Speaker 1: 0:00

So you want to launch a subscription box and don't know where to start? Girl, you are in the right place. I'm Julie Ball and I'm Renee Gonzalez, your host here at Subscription Box Basics, a podcast for new and aspiring subscription box entrepreneurs wanting to avoid overwhelm. So grab a coffee, some pen and paper and let's have some fun. Hey everybody, and welcome back to Subscription Box Basics. This is your head coach, julie Ball. I'm rolling solo today.

Speaker 1: 0:28

This past week, in our Subscription Box Bootcamp Facebook group the private one just for students I had so much fun helping our boot campers brainstorm what type of different offerings they're going to have for the holiday season, and so we talked mainly about one time, gift boxes and bundles. So I thought it would be a great idea to do a quick replay of this podcast episode that I recorded about a year ago, because I know at this point you guys should be preparing for Black Friday, holiday shopping weekend. So, without further ado, I'm going to toss it over to the episode. I'm going to be talking about 5 easy ways to make holiday bundles. So, just like clockwork, demand for subscription boxes and gift boxes peaks right around the holidays, so you want to make sure that you have products in your shop that you can ship right away. So maybe with your subscription box, you might want to adjust your shipping dates for maybe in November or December, to make sure boxes get there before the holidays hit, and you want to make sure that you have gifting capabilities in your cart. That way someone can buy your box and send it directly to them instead of having the subscription sent to you as the buyer. But that's it. Oh, we're talking about? We're talking today about holiday bundles, and these are things that you can do that are easy, with low hanging fruit, to help sell more, to increase the average cart value. So when someone is buying your subscription, for example, you can upsell them, say, hey, you might like this too. You can tap into your existing list. You can tap into your existing subscribers. Give them something to buy that is specific for the holiday. So let's dive into those five. I have them broken down to make it really easy. Pick one, pick two. Whatever's easiest that you can do right now that you can take action after you listen to this podcast episode.

Speaker 1: 2:22

So the first one is going to be really obvious it's holiday themed. What can you build that is holiday themed? It could just be your holiday gift box, or it could be a smaller version of your box. It could be holiday stocking stuffers. The fact is that people are looking for holiday gifts and when you put holiday in the title of your gift, you're making it a no brainer for them to see it and say, okay, that would be a great gift.

Speaker 1: 2:49

So think about what can you do with excess inventory. You don't have to go and buy brand new inventory. You may want to buy one or two items that have that holiday flair to it, but then you can pack that with other things that you already have in your existing inventory. What a great way to offload some of that excess inventory. And that is the perfect segue now into my second way to make a holiday bundle is recipient themed. So think about your customer. Who would they maybe be gifting to and who would your holiday product, or even your subscription box as it stands, who would that be a perfect fit for? And you can put that in the title. You can make sure that your customers are seeing that perfect gift for the teen girl or perfect gift for the dad who has everything. Think about who is that recipient and create a bundle specifically for them. I said it already, but I'm going to say it again you can use excess inventory for this, or you can add an additional item or two that you pick up specifically for your holiday gift bundles.

Speaker 1: 3:57

So one thing I want to mention too, before I forget, is when you're creating a holiday gift bundle, give yourself a goal. So say, you want to sell 50 of these bundles, great, you can buy fifty of whatever you need. Or you can set aside fifty of that excess inventory. Or if you need to get specifically like holiday stickers, you need to order fifty. Don't overdo it, don't stress yourself out. Just choose a number that you feel good about. Maybe make a good, better best. That's what I love to do. I think having that range Helps motivate me, because I don't want to feel deflated if I don't hit a goal, but I also want to push myself. It's kind of this fine line with goal setting. I love that good, better, best scenario. So think about for you maybe your good is thirty, your better is forty and your best is fifty. That way you can project those sales, you can have those goals to build your marketing campaign around. So and we'll talk a little bit about marketing after I cover these five easy ways to make holiday bundles.

Speaker 1: 5:02

So far we covered holiday themed and then we see it themed. Now we're going to cover the third one, which is price themed, and it might seem weird to you, but have you ever seen those gift guides that are like best holiday gifts under fifty dollars or best holiday gifts for twenty five dollars? Think about how your buyer might have budgeted a specific amount of money to buy gifts for different people. So can you create holiday gift bundles that fit some of those standard price points. So maybe stocking stuffers would be ten dollars and under, maybe you would have a price point of twenty five dollars, fifty dollars and hundred dollars. And on top of this, this is a great way to sell gift cards to check your.

Speaker 1: 5:50

If you don't already have this setup in your cart system, check to see if you can do digital gift cards. It basically allows someone to give the gift of your subscription box, but allowing the recipient to decide when they get it and what they're going to use that money for. So think about that, and I know that there's some really great opportunities with these digital holiday gift cards. You can print them out so someone could literally buy it five minutes before they go to a party and still have a hostess gift. They are easy, you can forward them on, typically because you're going to get an email confirmation. A digital gift card if you're not familiar is typically you're going to kind of Pre pay a certain amount. That's going to be on that digital gift card and your recipient is going to get a code to put in at checkout and that's that typically how they work. So think about not only your holiday bundles, but also digital gift cards.

