[Offer Grid] 📬 | How to Win with Tariffs | Issue No. 2

Hey everyone!

It’s week two of the Offer Grid Weekly Newsletter. Heya!

First of all, thank you for the resoundingly positive feedback after Week One. Your kind words mean a lot to me, and I will use your feedback to help me create informative future issues. If I can swing entertaining stuff I’ll toss that in, too. 

I read too many books and newsletters that read in a tone of voice that rankles me. The author sounds like he’s saying, “I think I’m funny, and you should, too.”

Dale Carnegie taught me that it’s really hard to be the funniest or the smartest kid in a room. So I’m aiming for "knowledgeable friend” with my delivery. We’ll see how it goes.

It’s only week two here. So I promise to work on voice and delivery as I share what I’ve learned about digital marketing over the past 20 years.

In ecommerce news this week:

Shopify is still a buy in the Wall Street world. Which means that if you’re building a store in Shopify you’re still in a good environment. Yahoo Finance likes the stock as a SaaS investment. The platform is strong (low bugs, and good tech and dev support) and has shareholder and corporate support. 

I like Shopify for most aspects of running an ecommerce business. At the end of the day you have to decide what works best for your business. As a platform I find it to be simple enough for most people to learn, but flexible enough if you want to do something fancy.

But honestly, you can build a business with a soap box, a hand made sign, a bunch of postage stamps, and some envelopes.

The website and the fancy apps and coding… these may or may not be necessary today.

It’s easier than ever to grab attention in a variety of ways, with the aim ultimately to own your traffic. This concept adds security and stability to a business.

Even without your own website:

• You can blog on Medium.

• You can have a newsletter on Beehiiv.

• You can publish videos to YouTube.

• You can take payments with PayPal or Venmo.

• You can shout out whatever messages you want to promote on social media.

For those who want a website, who want a simple way to take payments, connect to inventory, and send some simple emails to follow up with visitors, Shopify will help almost anyone do all of this and more.

But I’m probably preaching to the choir right now, yeah?

If your store is built properly with minimal friction, gets good conversions, and collects cash easily, then you can buy traffic and add a degree of speed to your customer-getting endeavors. 

Along the way you’re collecting email addresses for email marketing, and mobile numbers for SMS promotions.

No matter what you sell, the way to stay in business is to focus on building the customer list and nurture that audience.

Build the lifetime value (LTV) of each customer. Sell them more of what you sell. Sell them more frequently than they usually buy. Keep them buying longer than they did in the past.

These are the foundational steps to securing your future.

Your customer list is GOLD.

I know a guy who keeps a backup of his list on a thumb drive in a safe deposit box. That’s how serious this customer list thing is.

Your customer list is more important than what you sell.

I’ve had clients whose inventory was sold out, wiped out, or inaccessible, and we found ways to stay in business.

My line of reasoning begs the question…

What business are you in?

In simplest terms, a business is a list (an audience) and an offer (what you sell). 

I learned this breakdown from Dick Benson, known as “the World’s Greatest Direct Mail Guru”, and author of “Secrets of Successful Direct Mail”. (Big hat tip to Brian Kurtz, author of “Overdeliver”, for connecting me with Mr. Benson.)

When I learned this simple view on a business, my world changed.

Your product or service is a device for capturing the audience.

Your public engagement is a device for capturing the audience.

Your number one job is to collect customers, and to serve them.

I’d been working almost exclusively with ecommerce store owners, and some Main Street retailers, at the time. At first I thought the industry (ecommerce retail) was the business. But I learned differently.

When I worked to promote a doctor’s medispa, or ran ads to collect leads for a dental office doing implants, there were only small differences between those promotions as compared to selling clothing, cat toys, or home decor.

Each business has a customer list.

Each business has its offers to that list to get people to buy their products and services.

The list is who you talk to.

The offer is what you say to them.

There have been too many business owners I’ve worked with who get excited about the first sale to a new customer. They kinda go to sleep after that first sale.

Big mistake.

That first sale is the most expensive of the process. And besides, that’s where the work really begins. Sell ‘em again. And some more.

What I have found is that what you sell is a minor distinction when you’re planning your sales and marketing activities.

Whether you’re sourcing apparel in China, or making one of a kind products in a warehouse somewhere, the steps of selling are the same: you show your wares in your store. You send traffic to the site. You process sales with the built-in cart.

The “how-to” of selling has tweaks, twists, and turns after that. But these two different kinds of stores have more in common than less.

All of that being said, if you’re selling on any platform whether it’s Wix or Squarespace or WooCommerce or even if you are simply selling on Amazon, nationally we’re facing some interesting times.

Everyone in any kind of retail business is eyeing the news on tariffs. 

I told my clients more than five years ago to get out of China. 

India, Vietnam, Bangladesh and some other countries provide clothing manufacturing that rivals China now, but comes with less baggage. 

There are rumors at the time of this writing that all foreign businesses will have at least a 10% tariff to contend with. But a possible 60% tariff on China is probably a deal breaker for most businesses that source their inventories from China.

Domestic manufacturers can also be a good source but the costs can be prohibitive for other reasons. Check out the Centre for Economic Policy Research has this to say for comments this week on tariffs.

The way it looks now, tariffs are coming, and prices will go up.

Retailers are in the business of selling things to people. The businesses that can buy and sell the most things, and still make a profit, will stay in business in all conditions.

Depending on what you sell, how you sell it, the cost to acquire it, and what it takes to ship it out the door may be changing in the coming months and years.

