In the Loupe
In the Loupe
5 Tips to Prep Your Store for Black Friday
Mike shares five practical fundamental tips to prepare your jewelry store for Black Friday and the holidays. Quick wins stack up: show energy, make hours obvious, trigger visits with email, and remove online friction.
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Welcome to In the Loop. What is up everybody? My name is Michael Burpo. Thanks again for listening to In the Loop. It is our annual Black Friday prep episode. This time I'm doing five tips to get you ready for Black Friday. This is just a couple things, maybe just jot these down. I'll put them in the show notes. And if you do these, I'm sure they're not gonna hurt. It's mainly to just make sure that you are doing the fundamentals right. Whether you have a great Black Friday or an incredible Black Friday, it's gonna come down to sometimes how fickle the market is. But these are just the fundamentals to make sure that you have as good of a time as you possibly can. So everybody, please sit down, enjoy, and good luck. I hope it goes so well for you.
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SPEAKER_01:Okay everybody. Like I said, I'm gonna do five tips or kind of fundamentals, we're calling fundamentals, for your store to uh make sure that you're just doing everything right, and then the rest, the sales, they're gonna come to you no matter what. So let's jump into it without further ado. All right, here we go. The first one is let's be active on social media. I know that social media can be such a fickle beast sometimes, and it can feel like you're shouting into a black hole, but now is the time to capitalize on it. I've talked about this numerous times in uh other episodes and how it's like coming to a crescendo. You need to make as much noise and really capitalize on that social uh currency that you've built up throughout the years by posting, you know, regular fluff. But what I would recommend is just give one or two or three of your employees access to the Instagram if you feel comfortable with that, and give them the instruction, it's okay for them to record some uh stuff during the the store. So if you have a big rush of people at your at your shop, maybe they go in, they record a little bit of it. I think it looks great when you look around and you see tons of people in there, or when you have a nice purchase or an item going out the door, maybe not an engagement ring, but something nice. Um, maybe just get like a little recording or a boomerang and put that onto your uh your stories. Appearing in the stories increasingly, I think, is a more immediate buy now reminder than even ads sometimes. Especially, I'm sure that lots of the people in your location are following you already. And I think that following and seeing the stories on there and they open up your stories, and it's like a little, you know, the trail of white ants at the top. If you've got a lot of them and it's exciting and it seems like it's full of energy, that is definitely going to help. And if I am a shopper and I'm sitting around and I see it's slamming and there's great deals, and maybe uh you showcase if you guys have like champagne or something in there and you want to have people come by, highlighting that I think is just a great thing. I would highly recommend just diversifying. You don't have to put all the pressure on yourself, especially if you're the store owner. You know, it can be very tempting to want to do everything yourself, but I think what I found, at least for my own uh events, is giving your social media to a couple of other people, it just um increases the opportunity and chance for you to be able to, you know, fill up and have enough people um, you know, taking great videos. And you can take those and always repurpose them later into reels. You can always download them and then cut them together, but that's more advanced. Just be active on social media. A quick five-minute boomer uh five-second boomerang on your story does wonders, I promise. Okay, next one. I think it's worth it to do a nicely designed little uh post, a uh nicely designed square image of you know, whatever, or an illustration with your holiday hours, and then post it to all of your social media and then pin it in social media or on Instagram. You can pin posts, and I would pin it uh a week early, and I post it, pin it to the top, and then take it down later. But having things really easy to find is so important. People want to know when you're open, and a lot of times people are going to their uh to your social media to find out when your store opening is. I've been seeing them a lot more, it just makes it so that like a nice square or uh slightly vertical crop with some hollyberries or a wreath or a wreath with the hours on the mids on the inside, open seven days a week from whatever, ten until ten. Showing that I think is makes it so that things are much more accessible, and you'll never have people that are like, ah, I didn't know if they were open yet, or I didn't expect them to be open on whatever Mondays because they're usually not open on Mondays. Highly recommend just take two seconds, make that post, put it up on your Facebook, on your uh Instagram, even you can post that post into your story just every day if you wanted to. That'd be such super