It’s game time for product business owners like you. In today’s episode, Julie talks about 5 easy ways to make holiday bundles. They don’t take weeks of planning and in fact, you can launch these bundles with items you already have. Add these to your Q4 playbook to increase your average cart value, move inventory and make more sales!
Get all the details and your ticket at SubSummit.com, THE conference for sub box businesses. We'll see you in Dallas this June!
It’s game time for product business owners like you. In today’s episode, Julie talks about 5 easy ways to make holiday bundles. They don’t take weeks of planning and in fact, you can launch these bundles with items you already have. Add these to your Q4 playbook to increase your average cart value, move inventory and make more sales!
Get all the details and your ticket at SubSummit.com, THE conference for sub box businesses. We'll see you in Dallas this June!
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to a subscription box basics. My name is Julie Ball and my co-host today is not with me. She's recovering from some sickness where it's making her cough a lot. So today I'm rolling I'm on a roll it's time to go so low. I had to do a little throw back to vanilla ice. Speaking of ice to hear this. That's my iced coffee. It is Irish cream, cold brew season. I'm so excited. It's my favorite. Yes, it is 36 degrees here today, outside of Asheville, North Carolina. And I'm still getting my cold That I drink iced coffee and cold brew. Throughout the entire winter. I know I'm crazy. Anybody else like that? Anyhow. I'm going to jump into the topic today. I'm going to be talking about five easy ways to make holiday bundles. So just like clockwork demand for subscription boxes and gift boxes peaks right around the holidays. That's where we are at right now. It's about to be black Friday holiday shopping weekend. And then of course, December, there's going to be the last minute shoppers. So you want to make sure that you have products in your shop that you can ship So maybe with your subscription box, you might want to adjust your shipping dates for this specific month for maybe in November or December to make sure boxes get there before the holidays hit. And you want to make sure that you have gifting capabilities in your That way someone can buy your box and send it directly to them instead of having the subscription sent to you as the buyer. But that's all we're talking about. We're talking today about holiday bundles and these are things that you can do. That are easy. It's low hanging fruit. To help sell more. To increase the average cart value. So when someone is buying your subscription, for example, you can upsell them. Say, Hey, you might like this too. You can tap into your existing list. You can tap into your existing subscribers, give them something to buy that is specific for the holiday. So let's dive into those five. I have them broken down to make it really easy. Pick one, pick two. Whatever's easiest that you can do right now that you can take action after you listened to this podcast episode. So the first one is going to be really obvious it's holiday themed. What can you build that is holiday themed. It could just be your holiday gift box, or it could be, a smaller version of your box. It could be holiday stocking stuffers. The fact is that people are looking for holiday gifts. And when you put holiday in the title of your gift, you're making it a no-brainer for them to see it and say, okay, that would be a great gift. So think about what can you do with excess inventory? You don't have to go and buy brand new inventory. You may want to buy one or two items that have that holiday flare to But then you can pack that with other things that you already have in your existing inventory. What a great way to offload some of that excess inventory. And that is the perfect segue now into my second way to make a holiday bundle is recipient themed. So think about your customer, who would they maybe be gifting to and who would your holiday product or even your subscription box as it stands, who would that be a perfect fit for? And you can put that in the title. You can make sure that your customers are seeing perfect gift for the teen girl or perfect gift for the dad who has everything. Think about who is that recipient and create a bundle.Specifically for them. I said it already, but I'm going to say it again. You can use excess inventory for this, or you can add an additional item or That you pick up specifically for your holiday gift bundles. So one thing I want to mention too, before I forget. Is when you're creating a holiday gift bundle. Give yourself a goal. So say you want to sell 50 of these bundles. Great. You can buy 50 of whatever you need, or you can set aside 50 of that excess inventory. Or if you need to get specifically like holiday stickers, you need to order 50. Don't overdo it. Don't stress yourself out. Just choose a number that you feel good about. Maybe make a good, better, best, that's what I love to do. I think having that range. Helps motivate me because I don't want to feel deflated if I don't hit a goal, but I also want to push myself. It's kind of this fine line with goal setting. I love that good, better, best scenario. So think about for you, maybe your good is 30. Your better is 40 and your best is 50. That way you can project those sales. You can have those goals to build your marketing campaign around. So, and we'll talk a little bit about marketing after I covered these five easy ways to make holiday bundles. So far we covered holiday themed. And then recipient Now we're going to cover the third one, which is price themed. And it might seem weird to you, but have you ever seen those gift guides that are like best holiday gifts under$50 or best holiday gifts for$25. Think about how your buyer might have budgeted a specific amount of money to buy gifts for different people. So can you create holiday gift bundles that fits some of those standard price points. So maybe stocking stuffers would be$10 and under. Maybe you would have a price point of$25,$50, at a hundred dollars. And on top of this. This is a great way to sell gift cards, to. Check your, if you don't already have the setup in your cart system. Check to see if you can do digital gift cards. It basically allows someone to give the gift of your subscription box but allowing the recipient to decide when they get it and what they're going to use that money for. So think about that and I know that there are some really great opportunities with these digital holiday gift cards. You can print them out. So someone could literally buy it five minutes before they go to a party and still have a hostess gift. They are easy that you can forward them on typically, because you're going to get an email confirmation. A digital gift card, if you're not familiar is typically you're going to kind of prepay a certain amount, that's going to be on that digital gift card and your recipient is going to get a code to put in at checkout. And that's typically how they work. So think about not only your holiday bundles, but also digital gift cards when it comes to creating price themed products. The fourth one is one of my favorites. We have made so much money in the subscription box that I