Speaker 1: 6:41

When it comes to creating price themed products, the fourth one is one of my favorites. We have made so much money in the subscription box that I previously ran sparkle hustle grow. We made so much money with these surprise packs. What I would do is I would look through my excess inventory and find things that went together well and I would buy plain poly mailers and use a sticker like I didn't even use custom packaging. You can get plain poly mailers on Amazon or you line so many different places pretty inexpensively. So, say, I have two different surprise packs. One is a fifteen dollar price point and one is a thirty dollar price point. Then I would go into my excess inventory and combine a couple of items that are going to exceed that in retail value. I want to make sure people feel like they get their value, and so for me in the past with Sparkle Hustle Grow, what that looked like was maybe a book and a tech gadget and a piece of stationery. So maybe that was three items and little pro tip here. If you can keep your surprise pack under one pound, you can typically get less expensive shipping using the United States Postal Service first class postage. So if you can keep it under 16 ounces, one pound Anyhow, I'd create these surprise packs.

Speaker 1: 8:02

They would not know what was in them, but I would give them expectations. So again, for example, I'd say you can expect to receive three items and one is going to be a book, one's going to be a tech gadget, one's going to be stationery. They don't know exactly which items they're going to get, but they have a great expectation of what's going to arrive. They loved it. It would sell like hotcakes. I would usually create a handful of these and say limited supply. Maybe I'd make 25 of them and as I was preparing for that sale, I would go ahead and bulk pack those so they were ready to go when we launched the sale.

Speaker 1: 8:42

Don't overthink your marketing campaign either. When it comes to a surprise pack sale, we've literally put this together two days in advance before, where we say mark your calendar. On Thursday we are going to drop you the link to limited edition surprise packs and subscribers you get first dibs, and so we would say the first day, first 24 hours. Subscribers get first dibs. Then we'll release the link to the online shop where everybody can buy and would send it to the rest of our list. So often we would get that huge rush of sales in the first 24 hours because our subscribers already know and love us, and so it was much easier for them to make that decision to purchase. Tell them a little bit more about it. Tell them what the retail value might be, tell them how many that you have available. Tell them things like for us. The book has not been featured in the last six months, so if they're a newer subscriber, they know that they won't already have that book, and so we also taught them how to use the product. So we'd say you can use these for your customers as gifts or it's a great way to get inexpensive stocking stuffers. So teach your customer how to use those, how to make the most of those sales.

Speaker 1: 9:59

And just a side note, typically would have a surprise pack with a book and a surprise pack without a book, and so those were our two different price points. We bundled in shipping so that they wouldn't get sticker shock at checkout. And then even one time we did, I think, eight versions, and so we called it surprise pack one, surprise pack two. And I kid you not, we would have subscribers by one, of every single one, and having those eight different versions specifically allowed the buyer to know that they weren't going to get duplicates, because, I promise them, everything in these eight surprise packs is different than the others, and it was an amazing way to offload excess inventory, for people to have an opportunity to buy again. These stocking stuffers are things that they could give their clients, their friends, family, whatever. So surprise packs is one of the lowest hanging fruit like marketing campaigns you can do. Again, you don't have to have a massive marketing campaign around it. You can do a prelaunch run with seven days, 14 days, whatever, but if you need to move cash flow, if you need to move inventory, sit down after this podcast and start mapping out what that looks like and launch it in two days. I challenge you to do that right now.

Speaker 1: 11:10

Okay, so we covered holiday themed, recipient themed, price themed, surprise packs and the last one is best seller bundles. And this is a really easy way to offload some excess inventory that's not selling well by pairing it up with a best seller. And I'll just give you a quick example. Say, at Sparkle House of Grow we had a book that was really well received, so we would create that best seller bundle around the fact that book will be in there, but then we're going to bundle it with two or three other items that maybe wouldn't sell as well in the shop, but we still needed to move them out of our inventory and get that cash flow rolling. So think about, like, what are your Bestsellers? And if you don't know, ask your customers. It can be a simple post in On social media. It could be a simple survey that you send via email. If you have a Facebook group, ask them right in there of the last six months, what was your favorite product? Use that information to Then again bundles some of the slower moving items and get them out of your inventory. So those are my five easy ways to make holiday bundles, and I'm gonna leave you with two more little pro tips.

Speaker 1: 12:25

I mentioned earlier about Just getting some Poly mailers or some plain packaging to send these. We actually did a best of sparkle hustle grow box one time and used Craft boxes that we already had in stock, and all I did was I got some custom stickers. Now, with the holidays, you have so many opportunities to buy non custom stickers but that are holiday themed. If you just go over to Amazon or Etsy, there are so many options. You don't have to get brand new packaging, just give it that little bit of holiday flair by purchasing some holiday themed stickers. And the other thing that I wanted to mention was when it comes to Marketing your bundles.

Speaker 1: 13:06

Again, don't overthink it, but this is my easy kind of framework for what. Where do I post it? What do I do? Use the rule of three. Find the three different places that your people are gonna hang out. So for us in the past, social media, email list and Facebook group. And then, of course, you can post it as a blog too. If you post it as a blog, then you can share that blog all over the place too, and it's good for SEO. So those are the quick and dirty, scrappy, easy ways to create holiday bundles and increase that cash flow during this High season of gift giving.

Speaker 1: 13:44

If you're still feeling stuck and you want some help putting together your strategy, I'll drop a link in the show notes to where you can book a coaching call or we can brainstorm. We can put your strategy together so that you are prepared going into the holiday season. I hope that this episode was helpful for you and kind of got those gears moving on how you can make more money during the holidays. Thanks for listening, as always today, guys, and we'll see you in the next episode. Bye.