Local Market Monopoly

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Clarence Fisher: Hey, welcome back to Local Market Monopoly. I'm Clarence Fisher, your host, so glad you're here. Hey, listen, Black Friday's coming, but I'm going to tell you something. You do not have to have all of those door busting, marching, killing deals that the big retailers do to get masses of people into their stores. I'm telling you, that can kill a local small businesses. Listen, I've found a way that for you to not only survive Black Friday as a smaller, as a local business, but also turn that single day of profits into lifetime loyal customers and revenue beyond the holiday season and isn't that awesome? Well, stay tuned because I'm going to share with you how to attract those customers without deep discounting, first of all. Then we're going to give you some strategies so that you can ensure that those first time buyers, those people who are just now coming to you, turn into repeat customers.
And then lastly, how do you manage the inventory that you have? If you got extra inventory, how do you manage that without having to deal with all types of overstock? All right, stick around all that and more coming up right after this.
All right, so we are back, and before we get started, listen, if you want me to go through this for your business specifically, head over to MainStreetMarketingCoach.com and check out our program there right now as this episode is airing, you can get started for less than a cup of coffee a day. Seriously, it's crazy. Go check it out and check out some of the testimonials and stuff that we've been able to do good. So I'm going to share with you though some strategies that you can put in place on your own. You don't have to deal with me any more than listening to me right now if you don't want to just go over there if you want some stuff specifically for your business.
But let's talk about Black Friday. Black Friday shows up every single week, not every week, every year. I'm thinking about Dave Ramsey. When we took Dave Ramsey, was it financial piece? Years, years ago, my wife and I, he said, Hey, Christmas is showing up again by surprise, just like it does every year, right? And basically what he was talking about was putting a little bit every month towards your Christmas pinning budget, which we started years and years ago, and now it's just a thing that we do and it's really, really cool to just not have to worry about it because we've been stacking up on it. Anyway, Black Friday, love it or not, is part of that whole holiday season. And whether you love it or not, kind of just depends on if you're prepared for it or not. If you're never prepared for Black Friday, you don't really care about it. If you are like, I'm not discounting my stuff like that for Black Friday, you don't really care about it. But if you have the strategies that I'm going to share with you today, you'll love Black Friday because you realize you don't have to discount all of your stuff with all this door busting type of stuff, like I said before, that kills your margins. I mean, that can kill a small retailer. We know this. So here's the deal. I found a way that you can not only survive Black Friday, but also turn that single day of profits into a lifetime of loyal customers. And it wasn't about competing with these big retailers on price, but it's about offering something more valuable, starting with a unique, personalized experience that would keep those customers coming back long after the holiday is over. So let's get started, shall we?
First off, our first key to unlocking all of these profitable Black Fridays is I say, all these profitable Black Fridays, like I'm future pacing. It's going to be profitable for you from now on, okay? Is we don't want to slash our prices. You heard that, right? We don't want to do that. If you're in retail and you're like, Hey, it's part of what we do, that's fine. You can do that. I'm just telling you, operate at least a loss, a less loss as you possibly can. And here are some ways that you can do this. Scarcity works, scarcity, exclusivity. You can offer limited time products or even early bird specials. Think about that. Something that you're breaking out that your customer clients, patients are going to need and they can get access to it earlier, that's going to create buzz without you having to cut your margin.
Scarcity definitely does. You don't want fake scarcity. I mean, if it's something that you know you're going to have after the holiday, that's fine, but you could also stack the cool, we always talk about that. Add something that's really cool to it. You're not dropping the price, but you're adding something of great perceived value. For instance, you're a vet and you're adding doggy treats or something like that that don't cost you much, but my goodness, the value, we go crazy over doggy treats over here. We have a shihtzu that's like a year old, and my wife just went and got birthday treats and treats. Are we got donuts or something? They're not really donuts, but you know what I mean. All my beds are listening like, yes, yes, yes. So you could add doggy treats don't cost that much, but we go crazy over them and think about this. The specific treat is only limited, is only available during the Black Friday sale or is only available for that week or the month of December is when this is available.
So come up with something that's limited time. You could also host in-store events. So you're a beauty supply store, right? You've got an in-store event that you do. You could do demos, you could do workshops. We could do that as well, even as a service business, you could create a workshop that's exclusive for that particular week, and then you can also do a loyalty type program if you have one of those, what is it, app card or something like that that does loyalty programs for that day. There are other things that you can do besides slash prices. You get the point. You're stacking the cool, instead of lowering your price, you're stacking the cool. I think what we're going to do is do the, let's add the episode. Speaking to my team right now, let's add the episode from last year where we talked about stacking the cool as well, and then you can listen to that episode after this.
