[Offer Grid] 📬 | How to Implement a Custom, Gold-Plated Selling Method | No. 3

Hey there, people!

Another week together. That makes me happy.

I’ve got two essential marketing methods for you this week that can really make a difference to your bottom line, super fast.

They aren’t difficult.

My clients who use these methods have flown straight to the moon. (That’s a figure of speech. I don’t actually have clients on the moon.)

Do you use manufacturer’s images to showcase your products?

If you're a distributor of products from other companies, and if you’re not using your own images, you could be putting yourself behind the eightball. Let’s talk about how.

Are you familiar with Google Lens?

Google Lens enables anyone to upload a picture to Google. Google then provides search results in the form of images that match, to whatever degree possible, the image that was uploaded.

According to ZDnet, there are over 20 billion visual searches per month using Google Lens. For Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2024, Google expanded the reach and capability of this tool.

New features in Google Lens now use over 45 billion product listings and in-stock inventory data entries that Google can read.

Google Lens makes shopping online easier.

Picture this:

Sally found a great sweater she liked at an online store. But she wondered if the price was the best she could find. She thought she’d try to find the sweater somewhere else, cheaper.

So she took a screenshot of the picture of the sweater and ran it through Google Lens.

Lo and behold, she found the same sweater (the exact same image) in a few other stores, including one at a lower price, and one with free shipping. 

So off she went to buy this great sweater at a discount, feeling all proud that she had some easy technology skills to save herself some cash.

Good job, Sally. That’s some smart shopping.

But it’s really bad news if you’re the store owner.

Are you the store owner who lost the sale?

Sally found the sweater on your site first. That didn’t happen by accident. She found you because of your good advertising, SEO, CRO, product descriptions, structured data, and other hard work and expense you went to selling your wares.

You spent all of that time and effort setting your store apart as a premium site.

Why lose your customer by shortcutting your product pictures?

If you’re a distributor for a manufacturer’s products, shoot your own photos. Make them yours. Make sure they’re not like any other image available. Watermark the images. Compare your photos to other distributors’ images, and to other similar products.

Stand out and be different.

When a potential customer sees your product and screenshots it to try to find a better price, she won’t find your picture anywhere else. She might find similar items. But the same image won’t appear anywhere else.

By publishing your own original product images, you will tell the world that your product is unique.

Your marketing will support the superior customer experience you give in your business. (You do offer a premium customer experience, right?)

The process of doing a photo shoot for new products when they come in may feel daunting. It’s a huge commitment of time.

But you can compare the time you spend photographing products to the cost of losing sales because your price is too high, because you’re charging for shipping, because a buyer found the same thing elsewhere and just didn’t come back to you.

Sure, you might attract your buyer again with a retargeting campaign. But honestly, why take the chance? Retargeting ads are only for people who aren’t buying now. And that, dear reader, is a topic for another day.

Offer her a special product, one that she only sees with you. 

That photo shoot is GOLD.

My client and I were sitting having a chat about some inventory she couldn’t sell. She sold women’s clothing. Much of her clothing was sourced from a manufacturer in China. She wasn’t a big enough player to have her own line.

Each week, when her new order arrived, she’d hold a photo shoot to set up merchandising of her new pieces.

Her items looked original.

Her merchandising was exquisite.

She’d put the new items in her advertising rotation, and sometimes she’d sell out of the new pieces that week.

Sometimes, through the season, she’d feature the pieces again. Or she’d sprinkle them in with her marketing ad campaigns that included older and newer items in her store.

In spite of the marketing efforts, by the end of the season there would invariably be some left over items. There might be some leftovers of a particular size, or color.

We wanted to create a way to sell these unsold items.

The alternative was to create a stockpile in her warehouse and wait until next season to move them.

And in the fashion industry “old” is patently “not cool”. So we had to move products in a way that was as new and fresh as the rest of her inventory.

Some retailers “fire sale” their left over inventory. It’s one option for dealing with the stuff that just didn’t sell.

The fire sale method means you box up the stuff that didn’t sell and ship it off to a discount seller to sell at a huge, big, nasty discount.

Buying inventory and then having to turn around and sell it at a 70%, 80%, 90% discount isn’t an appealing proposition for a chunk of inventory each year.

She didn’t think this sounded like fun. And she was having a hard time thinking about stomaching the loss if she ended up doing a sale this way.

She had other choices.

Either keep trying to push inventory in her store. Set up a “clearance” area, like a sale rack, and do deep discounts.

But that kind of discounting could really hurt her business.

Selling “old” inventory didn’t fit her brand message.

Selling at a huge discount didn’t fit her brand either.

Her brand was new and fresh and super high quality. Always.

There wasn’t anything wrong with the products. They were perfectly good products. We’d simply come to the end of the season and the market naturally turned to the next season’s looks.

I had a different idea.

What about offering the leftover inventory to her existing customers in a series of emails so targeted that they felt like personal invitations to a unique shopping experience?