easy. All you gotta do is just add like a little sound on top of it. It'd be super easy. Okay, the next one. If you have an email list, now is the time to send out your blast. So Punchmark has email marketing services, but you might have an email list yourself. I know that there's like a way to export them out of the edge. I would highly recommend now is the time to cash in on that currency. And we always talk about doing the laying the groundwork and doing your your you know fundamentals during the year, you know, making posts and offering incentives. Now is the time just to get them to come into your store. An email blast, especially an early one, I think is a great way to just get inside of their Instagram their inbox, and it's another touch point. And I think that Instagram stories and then their inbox, it's these things that are just in transit, and people check them while they're in the middle of going to the gas station, and they check them when they're grocery shopping. That kind of moment, maybe they stop on their way home from the gas station because oh, there's gonna be great deals, or oh, there's going to be uh extra hours. I think that sending out your email blast is the time to do it. Don't do it like you know, you gotta take the foot off the gas in March and April, most likely, but now is the time to capitalize on uh sending out your emails. Okay, next one. Try out a dry run on your website. Uh it's no secret, e-commerce is having a real moment for the e-commerce in jewelry uh system. We saw that this past September and this past October, so that's September 2025 and October 2025, are the best Septembers and Octobers that I have ever tracked for e-commerce at Punchmark. So jewelry is really having a moment for e-commerce that we haven't seen since probably 2021 or 2022. Uh, there's a couple of reasons, I think. Um, I don't have I'm not a massive expert, but I look at these things a lot. I can say that it has to do with the general items that are being sold and also what the cost of goods are. And the average price of an item that's sold on through an e-commerce transaction is almost, you know, sometimes it's double what it was the year before because of just purely because of the price of gold. And as a result, we're seeing that the average transaction is uh average order value is uh in the 700s in certain parts, and uh that means that more people are able to have an appetite for purchasing online. And what's interesting is last year we were last year and the year before that, I think that the price of lab grown diamonds was down and people were still buying them, and as a result, the average order value was going down. So we saw the same number of transactions, but the average order value was in the 350 to 450-ish range, and all of this year it's between 500 and yes, 750. That's what October was. It was$757 was the average transaction side um on the Punchmark platform. So, what do I mean by dry run your website? Open up your website in incognito so you're not logged in. You're going to go, and I want you to order a pair of earrings. I want you to order them for me. Go in, add them to your cart, go in and add uh maybe one more item. Add a bracelet, a uh tennis bracelet if you have it. Add to your cart, go through, enter all of the information, and get to the last step. And if everything goes smoothly, if you can find the bracelet and the earrings appropriately, then you pass. But you might find something along the way. Oh, I don't have a landing page, or oh, I only have two earrings on my website. Why is that? That's the kind of stuff you want to detect now before your clients might. So now is a good time for you to just sit down, dry run your website. It's worth the three or five minutes that it's gonna take you. Do it on your phone, do it on your desktop. If you do both of those, add two items, it's probably gonna take you six minutes in total. I promise it's worth it. If you have an issue, just open up a ticket. All right, and the last one. Let's just put a banner up. Put anything up, change out your banner. I don't care what you change it to. If you've had the same banner all year, you need to put something new up. I don't care what it is. It doesn't even have to be holiday centric. I think just changing it so that if someone has been to your website earlier in the year, the odds are much higher that they're going to go now because we always see an incredible hockey stick right up and to the right for November and December and October, but that's past. November and December. Now is the time to just show that you've been updating your website. So go in, add a new banner for one of them, or a nice seasonal one, or maybe it just shows your holiday hours. I'm okay with that. Show some nice jewelry, pop it right in there, add it easily to your website, or ask your account manager to do it. That's the easy type of layups I think that make a huge difference on your website and make it so that uh people feel like, oh, this thing probably has fresh jewelry on it and it's you know trustworthy. Okay, so that's five items. I'm gonna run through them again. So that's be active on social media. Let's put some stories up there, get on top of it, give the login to a couple of employees or have like a centralized phone everyone can log into and just pull it