Copy of 10-13-23 Stop selling products
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the retail initiative podcast. I'm a little fired up today. Uh, yesterday at the end of the day, I typically record these episodes in the morning, but at the end of my day, I was checking my email and I love reading through different retailers, marketing emails, which that here's a pro tip. If you want to level up your email game, get on other people's email list, evaluate, like see what copy they're writing and the headlines and how they're structuring emails.
[00:00:27] It can help you level up. Your own games, you're going to start to [00:00:30] see like, Oh, they're really good at this. And you can start to pull their headlines and model yours after theirs. I'm not saying steal. I'm saying model. Like you can have similar type things without just copying and pasting it. But anyway, I was reading through and like seven emails in a row, new arrivals, new arrivals shop, what's new.
[00:00:49] It was all focused on new and I visit sites. And the hero image is like new arrivals in a cursory font with a cute picture. And here's a problem. Only your most [00:01:00] loyal customers care about what's new. If you go, have you ever been into a store and the person that greets you immediately, it was just like, well, our new arrivals are over there and you're like, well, I've never been here before.
[00:01:13] So this entire store might as well be new arrivals. And there's a disconnect in that. So what does it look like to do something better? And this is where the power of. I'm like, remember a couple of weeks ago, I talked about that. Our business is like a castle and we have to make sure that it's built on [00:01:30] the right foundation, that we have the right heart in the castle, which is the brand and customer relationship.
[00:01:36] And, and then I expanded from there and I'd go back and listen to that, but. That center of the castle, the relationship that the brand and the customer have and how they show up, how the brand shows up for the customer and serves them. And so how do we do this best? Because it's not necessarily new arrivals, because that doesn't connect to your customer's life and it makes the life cycle of your products [00:02:00] really, really short.
[00:02:01] Like you announce this dress and once you've announced the dress is new. It's pretty much done. So how do we build in a longer lifestyle for a product and a marketing, a copy strategy, a social strategy that connects. And this is where the power of story comes in. And so this is the best way I can teach this to you.
[00:02:22] So a framework I created with my friend, Tara Austin, we do the manifest workshop together and we do a handful of other things and it's [00:02:30] called the seasonal structure theory. And. The idea here is instead of just focusing on what's new, we focus on the events going on in our customer's life. And so there's three levels to this.
[00:02:43] There's first the seasons. Seasons are are not just like, you know, fall, winter, spring, summer. Seasons really are like the seasons of your customer's lives. And so like holidays is a season. Winter is a [00:03:00] season back to school could be a season. Um, you know, vacation, like resort time could be a season. You name it.
[00:03:07] Like this is around your customer's life. So there are seasons that we alternate through. And then within those seasons, there's what there's what we call major events and minor events. Now, major events are bigger things. These could be things like game day, uh, holiday parties, like big thanksgiving is a major event.
[00:03:29] And [00:03:30] these things are based on your customer. They're not. Like universal, every brand is going to have different major events. And then you have minor events. You could even consider minor events to be like moments. The moments might be the fam, the, how your customer feels when she is taking that family picture and she's coordinated amazing outfits, a minor event might be the temperature finally getting cool enough where you can sit on a back patio and drink wine while your kids play.
[00:03:58] And how you're [00:04:00] thinking through, okay, how does our customer want to feel in these moments? So these major events, like, what does it look like for her? What is she thinking about these events? How does she want to feel about it? So whether it's little minor moments or major events, we want to center our marketing around that.
[00:04:18] And then we get to the third level, which is showcasing, which is showcasing how they can feel value. Within those moments. And so when we get that dress that I talked about earlier, [00:04:30] instead of that dress, just being here's what's new, it can be a fall find something related to getting back into the fall season and tying that into all the things that your customer feels about fall.
[00:04:41] It could be a wedding guest dress. It could be a date night dress. It could be all of these things that we can then center that into curated collections, into reels around these events, into emails that are centered around the fall season or centered around even those minor moments. [00:05:00] But we can tell a story that is centered around, like, what does our customer's life look like?
[00:05:06] What is she thinking about or he thinking about? And then how do we use our products to fill that story in? So instead of focusing just on the products that you sell, we want to actually stop focusing on the product and instead focus on the story of our customer's life. When we can do this, it's so powerful because it starts to actually build that brand [00:05:30] connection where your customer feels like you are better suited to salt to solve their problems because you actually understand their life.
[00:05:39] Amazing brands. are what they do. Like when a, a bad brand ones that don't connect online, if you visit their website, the first thing you really understand is them. You see their logo and it's huge. And their name is mentioned again in the hero image. And then there's an about us right [00:06:00] underneath it. And it's, we're showing up to the party and we're talking about ourselves.
[00:06:03] It's me, me, me, me, me. Instead, what would it look like for your customer to land on your site and feel? Oh, my gosh. This brand understands me. I feel understood by this brand. And so when we, how we do that is by looking at, okay, what season is our customer in? What are the events going on in their life? And then how can we tell a story to showcase that?[00:06:30]
[00:06:30] And so some tactical ways to do that. You know, you can get into chat, GPT, tell chat, GPT, a ton of information about your brand, who you are, what you're focused on, even product wise, then talk, describe your perfect customer and describe the moments going on in their life and then ask it to write a ton of subject lines for your emails.
[00:06:52] You can even correct it on the tone and then from there you can build out and say, okay, put this into a calendar for the month of November. [00:07:00] Keep in mind these dates or you can tell it your promotions and have it build a calendar. Then say for every one of these emails, give me three real ideas. That is centered around the events in my customer's life and along the themes of inspiration, inspiring your customer around what you sell education.
[00:07:20] So teaching them something, how to style X, Y, and Z, how to style a denim, a denim jacket in three different ways and then entertainment. These are the funny things [00:07:30] that, that can build a deeper connection emotionally with the brand. So you're, you're starting with subject lines, then you're getting to real ideas.
[00:07:37] Then you could even have it outline your emails. Then you can have it say like, okay, well, we're going to update our site twice a week, provide hero image copy with a headline and a sub headline. So instead of new arrivals, you're at fall fines, like shot, you know, shot, shot, new fall shop, fall, new arrivals.
[00:07:57] It doesn't have to be anything like [00:08:00] this is subtle. You're not like telling a story that's like, imagine how you're going to feel during fall. Instead, you are tying in the season in these events. Into your, into your copy. So this was a quick one, but it's a powerful idea that if you can implement into your business and get away from just focusing on what's new and instead focus on the events in your customer's life, I think it's going to, you're going to see it make a massive impact.
[00:08:25] So thanks for tuning into this, this week's episode. Uh, if you're enjoying this [00:08:30] podcast, leave a review, it's honestly the best way you could ever say thank you. And again, grateful that you're here. I'll see you next week.
