Private Label Ideas For Boutique Owners
When you are considering private labeling products, you might wonder what products you could private label? In this short video, I give you some of my ideas.
What Is Private Label?
Social Media Kit For Store Boutique Owners
Learning socia
l media can be daunting! But what if you had guidelines, templates and ideas galore! This kit is special because it gives you all of that. Included are:
1. Social Media Content Template Guide that walks you through all the information contained in the package.
2. Social Media Management Checklist and Brainstorming Guides – make your plan for how you are going to conquer social media and then brainstorm away. You will have great goals which lead to great interaction on social media.
3. 7 Checklists for different networks – Facebook, Facebook Live, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest. From beginning (aka your profile) to end (posting and ads) you will know what to do to have a successful social media presence.
4. Social Media Content Planner – 14 months (Nov 2016 – Dec 2017) of daily ideas, posts, interactions and more to keep you engaged with your audience.
5. A visual guide for social media images and post guidelines for the social networks – wondering how long the video can be for instagram – it’s here! 
Much much more too.
6. Social media graphics and quotes – eye catching graphics for you to add your own text and branding to, 20 already done social media graphics, and 149 inspirational/motivational/success quotes to use in your posts. Plus you get the .psd version of these files too.
7. To make you more efficient, we’ve included a hootsuite bulk scheduler tool that allows you to manage your social media accounts and save you time.
When you make the purchase, you get a download file with all product files included. You immediately have access to your products files and can start right away.
All of this for the low price of $17. Even if you only learn to leverage one social network you will make your money back quickly.
Email Marketing
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Your first question is probably, what is email marketing anyway? Well, basically email marketing is any marketing that uses email as its main way of delivering the marketing message to consumers. It is a type of direct to consumer marketing.
To engage in email marketing you need to build a targeted email list, invest in the right email list technology, and focus on writing awesome content, sales messages and other information to send out to your email list.
Email marketing is much more than just sending bulk emails to a bunch of random email addresses. It’s not wise to purchase email addresses in the way a business might purchase a snail mail list. The truth is, effective email marketing is so much more, and it’s a lot more direct than snail mail marketing. It’s so much more personal. When you consider that most people now check email on mobile devices, and they keep their device right near them (often 24 hours a day), you realize how truly big email marketing really is.
To be really successful at email marketing, you must have a targeted list to whom you send personalized targeted messages. You’ll need to consider the buying habits of your audience, what they’ve purchased of yours so far, what actions they’ve taken on your messages, and more. You don’t purchase this targeted list either; you build it through other efforts such as content marketing.
As well as being targeted, email marketing needs to build relationships while driving sales in order to be successful. What’s really great about email marketing is that the technology that exists today allows you to be very data driven in your email marketing endeavors. You’ll be able to segment your email marketing in ways that will make your email marketing even more successful.
If you develop an effective email marketing plan, your email marketing can create sales opportunities, build customer loyalty, and even demonstrate your expertise to your target market – assisting in your rise as a thought leader. Making decisions about what type of email marketing you want to engage in, and what technology you’ll use to get there, will be your hardest decisions to make once you embark on using email marketing.
Your email messages don’t actually have to be direct marketing messages to be considered email marketing. Perhaps you send out a newsletter that has a few select advertisements in it. That is still email marketing. This is a great way to get involved in email marketing as a starting point. A newsletter along with sending messages to your audience to help build a relationship with them are great email marketing methods, in addition to sending specific sales messages via email. If you’re not spending a good portion of your time on email marketing, you’re missing out on a high return on investment.
How Can You Use Journaling for Your Business?
What Is A Journal?
When most people think about journaling, they imagine a diary. A place where you document your thoughts, fears, and deepest secrets. However, a journal can actually be a very useful planning tool. If you’ve never written in a journal, or even if you have, consider using the practice for your business.
The Journaling Habit
The first step is to create a journaling habit. A consistent time and place where you’ll journal. Consider journaling first thing in the morning as you drink your cup of coffee. It’s the time when you’re less distracted and able to achieve better focus and creativity. Journaling can be at the end of the day as well, where you make notes and document your day – what was good and bad about it and what you want to do the next day.
Julia Cameron wrote a wonderful book on creativity called “The Artist’s Way.” In the book she describes a habit she calls “Morning Pages.” The practice requires you to write every morning until you’ve filled three pages. It’s essentially a stream of consciousness approach. You write everything that you’re thinking and feeling onto the page. It helps clear the cobwebs. It allows you to complain. And more importantly it helps you brainstorm ideas for the future. You create solutions. You find yourself rambling but also just getting it out of the way instead of staying in your head.
You can embrace this same habit but rather than focusing on your personal life, goals, and needs you can focus on your business.
