You're listening to gift biz unwrapped episode 157. Today, I'm going to share with you the five elements to set your next promotion on Fire attentive. Gifters bakers, crafters, and makers pursuing your dream can be fun. Whether you have an established business or looking to start one. Now you are in the right place. This is give to biz unwrapped, helping you turn your skill into a flourishing business.
Join us for an episode, packed full of invaluable guidance, resources, and the support you need to grow. Your gift biz here is your host gift biz gal, Sue moon Heights. So happy that you're joining me today, because this is a day of successes. For those of you who have been following my journey, you know, already that I'm writing a book and I just send it off to the editor yesterday. Now this whole book thing is really new to me. Wasn't sure what the steps were going to be.
It's a little bit crazy that I've just written the whole book. I have no idea yet what the title is, what the cover is gonna look like any of that. And it reminds me a little bit of people when they start their business, they jump right in and want to say, what's the name of it? Where is it going to be without doing some of the background work? It would be kind of like me figuring out what the title is and the cover without having written the book yet, but it's a natural tendency. So I get it.
We're always driving to the result, the conclusion of what we're trying to do, what our goal objectives are without sometimes going back and figuring out truly the path to getting that result. And that leads me right into our promotions. Boy, I'm guilty of this too. Have you ever created a promotion that you knew? Absolutely. For sure. Was going to just bring the flow customers into your shop or get your website just humming.
You knew it was going to happen, but then you put the promotion into play and yeah, it's okay. But nothing absolutely blowing the doors off. Well, I want to help you change that. I have five features for you that are going to set your next promotion on fire, light up your business and inject sales into your business.
Not only so you have the revenue, obviously, so you can pay yourself, your employees and invest in the business, but it also energizes you and reaffirms that what you're doing in your business is right. That's why the success of your promotions is so important. It's not all just about the money. It really does affect you,
right? When a promotion doesn't go, well, you sit back and, you know, you're kind of feeling blah, and that doesn't help you either in terms of the energy and the resilience and the excitement that you need about your business. Let's change that. But first I need to tell you how I came about these five features. It actually happened with the promotion that we did back for a business that I currently have called the ribbon print company.
We have our own line of ribbon called pretty print ribbon that I have manufactured just for us at a factory in China. So when we order, we have to buy a minimum order, quantity in Nemo queue, and that equates to thousands of rolls of ribbon. And it takes literally months for us to get an order to be restocked. So finally our ribbon shows up. We're so excited to finally get it and fill some back orders. And we opened the box to find, Oh my gosh, a color Of ribbon that we didn't order.
That was the most. I'm going to say obnoxious shade of neon pink that you could imagine we don't stock this color Nor would we ever. And we're like, Oh my gosh, what are we going to do with all that This ribbon, it was a disaster. So we thought we made the assumption that this color came in the minimum amount that we had to buy. So we're thinking we are sitting on literally thousands of rolls of this obnoxious color. So this was a big deal.
Luckily, as we continue looking through the boxes, there was only a small amount of this neon pink. It was a replacement for some unusable ribbon that we had received in a prior shipment. So it was a make good if you will, but now what are we going to do with this crazy color? After a bit of foot stomping and some words coming out of our mouths that I won't repeat here. We figured out what to do, how we could use this at least to get rid of it, because we also had an inventory problem.
We couldn't have this ribbon sitting around, taking up space. So we decided to do a flash sale to recoup, at least a portion of our costs. We could do a quick promotion, get rid of this stuff, reimburse ourselves for the cost of at least shipping and get this out of here. So we could kind of forget about it. Now don't get me wrong. It was beautiful ribbon. There was nothing wrong with it. In terms of the quality, you know, it wasn't an inferior role. It wasn't dirty.
The edges were clean, you know, different things that we look at for the quality. It's just not a color that we stock and I don't want to stock it. So we decided to put together a short and sweet promotion with limited sizes and quantity of this ribbon. We offered it at a deep discount and explained that this was a one time thing in. We called the color never again, neon pink. It was offered to our VIP customers.
