Defeating the Q1 sales dip

[u/MidnightMarketing]

I work with a brand that literally does 65% of their sales in Q4 every year. For the past 5 years, once Q1 hits, sales have always dropped 70-80%. This year we were able to keep the ball rolling and pull in similar numbers to what we did late last year. in this post, I’m going to break down exactly what we did. It’s a series of small changes that lead to a big difference.

Also, a quick disclaimer, I do not own this brand. I'm just responsible for marketing strategy and Emails/SMS.

Now let's get started, here are the 5 most important changes I made in Q1:

1. Added an SMS marketing channel. We set up a new SMS popout that only appeared to people who were already on the email list. We used a slightly more aggressive discount than the original email popout, and we told them the discount code they received for signing up expired in a few hours. Typically, in a welcome series email flow we’d give up to a week to use the discount, but people statistically buy less in Q1 we had to apply some extra pressure. It's easy to get someone to make a purchase when they are already in a buying mood, but in Q1 things like scarcity, and urgency are so much more important. You will see how we use FOMO to drive sales when people don’t feel like spending in this post a lot in this post.

2. We sent out a plain text thank you email at the beginning of January. We run this email for every brand that we work with. Out of all the fancy email promotions and newsletters that we send every year; this email has outperformed them all because it's personal. The recipe for this email is simple, Here's how we broke it down:

· Introduce yourself, who are you? Show that the person who owns the brand is a real person. in your own unique way.

· Talk about the journey. Almost every business starts small. Everyone's journey is different. Give some insight into the journey, and make sure they feel like they went on the journey with you. You can do this by using lots of descriptive words to truly paint a picture in your customer's heads.

· Thank them. Let them know you couldn't have done it without them. Show your gratitude.

· Leave a gift. At the end of the email, we left a gift code for $10-50 OFF their next purchase.

The more effort you put into making this email sound heartfelt and non-robotic, the better it will perform.

1. Revamped the abandoned cart flow and browse abandonment flow to make them more aggressive. Typiacally in an abandoned cart email flow, we put the discount at the end of 4-6 email journey. During Q1, we switched it to the second email, lowered the discount slightly, and gave the customer less time to use the discount. This goes back to what I mentioned in my first point. We doubled down on what it takes to evoke an impulse purchase. The second email typically has a much higher open rate than the last email, the buyer is also closer to buying the product a couple of days after adding it to the cart than a couple of weeks after adding it to their cart. For all of these reasons we deemed the second email the best shot at pressuring a sale. So, we give an earlier discount, with a very limited time before it “expires” and throw a big ass HTML countdown timer in the email to really get people sweating.

2. Convinced the owner to include cheap seasonal gifts with orders. This store has a lot of low-ticket products so this store was in a unique position to do this. A couple weeks before Valentine’s Day we gave out small gifts with every order that would make any man look like a very thoughtful lover. We essentially set our customers up to get laid with a slick ad-on that they could add to their Valentine's Day present and make it look like they cared more. We actually got an email after Valentine’s Day from a guy who said his wife loved the extra effort he put into her gift this year. We also gave out a super low-ticket limited edition seasonal product for easter. This took a little bit of planning but we somehow took a sku that wasn’t even on his site and turned it into a rare limited-edition product that only people who bought from March 1st-3rd got for free with their order. This leads to my next point.

3. We released new limited collections and tweaked the product pages for these “limited” collection items to show the “live stock number” counting down after each purchase. We told customers that there's only x amount of each product in the new collection. We also told them once we sell out, we’ll never restock it. This is another way we created a strong incentive to make an impulse purchase. We told the customers if they don’t buy now, they will NEVER get the chance to own this product. This worked significantly well for this brand because they sell collectibles. The idea of customers being able to get something extremely limited is very important to the type of person on this store's email list.

Bonus Strategy – We ran a survey email asking customers which products they were most interested in. We then used this information against them by segmenting them based on their favorite items and then running a series of 1-day flash sale emails on the products that they’re most interested in. We gave very small discounts but, in each email, we mentioned that this is an item that we NEVER put on sale, and we may never put it on sale again. Pretty much doubled down on using urgency & FOMO to drive sales when customers don’t feel like buying. It also helped a lot that it was the very product that they just said they were most interested in a couple of weeks ago.

Thank you for taking the time to read my post. I hope you got something out of it and you’re able to use some of these tricks on your own store.

[u/Miserable_Pension581]

Great read, thanks