have previously ran sparkle hustle grow. We made so much money with these surprise packs. What I would do is I would look through my excess inventory and find things that went together well, and I would buy plain poly mailers and use a sticker. Like I didn't even use custom packaging. You can get plain poly mailers on Amazon, or Uline so many different places, pretty inexpensively. So say I have two different surprise packs. One is a$15 price point and one is a$30 price points. Then I would go into my excess inventory and combine a couple of items that are going to exceed that in retail value. I want to make sure people feel like they get their value. And so for In the past with sparkle hustle grow, what that looked like was maybe a book and a tech gadget and a piece of stationary. So maybe that was three items and little pro tip here. If you can keep your surprise pack under one pound, you can typically get less expensive shipping using the United States postal service first class postage. So if you can keep it under 16 ounces, one So anyhow, I'd create these surprise packs. They would not know what was in them, but I would give them expectations. So again, for example, You can expect to receive three items and one is going to be a book. One's going to be a tech gadget. One's going to be stationary. They don't know exactly which items they're going to get, but they have a great expectation of what's going to arrive. They loved it. It would sell like hotcakes. I would usually create a handful of these and say limited supply. Maybe I'd make 25 of them. And as I was preparing for that sale, I would go ahead and bulk pack those so they were ready to go when we launched the sale. Don't overthink your marketing campaign either when it comes to a surprise pack sale, we've literally put this together two days in advance before where we say, mark your calendar on Thursday, we're going to drop you the link to limited edition surprise packs. And subscribers, you get first dibs. And so we would say, the first day, first 24 hours subscribers get first dibs, then we'll release the link to the online shop, where everybody can buy. We would send it to the rest of our list. So often we would get that huge rush of sales in the first 24 hours because our subscribers already know and love us and so it was much easier for them to make that decision to purchase. Tell them a little bit more about it, tell them, what the retail value might be. Tell them how many that you have available. Tell them things like... for us, the book has not been featured in the last six months. So if they're a newer subscriber, they know that they won't already have that book. And so we also taught them how to use the product. So would say, you can use these for your customers as gifts, or it's a great way to get inexpensive stocking stuffers. So teach your customer how to use those, how to make the most of those sales. And just a side note. Typically would have a surprise pack with a book and a surprise pack without a book. And so those were our two different price points we bundled in shipping so that they wouldn't get sticker shock at checkout. And then even one time we did I think, eight versions. And so we called it surprise pack one, surprise pack two. And I kid you not, we would have subscribers by one of every single one and having those eight different versions specifically allowed the buyer to know that they weren't going to get duplicates because I promised everything in these eight surprise packs is different than the others. And it was an amazing way to offload excess inventory for people to have an opportunity to buy again, these stocking stuffers or things that they could give their clients their friends, family, whatever. So surprise packs is one of the lowest hanging fruit like marketing campaigns. You can do again, you don't have to have a massive marketing campaign around it. You can do a pre-launch runway. Seven days, 14 days, whatever. But if you need to move cashflow, you need to move inventory. Sit down after this podcast and start mapping out what that looks like. And launch it in two days. I challenge you to do that right now. Okay. So we covered holiday, Recipient themed, price themed, surprised packs. And the last one is bestseller bundles. And this is a really easy way to offload some excess inventory that's not selling well by pairing it up with a best seller. And I'll just give you a quick example. Say at sparkle hustle grow, we had a book that was really well received. So we would create that bestseller bundle around the fact that book will be in there. But then we're going to bundle it with two or three other items that maybe wouldn't sell as well in the shop, but we still needed to move them out of our inventory. I get that cash flow rolling. So think about like, what are your. Bestsellers. And if you don't know, ask your customers. It can be a simple post in, on social media. It could be a simple survey that you send via an email. If you have a Facebook group, ask them right in there all of the last six months, what was your favorite product? Use that information to then again, bundle some of the slower moving items and get them out of your inventory. So those are my five easy ways to make holiday bundles. And I'm going to leave you with two more little pro tips. I mentioned earlier about just getting some poly mailers or some plain packaging to send these... We actually did a best of sparkle hustle grow box one time and used craft boxes that we already had in stock. And all I did was I got some custom stickers now with the holidays. You've so many opportunities to buy a non-custom stickers, but that are holiday themed. If you just go over to Amazon or Etsy, there are so many options. You don't have to get brand new packaging. Just give it that little bit of holiday flair by purchasing some holiday themed stickers. And the other thing that I wanted to mention was when it comes to marketing your bundles, again, don't overthink it, but this is my easy kind of framework for what? Where do I post it? What do I do? I use the rule of three, find the three different places that your people are going to hang out. So for us in the past, and this might be the same for you. Social media. Your email list. And then of course you can post it as a blog too. If you post it as a blog, then you can share that blog all over the place too. And it's good for SEO. So. Those are the quick and dirty, like scrappy easy ways to create holiday bundles and increase that cash flow during this high season of gift giving. I'd love to know which of those five you're going to try first DME over at subscription box basics on Instagram. I'd love to hear And I am cheering you on. I hope that you have an amazing holiday shopping weekend. That's coming up soon and then just I really abundant holiday season, not just in your business, but in your personal life as well. I hope that this episode was helpful for you. It kind of got those gears moving on, how you can make more money during the holidays. We've got some really great programs coming up. So stay tuned. I'll be sharing more about those. And as soon as Renae is feeling better and stops coughing, she'll be back on the podcast. So thanks for listening today, guys. And we'll see you in the next episode. Bye.