Only through an email fulfillment was done on a first come first serve basis, by reply to that email, because we certainly weren't going to put this color up on it, our website, what were the Results we sold out? And we did have hundreds of rolls of ribbon. It wasn't like we had one or two. We sold out of all of our roles of never again, neon pink ribbon within 48 hours. I'd say that's a pretty successful promotion. Why did it work so well?
And what can we learn from this to apply to all of our future promotions, Laurie and I sat down and went back and said, okay, w why did we get the results that we did? And we've identified five things that this promotion had that made its performance so strong. So here we go, the five features to set your next promotion on fire. The first feature was scarcity. We had a specific quantity of ribbon, and we did not set an expectation that we would ever be getting this again in the future.
So people had to make a choice to buy quickly if they liked that color ribbon. And we had had requests for some neon type colors before, but if they really liked it, there was no time for them to hem and haw. Think about it a little bit, because we already told them, honestly, that once it's gone, it's gone. So they needed to respond quickly. That's scarcity. The second feature is limits. In this case, the limit was time since we were fulfilling orders on a first come first serve basis.
Hesitancy could mean loss of the opportunity we did in fact, run out of the product before all requests were completed. Unfortunately, because some people got excited about the ribbon and were just too late, but that does set the stage for future promotions because they see that when we say there's only a limited amount, there truly is only a limited amount. Another way you could use this limit of time is to have deadlines on your offers.
Perhaps it's a holiday special promotion only, or discounted prices only valid through X. So a different way to use a limit of time. The third feature to set your promotion on fire is credibility. And this is really important. We explain to our customers why we were doing this deep discount sale on the product. And then it wasn't part of our normal offerings. It was completely true and made sense to our customers in terms of why we were dropping the price.
It wasn't a sale, totally unrelated to what we normally present and without explanation. So it wasn't coming from left field and then being like, what? This is not what we normally see from the ribbon print company. So customers, weren't confused. We had explained the situation and the resulting promotion credibility. So important, being honest and upfront with your customers, particularly if you're doing something out of the norm versus what they've come to know and expect from you.
I call this fourth feature ego slash exclusivity. I mentioned, we offered this first to our VIP customers. I wanted to reward the most loyal customers first, had we not sold out, we would have then offered it to the rest of our customer base, but this made our VIP's feel special. And I like to give back to those who have helped us grow over time. And it also invested in us kind of like the Maya Angelo quote. It's not what you say or do. It's how you make someone feel.
And of course we want all of our customers to feel special, but this was a limited quantity. So we offered it first to a limited amount of people. There are lots and lots of ways that you can make your customers feel special. And I'm just now thinking that could be a very good podcast topic, making your customer feel valued and special can be done through email promotions, just to a list.
So only people who were on your list, maybe people who come in for a special promotion in your shop, that's available just for the day. So it's only people who are showing up live. You can also do this for events, lots of different ways. You can add different levels of exclusivity. It doesn't need to be just dollars. Like the people who spend the most money with you or that kind of thing.
The best way to look at ego and exclusivity is where is there the best match of what you're offering to, what your subset of customers slash prospects need, and then pointing out to them that they're special and that the value you're getting and that you have air quotes over here, self selected them for that offer. Doesn't that make you feel great when someone says, I thought of you, and here's why all of us want to feel identified and special and valued.
And this idea of presenting a promotion through exclusivity does just that. And the final feature is value. Now, in this case, we offered the ribbon at a 50% discount because we wanted to move it out fast. Remember this was a make good, so we didn't actually buy this ribbon, but we did have to pay for shipping from China. Remember, and it also meant that the color that we thought we were getting was now low in inventory. So we were going to have to restock that pretty quickly.
I feel like I want to make a caution here that whenever you are discounting your product, your retail price make to know all of your costs. And if you are going to deep discount, like we were doing at 50%, make sure you're not losing on the deal or at least covering costs like we were doing here. I know the first thing that people think of when you think of doing a promotion is a price discount. And I really want you to try and get out of that mentality.
