Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Recession-Proof Your Business With Accessible Offers
It’s no secret that spending habits have shifted dramatically in the last three years. If you saw record high sales in 2020, you’re likely not experiencing those same numbers today.
Business owner after business owner has mentioned to me that they’re worried about their numbers being down, and we’re all wondering – what can we do to continue maintaining the level we were at? And recession-proof your business moving forward?
I can’t promise that you’ll be able to hit those record high numbers again, but I do have a solution that will help – creating accessible offers. Today I’m sharing a peek behind the curtain at my actual sales numbers, a case study for two offers that I made more accessible, and seven ways that you can create accessible offers for your own business to boost sales.
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Really quickly, before we dive into this episode – I just HAVE to share something I’m really excited about with you. My book, Chasing Simple Marketing, is launching this July. I wrote this book for the business owner that stumbled into entrepreneurship because they were following their passion. But without that Masters of Business Administration (MBA) or background in business, they find marketing overwhelming and frustrating. Throughout these pages, I’m going to take you on a simplicity-focused journey to improve your content marketing and you’ll walk away with an actionable plan to simplify your marketing, so that you can fit your marketing into your business, without it taking over your business. To learn more about how to grab your copy, and even potentially get on the launch team head over to amandawarfield.com/book/ See you there!
- This week’s episode is brought to you by the Chasing Simple Content Planner and you can grab your own at amandawarfield.com/planner/
- This week’s action step: Choose one offer, and one way to make it more accessible this week and put it into practice!
- This week’s book recommendation: You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone by Rachel Lynn Solomon
- Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield
Did you love this episode?
Don’t forget to subscribe so that you never miss an episode! Also, if you would be willing to leave a review on Apple Podcasts, it would mean the world to me. It’s such a small thing that can make a big difference in helping me spread this message of simplicity to other overwhelmed women.
Have a comment about today’s episode, or a topic you’d like to suggest for a future episode? Shoot me an email over at hello@amandawarfield.com!
Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!
*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate
It’s no secret that spending habits have shifted dramatically in the last three years. If you saw record high sales in 2020, you’re likely not experiencing those same numbers today. Business owner after business owner has mentioned to me that they’re worried about their numbers being down, and we’re all wondering, what can we do to continue maintaining the level we were at?
Well, I can’t promise that you’ll be able to hit those record high numbers again, but I do have a solution that will help. Creating accessible offers. Today I’m sharing a peek behind the curtain at my actual sales numbers, a case study for two offers that I made more accessible, and seven ways that you can create accessible offers for your own business to boost sales.
You’re listening to episode 181 of the Chasing Simple podcast, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. This episode was brought to you by the Chasing Simple Content Planner, and you can grab your 2024 version at amandawarfield. com / planner.
How do I find time to create content without overwhelming myself? Where should I even be showing up in my marketing? How do I come up with fresh content ideas? Where should I be focusing my marketing efforts? What is lead generation anyways, and how do I do it? Are launches still a thing? And, most importantly, how do I put it all together to market my business strategically?
Can I really grow my business without spending all of my time marketing? These are some of the questions that float around in your head when you think of marketing. Welcome friend, this is Chasing Simple, where practical marketing strategy meets simplicity. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield, simplicity focused content marketing and launch strategist, speaker, educator, and author of Chasing Simple Marketing.
I traded in my classroom lesson plans for helping creative entrepreneurs sustainably fit marketing into their business without it taking over their business, so that they have time to grow their business, take time off, and live the life they dreamed about when they first decided to go out on their own.
When I’m working, you can find me working with one on one clients, such as The Contract Shop and Rebecca Rice Photography on their marketing strategy and copywriting, or helping my students simplify their marketing and launches. And when I’m not, you can find me spending time outside with my husband, Russell.
