiments
beforehand.
The reason for that is because Black Friday
is really competitive
which means that ads are more expensive
and I don't want you to test
waters with paid ads
with the small budget that you have
on Black Friday because it's actually
a very, very competitive,
difficult weekend when it
comes to using paid ads.
Another situation where I
don't want you to be using paid ads on Black
Friday weekend is if
you're not clear
with what your conversion rate
is. I don't want you to start bringing
paid traffic to your shop
if you don't know for sure that
this traffic is going to convert into
sales.
So if you don't really have numbers
on that, if you don't track conversion rates
in your traffic it's probably
not the best to test that again
on Black Friday because you could be paying
a lot for ads to be sending
traffic to your site
and then that traffic not converting into
a sale.
That's pretty much just money you put out of the window.
I'm not saying
that's for you not to scare
you of using paid ads because
there are great
and I do think that if you're ready
and if you know that your
conversion rate is reasonable,
if you have experience
with ads or some help in some
way via a professional again
or some training,
than hundred percent go for it
because it's a great opportunity
but please be cautious
with it as well.
Thanks for watching this video.
I hope that those few quick tips
helped you or at least got you thinking
in a different way about Black Friday.
I'm available via comments
below if you have any questions
and you can also join my free
Facebook group where there's thousands
of other makers
and handmade shop owners,
supporting and helping each other to grow
their handmade shops.
I also have a free
library of resources
and guides for handmade shop owners
and makers that you can access
on my website.
All of this information is
listed just below this video.
Don't forget to share
and like
and help me spread the word if you can.
I really appreciate it.
And I'm looking forward to chatting
with you again soon.