So number one, attracting without deep discounting. Basically stack the cool leverage, scarcity, some exclusivity always works. You could host in-store events, special events, and implement a loyalty program as well. Let's move on to number two, transforming those first time shoppers into lifelong customers. This first came up on my radar when we were doing a lot of Groupon type sales, and we still do that. We still run Facebook promotions, particularly for our chiropractors, for first time visits, and they're really low. You can get in for 19 bucks, 29 bucks, sometimes 19 bucks. But the whole idea is to get someone in who has not been in, doesn't know about you, but turn them in, get them onto ongoing care. So for you, you know how Groupon works. The problem with Groupon is you got all of this foot traffic, and we noticed this early, early on, you got all of this foot traffic and you sold a bunch of stuff, but it was at such a deep discount.
And then not only that, Groupon took half of what of the revenue you did collect, so you're operating at a severe loss. So the clients that we saw success with Groupon implemented a strategy where we started emailing those people. Let's take a dry cleaner, for instance, come in on a Groupon, which could be a Black Friday special as well. Then that very next week, they get an email that offers them a discount. We're still offering them a discount in this example, but it's less of a discount. And then that following week, they get an email that is an even less of a discount, and so by three or four weeks we've got them up to regular price and they've developed a habit now. Now we're their dry cleaner. They're coming to us for regular price, so that's just one of the things that we put in place.
You just got to understand that when they're coming in, even if they're coming in without a discount and they're coming in to get something exclusive, something that you've got scarcity tied to it, you want to keep them coming. And the number one way is to personalize and follow up with them. You want to send them a thank you email. You want to send them another special offer that shows that you value their business. That's the biggest thing, even in e-commerce, if you're selling stuff online, when someone purchases from you, let's say they purchase a watch from you or something like that, when you mail that out, you want to give them something called a bounce back, which is an offer for a little bit less like we did with our dry cleaning example, dry cleaner example, to get them to back. Now imagine this, if you're a plumber, if you're a plumber, you go out and you service, you want to leave them with something to get them to come back for maintenance.
At some point, you really want to try to get them onto a maintenance program, but even if that doesn't happen, let's leave them with a, I keep saying discount, but either a discount or leave them with something extra that they're going to get an exclusive deal that they're going to get, which may not even be a discount, but it's basically from this time period to this time period, you are eligible for this service, but you want to follow up. That's number two. Turning these first time shoppers into lifelong customers is personalized the follow up. And then going back to this loyalty program, if you do some type of loyalty program, you can give them an extra reward, but also make that time based, but you want to have some type of, basically, you want to have some type of post-purchase strategy, and this is what I'm saying.
This is one of the things that we break down in Mainstream Marketing Coach, but you want to have some type of strategy in place to engage them with regular content and regular offers after they've come in for the very first time. All right, so number one, we've got attracting them without deep discounting. Now we are going to continue to stay in front of them with relevant content and different offers. Oh man, you want to get their email address. Another cool thing too would be to when they come in, you definitely want to give them some type of review card. You can get little business cards printed up that you give out at the register for them to leave you a review. You could also send them to go into all this stuff. Anyway, those are some strategies for that. Let's move on to number three.
I don't want to take forever going through this, but I do want to give you some stuff on how to prepare, how to prepare for Black Friday, and let's look at the inventory management, which is always a big deal because especially if you don't have a Black Friday to go off of if you're not going off of a last year, really, that's really how you want to do it. You want to go off of the data that you have and analyze your past sales data to predict the required stock that you need for this year. If not, reach out to someone that's in the same business that you're in. We all have these groups and masterminds that we're part of. You can reach out to someone that's maybe in another part of the country, another city, and find out what they are, how much are they stocking, so you can use that. And then whatever your inventory tracking system, hopefully you have one that gives you real time inventory alerts.
Man, these sales kind of go, especially if you're retail. Yeah, you definitely want to have a track on your inventory and then restock those popular items quickly. So you have some vendors, some providers that you can get the restock in a day or two, and so keep them on speed dial and you may not have to keep as much stocked as you think. So number one, let's look at last year's data and see what this item or this service, how many did they sell? If it's a service, did you only sell two or three of those?
Maybe you don't need the stock so much, or you could sell them. Here's a good one too, is you could sell them and then deliver them later. As long as you're letting people know that, hey, especially in a service, we're going to run this offer for you and it's exclusive, and then we're going to schedule the completion of this for you starting next month. And then you can schedule everybody, right? Let's say you've got, yeah, I mean, that's a good one for service, for people who are holding actual stock. You really want to try to look at last year and get a forecast, otherwise check with other people that are in your industry. So now when they get there, we want to have some type of memorable experience for them, like a memorable, especially if they're coming in the store. That's going to be your secret weapon against the big retailers.