Enter customer list segmenting.

Her customer list had the answers already to selling her leftover products.

She knew who had purchased what sizes and colors and styles all the way back to the start of her business.

We created a project where she could look at her customer list and see who would potentially be interested in buying an extra large, yellow, peasant style blouse, all while building up the experience as a unique invitation.

For example, with five extra large yellow peasant blouses on the back shelf, she could invite this special group of customers an email to everyone who, in the past year, purchased items of the same size.

To get really fancy, make the offer to those extra large buyers who also purchased something that would be a match to the color and style of the products on the shelf.

We know it’s a fit. The blouse is in the customer’s size.

We know these customers like the item style. Their past purchases show they like the style.

We know they trusted her. They purchased from her in the past.

This is a warm outreach. The emails offering these blouses aren’t sent to a bunch of people she’s never done business with before. The email recipients are all from her customer list. This is a warmest-of-the-warm email campaign.

There doesn’t even have to be a discount. In fact, there shouldn’t be a discount.

A discount is just one way to get a customer to take action.

The email could read, “I have a few select and special blouses that match your past purchase, and because of your VIP status I wanted to offer one to you before it got snatched up by someone else.”

Any inventory offered in this way can be paired with a coupon to incentivize a future sale.

Or the item could be offered with another product. Maybe the additional product is new inventory.

If you make the customer feel special enough, you don’t have to pair the offer with any other incentive at all.

The point, though, is that leftover inventory doesn’t have to go in a fire sale at all.

My client did feel pretty good about this plan.

Overall, this plan, as well as others we worked on during the two years we worked together, gave her a 404% increase in revenue in her business.

You can develop similar results.

When you market to segments of your customer list, you can fine-tune the message and the offer you make to each group.

Depending on how much time and effort you can put into this method of marketing, you could build small groups of customers based on their past purchases, and offer unsold products in very small and specific email campaigns, at will.

The effort is worth the time you’ll spend on it.

You could do this in such a way that you don’t ever (or at least rarely ever) end up with fire sale discount leftovers… that unruly pile of inventory that was overbought, or enough of it just never made it out the door.

Even if this laser-targeted campaign selling method only reduces that pile of fire sale leftovers, it’s better for the bottom line.

Remember: unless you know why the items didn’t sell, then you don’t know why the items didn’t sell.

Honestly, if you don’t track your numbers, some of these decisions are going to be impossible to make.

Did these leftover products get less exposure in ad campaigns?

Is there a UX (user experience) issue on the site, so people simply couldn’t find them?

Is the item color such a departure from the Pantone Color of the Year that it clashes with everything else in the marketplace palette all year long? (If that’s the case you may have just bought the wrong thing and this could be an uphill battle. In that case you had a buying problem, not a selling problem. However, you can still offer the pieces for sale to just the right customers when you make them feel special about doing business with you.)

And, this method doesn’t work with just clothing.

You know your business and your inventory better than anyone.

You know what items go together.

You know what customers bought in the past.

Or what’s new in inventory that could go with something old.

This is about messaging and positioning.

This works for car parts, home decor, supplements, clothing, cat toys, hobby kits, software…

I could go on.

Everything I have ever sold with every client I’ve ever worked with can use this targeted list segmenting method to fine-tune and absolutely control sales.

Do you see it?

Do you see the power of list segmenting?

By developing small and special offers to your customer list segments, you can also give support to better prices. You’ll be offering a premium product and a premium shopping experience.

Customer list segments can be the answer to all of your sales after the first one.

After all, it costs a whale of a lot of money to get that first purchase through ads.

So you certainly don’t want to treat those lovely people in your customer list as if they’re still cold audience members.

A warm list deserves warm treatment.

That’s customized.

And a concierge, customized, premium shopping experience can bring more to you.

Premium means higher prices. That’s better profits and better everything.

Don’t be afraid to be more expensive.

When you manage your warm sales in your special laser-targeted campaign selling method you gain a measure of control you can only dream of by selling from ads, from your website, or from general email campaigns that go out to your entire list.

When you communicate with segments of your customers in ways that are warm, and engaging, they get that you get them.

Well, 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 scrub out my trash cans.”

And I want you to be able to use this stuff. Seriously. Go do these two methods in your business this week and then reply to this email and tell me how you did.

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. Remember, when you make your customers feel special, you both win. They win in doing business with you because you give them the best experience possible. You win because by nurturing that customer you’re able to keep them as a customer again and again and again… and that’s just plain magical.

P.P.S. I’m wondering about putting together a course. An easy way to implement 40 of the best sales and marketing ideas that keep you from ever having to hold boring sales ever again. If I had my way, no one would ever use the overworked phrase, “Shop Now” ever again. If you’re into injecting some creativity into your sales, marketing, and advertising methods, just reply to this email. You can just say, “Offer Grid 40”… and I’ll know what you mean. But if you say, “Hi” too, that wouldn’t be terrible.

Always feel free to reach out with ideas or comments.