Another approach is to simply sit down at your kitchen table each morning and brainstorm ideas and problem solve for your business. You might use the same freehand approach or you might prefer a more structured approach. The wonderful thing about journaling is that you get to make the rules. There is another site called http://750words.com/ that allows you to do the same thing as morning pages – you type about 750 words which is the equivalent of 3 pages of writing. It will give you analysis of your words and it’s a secure place where your words are safe from others. Just you and your thoughts.
What to Journal about and What to Do with the Material
Journaling supports you to write down your thoughts about your business without any direct objective. The benefit is that it allows you to think and express yourself freely. So often anything that’s related to your business probably has to have a goal or a productivity objective. Journaling gives you the space to work on your business without expecting any type of outcome. Just write about your vision and what you want to happen, or get your frustrations off your chest about what is going on at work.
This is surprisingly productive because when the rules are set aside, creativity is allowed to flow. You’ll find that your plans and ideas for your business grow. You may find that your enthusiasm and motivation for your business grow. And your passion for your business may be reignited. You may find that you are able to come up with fantastic and exciting content ideas too. Your subconscious will work on those problems you write out and give you ideas and solutions at the strangest times.
Give yourself the opportunity of experiencing what journaling can do for your business. Try the “morning pages” approach for a month. You will likely be quite surprised with the results. All you need is a notebook and a pencil to get started. Take the time to do it and see what happens, then let us know.
Finding Your Peak Productivity Time To Get The Most Out Of Your Day
Peak Productivity Time = Do You Feel Like You Work But Nothing Gets Done?
Does this sound familiar? You sit down at your desk to get some work done and what should take you mere minutes, isn’t completed two hours later? Maybe you blame it on low energy or perhaps you feel overwhelmed. The truth is that timing matters. If you’d sat down at your desk during your peak productivity time, you would have accomplished everything on your list, and more.
Unfortunately, many people don’t know that they have a peak productivity time. Even if they’re aware that some times of the day are more productive than others, they may not be able to identify a consistent pattern. Yet, when you can clearly identify it, you can accomplish ten times more in less time. This means you’ll have more time in your day to both work and play. So that is what I want to help you understand and uncover today so that starting tomorrow you will be on track!
What is a Peak Productivity Time?
Also called “power hours,” your peak productivity time is the time of day when you feel most able to focus. It’s generally a more creative time of day as well. You may have an inclination about your peak time already. For example, you may call yourself a “morning person” or a “night owl.” These phrases are clues to your productivity personality. However, you might be surprised to learn that a self-proclaimed morning person may also be a night owl when it comes to productivity. You can think about it like your time of day when time just flies and you are able to complete stuff easily.
Step #1 Those Common Phrases and a Little Self-Assessment.
Are you a “morning person?” Do you use phrases like that to describe yourself? Take a few minutes to consider when you consistently feel more energized and productive. For example, someone might consider herself to be a morning person but also take her about two hours to fully wake up and reach that peak productivity time. I find that I am able to really get going around 10 am but before that I just need to meander around doing all the stuff that doesn’t involve brain work.
Step #2 Energy Mapping
Using a simple day planner with the hours of the day on one side of the paper and the days of the week at the top, start tracking your energy level. You can also whip up a simple spreadsheet to track the information. Track your energy on a scale of 1-10 and jot down the task you’re performing. You can use anything that is simple but track it for at least a week.
For example, you sit down at your desk at 9:00am to answer email messages. Your energy level may be at a 6. You’re feeling pretty good but not at maximum productivity. Later, in the day you may be writing sales copy and your energy level is at a 9. Track this information for a few weeks and you’ll be able to identify patterns in your energy levels. You may find that every afternoon around 3 or 4 o’clock you have a burst of energy and are able to get a lot accomplished.
Step #3 Put it to Work
Once you’ve identified your power hours or peak productivity times, use them wisely. Schedule your priority tasks during this time. Any activity that requires focus, concentration and creativity should be scheduled during a power hour. Save the less energetic times for administrative tasks and chores. You can do more that way and feel great at the same time.
It’s key to remember that there are a couple of different types of tasks that you will be working on in your day. You have some routine tasks that don’t need your high energy and thoughts, and others that require a lot of focus. Schedule your day that way so you can move through the day with ease.
There are only so many hours in the day. Identify your peak productivity time each day and get much more done. Your personal and professional life will benefit. Let me know what you are able to figure out and if you have used this technique in the past to figure out what you should do during the day.
Using Twitter For Your Boutique Effectively
Why Worry About Twitter?
With over 554 million active Twitter users, and more than 58 million tweets going out each day, Twitter is an important component of all your social media marketing campaigns. But, with that many tweets going out each day, you need to learn to use Twitter effectively to make a difference. Twitter is a lot of small conversations going on at once, and you are in a big room – but really you can only talk to those around you.
