Want to encourage people on your email list to buy one (or more) of your products or programs sooner than later? Have a sale! I’m sharing 7 super-simple ways that you can provide great value to your audience while bringing in a great profit for you at the same time!
7 Ways to Have a Sale Today
1. Half-Off Sale
Offer your product or program for 50% off its usual price. That may seem like a big discount – and it is – which means that many more people are likely to buy it.
Or go one step further and offer all your products or programs at 50% off (except any one-on-one work with you, of course!).
I’ve been thinking about buying a few products over the past year from one site, and when they had a 50% off sale recently, I jumped at the chance to buy not just one, but three products for half-price. Give your list the chance to do the same.
2. Close-Out Sale
Do you have a product or a program that you are no longer going to offer, perhaps to make room for some new offerings? Or are you coming out with a new version of one of your offerings? Have a close-out sale by offering a deep discount.
As an added bonus, you could then offer those people who bought your offering at the close-out price that same amount in a discount if they buy the new version.
Here’s a bit of inspiration for you: One of my close-out sales brought me over $10k in less than a week.
3. Re-Gift Sale
Remember the Seinfeld episode about re-gifting? Do something similar for the stock of any of your products that have been returned. “Re-gift” the ones in good condition to a new buyer for a discount.
4. VIP Sale
Offer a coupon or promo code ONLY to your email list, or to your clients, or to those people who have bought from you before, that’s good towards the purchase of any one or all of your offerings. You can set this up in your shopping cart system very easily, so there’s no other extra work on your part.
5. Free Shipping Sale
Offer free shipping on any of your physical products for a limited time, or offer free shipping on all orders over a certain amount.
Personally, if I’m looking to purchase something online, I always search for (and almost always find) a ‘free shipping’ code before I buy.
6. Bonus Sale
Add a valuable bonus or two to your offering for a limited time. It can be something you’ve created or something from one of your colleagues that your niche would benefit from.
Leverage this kind of sale by doing a “bonus sale swap” with a colleague, where they would offer a bonus from you and vice versa. Your own sale will bring you cash, and your bonus offering for your colleague’s sale will bring you more subscribers to your list, which will ultimately bring you more cash.
7. Just Because Sale
This is a favorite of mine – having a sale just because – it’s your birthday, you want to show your gratitude to your list, it’s the 1, 5, or 10 year anniversary of when you went into business for yourself, or for any other reason you can think of.
Having a sale WILL bring in more immediate cash, but there are some cautions to take when doing so too. Only have a sale occasionally, and when you do, have a compelling reason for it. Otherwise, if it seems you’re always having a sale, you’re planting a seed in your potential buyer’s mind that your offerings may not be worth their regular price.
So, which kind of sale are you going to have to put some extra cash in your pocket today? Share with me in the comments.
Feel free to share this post with your friends and colleagues via the buttons below too – thanks!
PS: There are definitely some nuances to making a sale be really successful for you, and that’s something we talk about in the Lively Biz Business Club (my most affordable coaching option). To find out more, be sure to get on the wait list here today, ok?
Ever sit down to write a blog post or an email to your list and be at a loss as to what to say? It happens to the best of us, so I thought I’d share some of the ways that I get unstuck when that happens to me.
7 Quick Ways to Content
1. Offer Your Client Success Stories
You’ll see me implement this idea fairly often, where I’ll share a common struggle among my private clients and offer some solutions. You can take this a level deeper and offer a ‘case study’ of a specific client who had a specific challenge that you helped solve and turn that into your content to share with your readers.
2. Pick 3 of Your Most FAQs
Something I also encourage my clients to do is continually ask their market what it wants help with. As you do this you’ll see a common thread of frequently asked questions from your readers. Highlight three or so of those in your post with your solutions.
3. Share Your Cutting Edge Knowledge
When you learn something new that will help your clients, share that information with your readers as well. Not only will this help you be viewed as an expert, your readers will be grateful for not having to do this work themselves.
