holiday promotions, stop being stubborn

Summary

I refused to run Black Friday sales for years because I didn’t want to be like everyone else. it cost me millions of dollars in revenue. don’t be me.

1. some things are done a certain way because they work. people are in buying mode in november and december. they’re shopping for gifts and for themselves. if you’re a better human business, the new year is when people are looking to change. don’t fight the current.

2. segment first. email your list and ask if they want to hear about your new year offer. if 100 people are on the list and 30 reply yes, now you only talk to those 30. you’re not spamming the other 70.

3. engage with a three-email sequence. email one, what’s wrong with the current options. email two, why your approach is different. email three, the offer is live.

4. use real scarcity. ten spots, real deadline, hard cap. fake scarcity erodes trust the second your audience notices, and they notice fast.

a campaign in the last week of december and the first week of january is straightforward, low effort, and adds real money to the business. don’t be stubborn for no reason. try harder.

Transcript

the stupidity that cost me millions

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe, if you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. All right, so we’re coming up on the start of a new year. What should you be doing as a business owner when it comes to marketing? So I’m not necessarily talking about your goals, your plans, things that you should be doing at the beginning of the new year, but talking about how to get more customers, clients, patients, et cetera.

This is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon. Let’s dive into it a little bit more. So I, as a business owner would always go against the grain. In fact, that was in my nature for a long time, very just everything was against the grain. If you told me to run a promotional campaign or get a sponsor on my podcast, like I wouldn’t do those things because I didn’t want to be like everyone else.

why the new year is your moment

I didn’t want to conform. That was my, I think my biggest fear was conformity. Like I didn’t want to conform to being average or what other people were doing. But there’s a reason some things are done and you have to look at, are you just being dumb or are you actually like standing on principle? And I’ve talked about podcasts in podcasts about like standing on principle for don’t sell your soul.

Don’t don’t like, and in my context, it was like, I didn’t want to create a supplement company as a part of Garage Team Athlete, even though that would grow the company because I just felt like I would have to sell my soul in order to do that. That’s a principled stand. But saying I don’t want to run a promotion because everyone else is running a promotion isn’t really principled.

It’s more stupidity. And hey, this is coming from a guy who just wallowed in that stupidity for a long time. So don’t do it. Don’t be like me. Don’t make the mistake. I just started doing Black Friday. We call it Better Human Friday at Garage Team Athlete. I just started doing that a couple of years ago, only a handful of years ago.

segment your list

Maybe I’ve done it three times now. And I calculated how much it makes and how much, how many years I had not done it in the past because I was like, ah, you know what? Everyone else does a Black Friday. I don’t want to do Black Friday. And I was inspired by Patagonia, the company, I think it was Patagonia or REI, one of those where they do anti-Black Friday where they like give their team off and they don’t run any promotional or sales, or at least they didn’t back in the day.

Maybe they changed their mind on that. And I thought it would be cool to adopt that as a business owner, but I calculated it out and I had lost millions of dollars in revenue by trying to take a stupid stand on the fact that I wouldn’t run Black Friday sales. And this wasn’t like something I preached and told people I wouldn’t do.

I just kept it to myself like, I’m not going to do that because everyone else is doing it. But there’s a reason, right? There’s a reason people are in a buying frenzy. They’re looking for gifts for loved ones and discounts for themselves and things like that. So that’s why people run Black Friday sales and why they’re really successful.

engage with a three-email sequence

So again, my stupidity costs me millions of dollars and I don’t think that it should for you. So what do we do going into the new year? If you are running a better human business, meaning that your business improves other humans in some way, shape or form, the beginning of the year is your time to shine.

It is your time to shine, right? People are looking at your business as a place to improve. And a lot of people get excited around the new year. I admit, I’m one of those people. I love a fresh start, a new calendar, January 1st, like a new year. I love that. I love that stuff. I always have and I always will.

And I’m the type of person who doesn’t really care that it’s January 1st. If I want to start a new goal on June 1st, I will, but I’m still not going to take a crap on January 1st. It’s just better. There’s something about it. The whole world is with you in wanting to get better, at least temporarily.

real scarcity, not fake

Now, I’m not saying everybody adheres to their new year’s goals or resolutions and all that kind of stuff, but at least they’re motivated and amped up to do it initially. So it’s a really, it’s a really fun time every year. It’s motivating, at least in the health fitness space, like the self-improvement, self-development space.