Know the Voice of Your Business
Every business has its own voice, even if you don’t know it yet. Is your business serious, funny, organized, or something else entirely? You can have several voices if you want for your business. Even if you use your company name as your handle, or let a person or persons be the voice for the name. People like hearing from and knowing real people. Let the profile explain the people behind the Twitter profile. Just remember to be consistent with your brand. Set up some guidelines clearly on how your account will be used.
Define Your Purpose
If you don’t understand why you’re on Twitter, it’s hard to develop good messages that resonate with your audience. What is the purpose of your business, and what is the purpose of your expansion to using Twitter? Do you want to drive traffic to your website? Do you want to communicate with your customers and fans? Remember that your purpose should take into consideration that social media is “social” and requires engagement. Don’t just go on Twitter and push people to your site. It won’t work. You can work to inform people about trends in your industry, or just to make sure they know about sales in the store. Either one is fine, you just have to choose one.
Develop Achievable Goals
As you work on the goals you want to achieve by using Twitter as another marketing channel, write them down. Look at Twitter statistics and research what other companies have accomplished using Twitter as a social media marketing channel. Then try to develop goals that you can reach considering the size and purpose of your own business. Goals can be things like, number of retweets, social reach as defined by number of followers, or other things. You can have a simple goal to start with that says that you will post 2-3 times per day.
Outsource Strategically
You can’t be everywhere at once; it’s true. You may need to consider outsourcing most of your Twitter marketing campaign. If you’re going to outsource, you need to pick people that you can trust. You need to select people who understand that social media is about engagement and who understand your business enough to truly engage with followers in a real way. You can use your current employees to get you on the right path – they might know more about twitter than you realize.
Automate Carefully
There is a lot of technology out there to automate some of your Twitter experience. However, it’s important that you are very careful how and what you automate. Many people are turned off by some of the automation available. You need to understand and know your audience enough to know that they probably know automation when they see it. And remember, you can’t really automate engagement. You can’t have a conversation when you are a computer, so go in and check your messages and retweets to be sure to thank people for them and respond to questions. Do this daily at first to make sure you are engaging.
Twitter is fun to ask people questions and get great responses, so go in and ask when you know you will have time to stay online and answer/respond to those who engaged.
Follow with Purpose
The saying that quality is more important than quantity is true for many things, and that includes social media when it comes to following people and people following you. You want targeted followers who really want to see what you have to say. And you want to follow people who can connect you to others who are movers and shakers in your industry or who happen to service the same audience as you but in a different way.
Finally, social media marketing all comes down to two things: engaging and interacting with your audience. If you skip this crucial element on Twitter, you’ll find that your audience becomes very unresponsive to anything you send out. It’s because they’re not paying attention to you because they don’t see you as “real”. Be real, share other people’s tweets, comment on information, share a variety of content (from your own blog posts, to images, to videos) and be sure it is relevant to your audience.
Now it’s your turn, how have you used twitter or other social media in your business?
Segmenting Your Potential Retail Customers Using Email – Tips for Success
What Is Email Marketing Segmentation?
Email marketing segmentation allows you to laser focus your marketing messages to all of your subscribers as if they are a market of one, because in reality – they are just one person reading the one email you sent. Market segmentation promotes customer loyalty by making them feel special. It also increases open rates, sales, branding and more. If you’re not practicing market segmentation using your email marketing technology, you’re missing out.
To get started with successful market segmenting, take a look at how your email marketing technology works, such as aweber. If you don’t know how it works, you may want to hire a specialist to help you improve your marketing. Most of the marketing segmentation can be done automatically if you set up your technology correctly. So it might be a good idea to pay someone to set it up right then you are set.
Separate Customers from Potential Customers
If the only market segmenting that you do is to separate those who have bought from those who have not bought, do it. The moment a prospect becomes a customer, their marketing messages should be very different from those who have not become actual customers yet. This will increase satisfaction among list subscribers, as well as increase sales because the messages you send each audience is totally different. You don’t want to send messages to people about products they have already purchased. And you can do more for your customers – like VIP days – if you have a way to email them and let them know.
Another Option: Separate Openers from Those Who Don’t Open
It can be really frustrating to send out emails to people who never open them. So, why not separate people who open your emails to read them, from those who don’t. Maybe the ones who are not opening need a more forceful or different subject line approach. By separating them, you’ll be able to focus your marketing messages differently for each group. It’s likely you’ll end up with more and more openers by better focusing your messages to each group. Email programs can detect, most of the time, when an email has been opened, so you can read in your stats about how many opened the message. If you are resending because you are doing A/B Testing, then you are also segmenting there too.