4. Offer Your Top 5
Writing a quick ‘5 Top Tips’ is an easy way to get an article written fast. Pick a topic, then five points about the topic you want to make, and write 2-3 sentence for each point. With a brief intro and closing paragraph, you’re done.
5. Interview Well-Known Colleagues
Send an email request to a handful of well-known colleagues in your field whose work complements yours asking to interview them for your readers. Ask them five questions via email and then post the interview. They get free exposure and you get valuable content to share with your readers.
6. Do an Ask (Insert Your Name Here) Column
Periodically ask you readers to send you questions that you can answer for them in future issues. When you find yourself stuck for content ideas, pull these out and answer one or two. These are great idea sparkers and even better, you are giving information your readers specifically asked for.
7. Run a Reprint
Use this strategy when you’re pressed for time or when you’re going on vacation. There’s nothing wrong with reprinting a favorite piece of content. Your current readers will appreciate the refresher and your content will be new to your newer subscribers.
Print this list out and keep it nearby so the next time you sit down to write you’ll have 7 quick ways to come up with valuable content for your readers.
I’d love to hear how you come up with content for your readers too! Please comment below – and also feel free to share this with your friends and colleagues via the buttons below too – thanks!
In 2009, I started thinking about the hosting my own live event.
But even though I had a great coach to help me plan it, her events were far larger and much more involved than anything I wanted to do…
So I held back.
Then I started feeling pressured to move forward with this idea, so I contacted a nice hotel near the airport, submitted my request to host a 3-day event there, and then nearly passed out when the 15-page contract arrived – along with a required MINIMUM commitment of $15k from me.
Gulp. 😟
So I decided to toss the whole idea until I could come up with a way to do it that felt good to me – and that didn’t make my heart palpitate in fear!
I asked myself what kind of event I really wanted to do. Not what ‘everyone’ else was doing, but what felt easy, fun, and much more me…
What I came up with was this…
I didn’t want to hold it at the airport. I didn’t want to hold it at a big hotel. I didn’t want to hold it in the big city. I didn’t want to stress about filling seats or worry about paying for rooms that didn’t fill in our room block. I didn’t want to commit to thousands of dollars of food that I knew would mostly be wasted. I didn’t want to deal with sound systems and the cost and labor involved. Basically I didn’t want to do anything the way I was ‘supposed’ to.
So I started over – and by asking myself what I REALLY wanted (and following that guidance) – I found myself with a 1-page contract with no financial commitment upfront, with no commitment to paying for empty guest rooms, in a boutique hotel in a hip town near the sea.
Was I still nervous about filling seats? Sure.
Did I have lots of questions about all the things I didn’t know? Yup.
Was I afraid of what I didn’t know I didn’t know? Absolutely.
But by doing it my way, and starting from where I was realistically, I’ve successfully hosted 8 small workshops and have generated anywhere from $60k to over $100k NET every time.
I’m sharing this with you so you know I’ve been there…and I have a lot of wisdom to share with you as you plan and navigate hosting your own small live event, starting with my free training coming up next week.
Join us here:
https://aforest.lpages.co/psewebinar/
When I was studying for my MBA, my most challenging class was statistics. And even though I managed an A- in the class, it took every one of the few analytical brain cells I had to do so.
So when I sit down to analyze the statistics of my business every year, I’m still surprised to find myself engrossed, fascinated, excited and practically dancing for joy. Armed with this critical data, now I know exactly where to spend my time and efforts going forward to receive the highest and best rate of return.
I ran a total of about 10 reports, but let me share some of what I learned specifically from my shopping cart’s reports:
CRM Stats
The backend system I use (Infusionsoft) has the ability to run sales reports in a variety of ways. Below are four of the reports I run, what my results are, and how you can apply the results to your business:
a. My Monthly Sales Totals…
…showed me how many sales I made each month, and from that information, I discovered that my best month financially was November, followed very closely by December, then January.
I reviewed my marketing and sales activities (in other words, the offers I made) for that month, and what I found was this:
In November, I opened the Lively Biz Business Club membership for the first time.