There are so many other ways you can do promotions and bring in sales without just automatically resorting to dropping your price on the product for us in this particular situation, it made sense. The five features again are number one, scarcity, number two, limits number three, credibility four was ego and exclusivity. And number five is value before we move on into why this worked so well.
And the benefit to this promotion, let's hear a word from our sponsor who just so happens to be the ribbon print company. This podcast is made possible. Thanks to the support at the ribbon print company, create custom ribbons, right in your store or craft studio in seconds, visit the ribbon print company.com for more information, Couple of reasons why this promotion worked so well for us. The first one is infrequent sales.
Although we do have promotions from time to time, we have not conditioned our customers to wait for a sale to stock up on supplies. So as a consequence, when we do promote a new product or reduce our pricing, because remember I was just talking about the fact that not all promotions need to be a price reduction, but when we do our customers really take notice. The second thing is the quality of the product with this promotion. As I'd mentioned, also, the product was not inferior.
It was perfect ribbon. There was nothing wrong with it. It just wasn't a good color, never again, neon pink. So it wasn't damaged in any way was also not leftover reused or one of the displays. So the value of the product was 100%, even though the price was 50%. Now this might not always apply to you for a promotion, but I wanted to bring this up because this is an angle you can put into your promotion.
Copy. If the quality of the product is still of high value and you're offering it as a discount. So it worked so well for us because we were having a sale. When we normally don't do a lot of sales to our customers and the product, wasn't something that was inferior, which qualified for a price reduction, somewhat of a magic combination. If you ask me, I want to know cover what the benefits of this promotion were, and I'll identify three of them for you.
And this is something that I'm thinking you don't consider necessarily when you're putting together promotions. The first is it was a win, win. It was a win for us. And it was a win for our customers in situations like this, both of you as a business owner and your customer win, that's the sign of a successful promotion. We got rid of our never Again, neon pink, and many of our customers got a fun color of ribbon at a low price.
If they keep their pricing strategy solid, when they use this ribbon. In other words, they don't reduce the price of their ribbon just because they purchased it from us for less, their margins are going to be greater to. The second benefit is, was a low cost to implement this promotion. I gave you a lot of detail about what we did, because I wanted you to see that we didn't have to invest a lot of time into putting this together.
Yes, we had to do a photo and we had to make an email and send it out to a specific list, but we didn't have to add product to our website heavily promoted anywhere, or spend money to make money. And the final benefit is Goodwill. We could have sold this product at full price, and I know it would have sold out that way too, but by reducing the price we showed our customers that we like to work in. Good faith with them. Another win-win idea for a more altruistic twist. So How can you use this?
What we Did with our promotion was in a way the perfect storm, it combined a number of promotion. Success features into one, take a look at your business, your products and your customers. How might you be able to apply several of these elements into your next promotion? You don't need to use every single one of them like we did to help ensure that you do this in this crazy business world of ours, right? We hear things that we want to do. And then so quickly they vanished from our mind.
I've created a download for you that covers these five features. All you need to do to get that is jump over to gift biz on rapt.com forward slash one, five, seven. You can print that out, put it in a file that you use when you're doing promotions, hang it somewhere, give it to a marketing manager. If you have one, but try out these five features so that you can totally rock your next promotion. I am so excited for all of you to hear the podcast for next week.
So I'm going to give you a little insight and teaser into what's coming up. We are going to be hearing from Aaron Roth of arc-on mounts. He has integrated into the creator in a big way and talks with us about how to do live. And we all know on social media live is everything. Whether it's Facebook, whether it's Instagram, he's got some great tips for us.
And I have to tell you a discount coming just for you on his products to ensure that you don't miss this episode or any episode of gift biz on wrapped. If you're listening on iTunes, click that little subscribe button. That way each new episode will be downloaded directly to your phone. The minute it goes live on Monday mornings, I'll see you. Then Episode is all wrapped up, but your gift vis journey continues.
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