Separate Subscribers into Different Product Categories
If you sell more than one product or service, you might want to further segment your market by putting those who have bought product A and B into one list, while those who have only bought A into another list. If you can focus those who have bought A toward buying B, then those who have bought both A and B into buying C, you’ll see an increase in sales due to the more personalized marketing messages you can send. This works for the digital marketplace, but you could also segment based on location if you have more than one store. You could have people on a different list based on where they shop, and are able to personalize sales and other messages to them.
Get Rid of the Freeloaders
Through segmentation you can keep your list a lot cleaner. If you see a pattern of those who never open anything also happened to be the ones who downloaded the free eReport, then you know your eReport is not targeted exclusively enough toward your target audience. You can do two things to fix this. Clean those people off your list, then redo your free offer to be more relevant to only your target audience. You pay for those people, even if they don’t open the emails, and it’s best to have a responsive list of people who read what you have to say!
By segmenting you are going to be more aware of who the responders are, as opposed to the freeloaders. Segmenting will make your business more profitable than you ever thought possible.
What are your thoughts about segmenting your business? How have you seen it done before?
Lessons In Marketing: Testing Your Message – A/B Testing 101
Lessons In Marketing: What Is A/B Testing?
A/B testing is also known as split testing. It is a way to improve your email marketing exponentially by testing different email marketing messages. It’s called A/B testing because you have version A and version B that you send to your audience. Then you look at the metrics to see which one worked best. Only a small thing is changed in version B compared to version A. That’s how you know what element caused the better or worse result. It’s important that you only test one thing at a time so you know what caused the change. Important to note, you need to have about 100 people on your list to allow you to split test, otherwise it’s not going to work well as far as statistical significance.
Assuming your target audience has signed up for your list, you will send half your list message A and half message B. Send message A to group 1 and message B to group 2. Then you’ll take a look at the metrics to figure out which worked better. For instance, perhaps you simply change the subject line in version B and nothing else. What might then happen is that version B gets five times the opens as version A. The message does not have to be completely different, and many email providers allow you to do this without really breaking a sweat. In Aweber, it’s easy.
You’ve learned something about the subject line. You can now send version B to all of group 1 who did not click, to find out if more people click on the message again. In some cases you can set up your email autoresponder service to do these tests automatically so that the best subject line gets sent again to the people who did not click in the other group. It might sound a little confusing, but it’s really not confusing if you’ve chosen the right email marketing software to use. You can easily do this and with little time and effort – you find more people are opening your messages and you are making more sales and getting more customers in the door.
What Should I Test?
There are other things you can subject to split testing. For example:
Time of day – What time of day does your audience tend to open messages? Send the same message to some of your audience at one time, and some at another time. In this case, if your list is large enough you might be able to pick up to four times. Then, whatever time automatically gets opened more often, you can send the message again to the rest who did not click. This type of testing is easy and doesn’t even require you to think of another type of headline.
What day of the week – Want to figure out what day of the week your audience opens your email promotional material? Just do a test. You might find that your audience opens newsletters more on Monday, and sale information more on Sunday. As you learn more information about your audience, take note of it, and incorporate it into your email campaigns. You can test this and see if different types of emails are opened at different rates. If you send frequently, you can already see which days are higher opens. You can look in your email reports and see what is popular.
From address – Do your subscribers respond more if the from field is your company name or your personal name? Some people may respond better if they know it’s a trusted brand they know. Others may feel better if it’s more personal. You can also test adding a [Wholesale Fashion Buyers] type message on the subject line so people have an idea of where it’s from or what it’s related to before they open. This can increase open rates as well.
Personalization – Inside your emails you might write to “Mrs. Jones” or you might write to “Sally.” Which works best? What approach gets the best response from your subscriber? This is another place where A/B testing can help. Or try it with no personalization at all and see what happens. I’ve heard both work, so which is better for your list.
Hard sell versus soft sell – You can also test the type of words you use within your email message to find out if your audience responds better to a soft sell message over a hard sell message. If you create some urgency, do you see a lot of people clicking through and opening? While not necessary all the time, you can use this in some messages and see if you get a better response.
By using split testing or A/B testing, you’ll increase the effectiveness of all your email marketing campaigns. You should most definitely do A/B testing on every single marketing campaign that you create so that over time you can collect data that will make your email marketing even more effective. Why wouldn’t you? It’s easy once you figure out how to do it, and if you challenge yourself to always come up with 3-4 good headlines, you will have a way to immediately begin testing your email campaigns. Give it a try and see what happens. You really have nothing to lose, most email providers give you unlimited sends in a month – so start now.
What about you? Have you done some A/B testing and how has it worked out for you?
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