Many of the biggest businesses in the world have had to go through major pivots over time. Some did… IBM is still in business. Some didn’t… Kodak is an example. Remember cameras that used film? Yeah, you might not.

This issue is about the thought exercises you may be going through right now about staying in business if your product costs increase beyond your ability to stick with them.

Because at the end of the day…

The market will tell us what it wants in all cases. The winning businesses will be the best listeners, and actors on that feedback.

I’m not talking about going from selling shoes to selling tractors. Don’t do this unless your existing customer list also buys tractors.

Let’s use International Business Machines Inc (IBM) as an example for this exercise. They’ve seen incredible changes in the market since their beginnings in 1911.

We know they weren’t always on the cutting edge.

We know they didn’t always get adoption right. After all, Thomas J. Watson, who led IBM from 1914 to 1956 famously said "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Not exactly a visionary stance. This was in 1943.

Yet, here they are, still.

So you don’t have to be right all the time. Just be right enough of the time.

I observe that IBM was right enough, in front of the same kinds of people, long enough to stay in the business of whatever the current business machines were, for 114 years. And they’re still going strong.

They began in 1911 as Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company.

They were at the cutting edge of punch card technology for data management. They pioneered time clocks for the workplace.

They offered the machines that kept workplaces going. And they kept up their offers to meet the times.

Working in the favor of the longevity of IBM, and any business like it that has weathered major economic and industry sector shifts, they stuck to the gold.

What was the gold?

Their greatest asset. Their customers.

At no point in their storied history did they toss their customer list in the trash heap to go into a new business, unrelated to their roots.

Additionally, at no point did they make any change that was such a leap that customers couldn’t follow along.

The best way for any organization to grow and change along with market and economic needs is to find the direction the new wind is blowing, and find or create the way to take their existing customers along with the new breeze.

There aren’t many haberdasheries around these days… But we see menswear stores.

There aren’t many buggywhip makers anymore… But leather goods still have a market in shoes, men’s and women’s accessories, and other leather goods by the likes of Coach, for example.

Let’s talk about how to take this history lesson home.

I mentioned above, in this fine epistle, some details about the current threat of impending tariffs. We’ve been through threats before. This isn’t the first time in recent years we’ve had outside forces looming.

One of my client’s raw materials costs doubled during COVID. 

Another had an entire new product line stuck in customs. That was his entire inventory for a whole quarter.

Business is fraught with problems.

If it weren’t for problems we wouldn’t be in business.

Looming tariffs are just the next thing. 

If your business sources products from non-domestic sources, your cost of goods sold (COGS) numbers may be about to take a beating. 

Take a lesson from our friend Tom Watson. If you want to pivot to meet the times you might consider one or more of the following options to make adjustments:

Keep asking, “What’s possible?”

Are poultry farmers who are currently facing bird flu suddenly in the feather business? (Actually, I don’t even know if that’s possible. But I’m just tossing it out there.)

A few years ago I was working with a client who was new to business. She was having one heckova time making sales. She was in the dog toys business, which is a great place to be because dog parents lose their minds over their fur babies.

She had a great product: a dog-safe, eco-friendly line of chew toys. Her first challenges were internal. Her ads weren’t producing traffic.

So we fixed that. She got so good at running ads she was teaching her own business clients how to run their own ads.

But she still wasn’t selling enough, and she was still self-funding elements of her business with her job as a freelance web developer.

We worked on ways for her to sell more products to each customer with each same-session conversion. Meaning, if in the past the customer bought one toy, now they bought three.

This method alone increased her average order value by over 600% while she ran this campaign.

She created bundles of products to make it dirt dumb simple for people to put three items in the cart at one time.

Could you do that in your store?

Seriously, any business can bundle their stuff.

I’ve done it with services. If you want this, you will also want that.

Grocery stores bundle items all the time. And they show up in the circular in your mailbox every week.

Look at what other businesses are doing. If they’re still in business for the past 10 years (even for the past five years!), they’re doing something right.

Tom Watson didn’t have desktop computers to sell in 1911. But IBM followed, and sometimes led, the market. They kept up with innovations. They lived through the Great Depression in 1929. They stuck tenaciously to their customers’ needs.

And in 2025 they’re still sending dividends to stock holders (which they’ve done every quarter since 1916… another sign of a very strong business).

In my own business, I’ve had to pivot as well. I no longer run the membership program. It was easy to fill when it was new. It was expensive and business owners had the cash to put into it. 

Besides, members who succeeded made their investment back in a matter of weeks or months, and grew from there.

Times are different now. That’s why this newsletter was born.

And soon I’ll have a very affordable course for ecommers. But that’s an announcement for another day.

Sing along with the sheet of music that everyone else is singing from.

Don’t sing off-key.

Keep pace with the choir.

And you can do very, very well.

Well, I think that’s a wrap. There is always so much more to say, but I want to make sure you read this thing, not just say, “I’d rather go sort my sock drawer.”

And I want you to be able to use this stuff.

Next week, more good ideas about ecommerce, retail, and how to succeed using some innovative thinking. I can’t wait!

Best to ya,

Amy

P.S. Always remember Henry Ford’s quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” You know your business and your customers better than anyone else. You can determine best what pivot your business can sustain (or celebrate). Remember, you don’t lose if you don’t quit.

P.P.S. What do you think? Too long? Too short? Any special requests? Have a story you want to share?

Always feel free to reach out with ideas or comments.