It’s a great time. So you don’t want to stand, you don’t want to work against that momentum in saying I’m not doing something. You really only want to aid those people who are looking to go in that direction. So we’re not trying to convince people who don’t set goals or don’t do things to better themselves.

We’re not trying to convince them to get better, but the people who want to and you have something to offer them that can launch them into the new year, now is the time to do that. Now is the time to start planning that. And so I’ll give you a basic kind of marketing breakdown. If you don’t want to do like a mega promotion, right, a mega promotion to me is if you just did something for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, something like that.

If you already did those things, then you probably don’t want to go back to back with another huge campaign for 2024. You can, if you haven’t ran anything, then I’d recommend doing a huge campaign for 2024. But the one thing that I highly recommend people do is segmentation. So this is if you have a way to communicate with your customers via email, text message, something like that.

So you want to segment these people. And so you can, you can segment people by doing something as simple as, Hey, we’re running this awesome 2024 promotion. So give it a name, right? With a better human fitness program promotion, what I wouldn’t call a promotion to your, to your customers, but I would segment them.

So I email them or text them and be like, Hey, if you want to hear more about, you’re specifically asking if you want to hear more about how you can become a better human in 2024, click this link, sign, fill out this form, reply back. There are a number of ways you can do this all very easy, very simple.

And so say I had a hundred people on the email list and I just want to keep it simple. I don’t want to create new forms or track links or anything. And I just have a hundred people on this email list. And I say, Hey, if you want to hear about this awesome 2024 promotion, we’re running reply back and let me know.

I send it to a hundred people. Let’s say 30 people reply back and say they want to hear about it. Now I’m only going to communicate with these 30 people, right? So now those are the people who are going to be in my 2024 promotion, these 30 people. And the next step I would take from here is engagement.

So we go from segmentation, we’ve segmented the people who want to hear about it. So we’re not bothering people who don’t, now we’re going to engage. And so we’ll engage the people who want to hear about your 2024 thing. And this could be a series again of communication. It could be text message, whatever emails are really effective at this.

And it’s, I’d say two to three emails where you’re just educating them about the thing. So say I was selling a running program. So I’m like, Hey, I reached out to these hundred people. Do you want to hear about my running program that I’m launching in 2024? Thirty people say, yes, I do. And then I reach out to those 30 people and I’m going to do a number of things.

I’m going to, I’m going to tell them what’s wrong with current running programs and why running programs are not as good as they should be. I’m going to tell them the current state of the industry in my first email. The second email, I’m going to tell them my unique approach and how I’m different, how my company is different, how my programming is different, how my running program is different.

How do we do things differently? And then in the next email, that can be like the launch. And you do that right around the end of the year, beginning of the year. And this is a very simple marketing framework that you can follow. And then the call to action, typically there’s going to be, you need to throw some sort of scarcity element around it.

And anytime we get into scarcity, I know scarcity is like a psychological trigger, but I, I only ever encourage doing authentic, true scarcity. So if I’m reaching out to 30 people for being a part of my run coaching program and I can only realistically fit 10 people, I want that to be known. I can only fit 10 people in this.

Or maybe you’re trying to get people into your practice and you can only fit 10 people at the given price if it’s a discount, or maybe you can only take on so many in a given week, something like, there’s always a way to find that scarcity element. And then I would do a series of those emails, right?

Like, Hey, we’re open. And then another email letting them know, Hey, did you, are you sure you saw this? You haven’t signed up yet. And then the last email be like, Hey, we’re closing down. And this would be around January 5th or something like that. And so that is a simple framework. And I just did that real briefly.

Like you could knock this out without, you don’t have to write a ton of emails or whatever, but this is very simple email marketing framework. I feel like I’m giving you just enough time from when this is published to plan those things out and execute them, but it’s going to add money to your business if you do it.

So I highly recommend that you do it. Don’t go against the flow. Don’t be an idiot like me who wouldn’t run a black Friday and has said no to money in multiple different ways. Sometimes it’s been in good ways as a principled stand, and sometimes it’s just straight stupidity. And I don’t want you to be in that boat.

So don’t make the same mistakes. Now, I know this is a lot of work, right? You got to write some emails. You got to prep a campaign around the holidays. Maybe you’ve never done this before. Maybe you’re a little bit scared.