In December, I opened the Lively Biz Accelerator small group coaching program for the first time.
In January, I offered a handful of spots for private Business Breakthrough Virtual Retreats with me, which always sell out very fast.
While the Club has a low price point, I designed and followed a specific launch plan, which resulted in a lot more enrollments. If you only have higher price points in you business model at the moment, consider if you can add a lower-priced leveraged offer to your menu of services.
Both the Accelerator and the Business Breakthrough Virtual Retreats have higher price points, so if you’ve already developed some products or programs at the lower-priced end of your funnel, consider adding a more comprehensive program at a higher price to your offerings to increase your bottom line.
b. My Sales by Campaign…
… showed me which special offers were the ones you were most interested in taking advantage of. Now I know which offers to consider repeating, or offering on another product or program in the future.
This is something you can do as well. Guessing if a special campaign you ran worked well or not doesn’t make good business sense. Tracking actual numbers does, however, and it’s super-simple to do if you have a backend system that has that feature.
c. My Sales by Clients/Customers…
… showed me who my top clients/customers are, what they’ve bought, and how much they’ve invested in my offerings. And since I know that one of the most effective ways to grow a business is to make additional offers to those who have already bought from me, you can bet that not only will I do that, but I’ll do it in a way that makes them feel special – because they are to me – by offering them special access or discounts or additional benefits as my way of thanking them for their continued business and loyalty.
If you track this information, you can do the same and increase your sales and your customer loyalty at the same time.
d. My “Where did you hear about us” Report…
… showed me that even though I thought that some of my online networking efforts weren’t really paying off, mainly because I didn’t think I was focusing enough time on them, I was wrong. It seems even the small amount I had been doing was making an impact.
So now I know the top three places to really focus those efforts going forward. If you’ve found online networking to be a struggle for you, tracking this information makes what can seem like an overwhelming marketing activity (some lists are SO active) into an extremely manageable and once-again enjoyable one.
I gleaned all of this information from just four reports from Infusionsoft. And this doesn’t include the reports I ran for my web stats via Google Analytics.
Measuring the results of your business activities is critical to your success, and anyone can do it (it’s really one of those “if I can, anyone can” kind of things). I really want to encourage you to take a look at where you’ve been over the past 6-12 months, analyze that data, and make some strategic decisions about where you want to focus your efforts going forward to get where you want to be.
I’d love to hear which of these tips you’re willing to embrace today. Feel free to share with me below.
People ask me all the time what I’m reading, listening to, watching, and following as I continue to grow my lifestyle business, so I thought I’d share some timely goodies with you today. 🙂
So, I stumbled across Rachel Hollis when I found a bunch of unused credits in my Audible account. Her book, Girl, Wash Your Face sounded interesting and had a lot of good reviews, so I downloaded it and started listening to it on my walks last spring.
It just celebrated its 1-year anniversary and has been the catalyst for Rachel’s rise to the top of the inspirational/motivational speaker/writer circuit.
In the book, Rachel gets really real and is an engaging storyteller – but it’s her voice that drew me in (and I’m not a auditory learner) and the fact that I felt like she was sitting on the couch with me, talking with me, not reading her book to me.
Check it out here.
And just out on Amazon Prime is her documentary/behind-the-scenes look at her live Rise event, Made for More…
I took Chloe to see it in theaters last month and I don’t know who enjoyed it more – me or her. But it’s definitely something to watch yourself, with your daughter, with your girlfriends. It’s a keeper…
See it here
And her next book, Girl, Stop Apologizing is available for pre-order (Chloe actually pre-ordered it for me for my birthday since it comes out next month, which is my birthday month ;-)) right now too.
Pre-order here (there’s a cool bonus when you pre-order too).
If you’re looking for some inspiration and motivation, with a solid dose of realness, and genuine fun, check out Rachel – she’s pretty cool. 🙂
Note: Those are my Amazon Influencer links, so I may receive a tiny (and I mean tiny ;-)) commission if you purchase through my links. That said, I never recommend anything I haven’t purchased and loved myself.
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