First and foremost, speedy service. If people are contacting you through your website, you definitely want to have a chat widget on your website so that you can respond to people quickly, especially for service businesses and service people, and you want to be friendly. Listen to me, people are crazy during these holidays. I'm telling you, people have the craziest attitudes during the holiday, and you would think that it is super ironic when everybody's supposed to feel love and spiritual and the love of God. People have attitudes. Look, you have to be friendly though. Tell your staff, we are going to be friendly when you get off work. You can do whatever you want to do. You can go and hit the boxing bag or kick a wall or something like that. But when you're talking to people, you got to be friendly. Make sure that your folks are well-trained.
They provide efficient service. They provide friendly service. I keep saying it. Friendly, friendly, friendly, fast and friendly. That's what has to happen fast and friendly. And so when they come into your store, you want to make sure that they are being engaged. Make sure that things are easy to find, and this goes for your website as well. If you're a service person, things need to be easy to find. Whatever you're offering, they need to go. If you're running an ad and it's promoting one service, they need to go to a page that is only about that service actually that should be happening any and every time. Don't send them to your homepage, send them to a page that is about that service. If you're sending them an email about a service and they need to either schedule an appointment with you or you have a link that is going to your website that is saying, to learn more about this service, please send them to something that is only about that service, I promise you, your conversion rates will be higher.
Now, of course, if you are, you're in retail, you can offer free gift shopping or at least gift wrapping or at least lower cost gift wrapping. I mean, I personally don't like when gift wrapping is going to cost me a whole nother 20, $30, and especially for the guys. I get it. You can make some money. Those of you who have retail stores, us guys, we're like, you know what? Can you just wrap this for me? But I'm telling you, it gets to the point to where I'm like, I mean, you're buying so many gifts.
It's a running joke in my family. Now they know when I wrap the presents because I mean, it is not perfect. It's not good. I think I posted on Facebook last year. She always knows which, they always know which ones are from me because two pieces of tape, and as long as it's covered up, as long as it's covered up, we are good. So you could also offer personal shopping advice when you're in there. And so craft a memorable customer experience. Sit down with your team. If it's just you sit down with you and say, okay, if we were serving one person, one person, what would make this experience awesome for that one person? And brainstorm what you can do for that one person. Now, of course, if you were really serving one person, there are things that you would probably put on there that don't make sense when you scale to hundreds of people, but at least put it down because that power, it's called the power of one exercise.
Basically, if you do that power of one exercise, and you should probably all of this stuff we should do not only on Black Friday, but you should do this anyway, do the power of one exercise, list everything that you would do for one customer, and then go through that and see what you can actually do, and that's going to allow you to create an extremely awesome customer service for your people. And then put that into play. Because I'm telling you, it's all about experience right now when someone comes to your business, either you're doing a service for them or they come to your physical business, it's about the experience. And so a couple of extra tips in closing here.
If you want to take things to the next level, look at some local partnerships. Who can you collaborate with to create a mutually beneficial promotion that compliments what you do but doesn't compete compliments, but doesn't compete with you? Who do you have? How can you both collaborate and have a bigger, better promotion? Also, you can use technology to help you customize things. It was so cool when we went to, where were we at? We were at Disney World and going through this really creepy ride called, it's a Small World. If you've been through it, you know how creepy that ride is. Still, sometimes I wake up on Halloween.
Crazy. But one thing we did when we were leaving out of when the cart was coming out and you look up and it said our names, it was like, thank you, Clarence, right? And it had our names, which added to the freakiness, but I thought, man, that is so awesome. It had my name, my wife's name, the kid's name, and basically I think they were reading the R F I D off of our wrist or passes, but it was really cool. So anything you can use to personalize things. If you send, we talked about the email and that being personalized, you could send a personalized video, especially if you're a service business and you're not sending these to hundreds of people. You can send a personalized video. You can send personalized postcards. You do want to. Also, coming up is Thanksgiving, and we're going to put this in the show notes as well, is the greeting card that you need to be sending. You need to get ready to send that. Now, send the Thanksgiving cards because most businesses don't send that, especially service businesses, your customers, your clients, your patients aren't getting Thanksgiving cards. They'll get a Christmas card, but they're also getting 50 other Christmas cards. And so when you send a Thanksgiving card, then it stands out. And not only that, when you send a Thanksgiving card, guess what else you can send with it?

Clarence Fisher: A Black Friday promotion. So send your Thanksgiving card to where it hits maybe seven days early, seven days before Thanksgiving, but also with it is an exclusive deal that they can take advantage of up till Black Friday. Now they're thankful for you, but then they're also even super thankful for this deal, which doesn't come off as a promotion because of the way it's positioned. There you go. There's some extra stuff to take to the bank all. So I hope all of this has been helpful. Like I said, if you want to dig into some specifics for your business, head over to MainstreetMarketingCoach.com and we can help create all of your promotions for you. But until next week, what I want you to do is take all of this and do what you need to do in order to own your block.