up. If there's if it's busy, get a nice recording or some nice boomerangs or some jewelry. I want some trails of ants, you know, the white ants at the top of your stories. Let's have go shoot for 10 stories a day when it gets into the busy part of the season. The more you appear, people go in, they watch three in the morning, and they come back in the afternoon, and you have seven more, they're gonna be watching them, and suddenly it's like, oh man, I kind of want some jewelry. Next, pin the hours on your social media, make a little post. It could be a square crop, could be not, a nice little wreath. Feel free to steal that. Everyone loves wreaths. Put in your stories open seven days a week or six days a week, Monday or whatever, ten to eight until Christmas Day. Popping that in there in a text base right on the story, and then pinning it to your Instagram grid so it appears in your top three posts, putting it on your Facebook page so it appears right at the top or on your most recent post. And even if you're gonna combine it, you could do it with the email blast, just having it easily accepted accessible, and then feel free to share that post every 24 hours onto your story. It's you know, you might as well. That's the kind of stuff no one's gonna get mad at you for having that post there, and it's only gonna make it so that people are more informed. Next, if you have an email list, just send out a blast. A little thing that has some information about your store hours or a coupon code that's exclusive to email emailers, or uh an information about the newest orders, some type of email blast. Now is the time to cash in on it. Send the email blast now. It's much more valuable than in you know March or April. Send them right now, it's worth it. Drive run your website. So let's go in. We're gonna add two items a pair of earrings and a bracelet, and you're gonna do it on your desktop and on your mobile device. And do it in incognito so that there's no chance that uh you're logged in and it's gonna cause any issues. Add those items both to your cart, get to the last step, and make sure you have no roadblocks. Just go through. The dry run is key, I promise. If you have any issues, contact your account manager earlier as opposed to later. And then finally, let's put up a banner. Put the banner up. Doesn't matter what it is. If you had an old banner throughout the year, everyone has an aesthetic one, change it out so that when if someone has gone to your website earlier in the year and then they come back for the holidays, it's fresh and it just shows that you care about your website and that it's okay to buy uh from your e-commerce site or that you're leaning in. I promise it seems like it's such a oh, like I already have that set up, I changed it in September. No, no, no, just update it, use a little wreath. I'm big on wreaths right now. Other than that, you all are so ready. If you're listening to this uh episode or you listen to this podcast each week, most likely you already probably know about these things. We talk about getting ready and being prepared. We had a retailer roundtable that talks all about preparing for the holidays. Well I can just say is that every effort that you do now is going to be worth it in its own way, whether that's getting your VIPs more engaged, getting your social media more active, getting your website tuned up, getting your uh sales staff engaged and leaning in, all of that stuff is just going to move the needle just a little bit more. And I do believe that luck favors the prepared. And the more prepared you are, the more opportunities you have to get nice and lucky when it comes to selling that big item or selling more items, whatever that means for you, just be prepared. I'm so excited. I during this time of the year, we always just have to go quiet and let our retailers do their thing. And it kind of kills me a little bit because I want to cheerlead for them a little bit more and tell them how excited I am and to encourage them. But you all are doing this, this is your livelihood, and I can't wait to kind of check in on you all uh on the other side and hear about the stories. Every time we go to the shows in uh February and March, I love hearing about how people's Q4 was. I follow the JHJ post where people are like, is it quiet for you? Is it busy for you? And people are like, Oh yeah, I already beat last year's Q4 and it's only December 1st. I love reading those posts. So I'll be tuning in. Good luck, have fun, you know, maybe drink some water, a couple more coffees, and you'll be great. Thanks everybody. Quick episode this week, and we'll probably take a week off for Thanksgiving, and we'll be back the week after that. Cheers, good luck, bye. Alright, everybody, that's the end of the show. Thanks so much for listening. This episode was brought to you by Punchmark and produced and hosted by me, Michael Burpel. This episode was edited by Paul Suarez with music by Ross Cochran. Don't forget to leave the podcast a five-star rating on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and leave us feedback on punchmark.com slash loop. That's L-L-U-P-E. We're gonna be probably taking a week off next week, and we'll be back the next week after that. So good luck in your Black Friday sales. Can't wait to hear all about it. Cheers. Bye.