Reading in our hammock, watching Gamecock Sports, traveling, or forcing our cats to snuggle me. If you feel overwhelmed by marketing, you aren’t alone. Many entrepreneurs find marketing frustrating, overwhelming, and simply an obligation. They know they need it, but they don’t enjoy how easily it can suck up their time when what they really want to be doing…
Is the thing that they started their business to do, which is why I’m here to help make marketing simple and less time consuming so that you can spend less time on your marketing and more time growing your business and doing what you love each week. I’ll bring you transparent conversations, actionable steps.
And judgment free community to encourage and equip you. So grab yourself a cup of coffee or whatever your drink of choices, and meet me here each week for love, support, practical tips and advice on uncomplicating, your marketing and business. Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together, shall we? Really quickly, before we dive into this episode, I just.
Have to share something that I’m really excited about with you. My book, chasing simple marketing is launching this July. I wrote this book for the business owner that stumbled into entrepreneurship because they were following their passion. But without that Masters of Business Administration or that background in business, well, they find marketing.
Overwhelming and frustrating throughout these pages. I’m going to take you on a simplicity focused journey to improve your content marketing. And you’ll walk away with an actionable plan to simplify your marketing so that you can fit your marketing into your business without it taking over your business.
To learn more about how to grab your own copy and even potentially get on the launch team, head over to amandawarfield. com slash book. I’ll see you there. Are we in a recession? Are we not in a recession? I honestly don’t know. I’m not an economist. I frankly try to avoid all of that as much as I can, um, because it’ll send me spiraling into panic attacks.
And so I really don’t know. I’ve seen people talking about the fact that we’re in a depression even worse than the Great Depression. I’ve seen people talk about the fact that we’re heading into a recession. I don’t know. What I do know… Um, is that regardless of if we are or if we aren’t all of our spending habits have changed all of ours because.
Um, whether we’re actually in it or not, we are mentally prepared to be in one. And so we have all tightened the purse strings a bit and that affects our businesses, right? Sales are down. Almost every single person I know in business, sales are down. Um, whether that’s. Friends or clients, myself, numbers are lower than they have been in a long time.
We had a huge boom in our industry in 2020 and beyond thanks to stimulus checks and people being home and all of that fun stuff. And we’ve seen that slowly starting to turn around and this year, more than ever, we are seeing sales are down. We are also seeing people that are much more interested in DIY options versus done for you options, meaning that people are less interested in outsourcing and hiring things out.
That’s not to say that’s not happening, but we went through this boom of done for you options being. A great fit and people being really interested in, Hey, my time is more valuable than my money. And it seems like that’s shifted. It seems like people are now saying, Hey, my money is more valuable than my time.
Thanks to this mental, are we in a recession? Are we not kind of mindset? And so what does that mean for us? Well, let’s just talk about some real numbers. Let me share some real numbers from my own personal business. In the last six months of 2022, my shop made 1, 500 for me. In the first six months of this year, it made about 900.
Now, I’m comparing the last six months of the year and the first six months of the year, which normally I wouldn’t do because buying habits tend to be different in different parts of the year. But my shop was only open from July on in 2022, and so I only have that data available to me. So there is a grain of salt there, for sure.
But that difference is still fairly significant. I made much more with my shop last year than I have In the first six months of this year, but what I have seen is that I’ve made more sales I’m just selling more of my lower priced items than I did last year so last year a big chunk of my sale were some of the bigger offers versus this year i’m The bottom line is less, but the sales are up because people are buying more of the smaller price lower offers.
Another thing that I’m seeing is that last year, my courses sold fairly well with just their, their one time. I didn’t have payment plans. This year I added payment plans and that made a huge difference for those bigger offers as well. Outside of my shop, I’m also seeing significantly less one on one inquiries and lots more I want it, but I can’t afford it.
Now that’s not to say I’m not getting clients and the inquiries that I do get, those are almost better inquiries because it’s people who have done the research, know what they want, know what the prices are, know that they can afford it. And they’re much more likely to only put out an inquiry if they know that they’re ready to take that next step.
And so my conversion rates are higher. So that’s just a peek behind the scenes of my own business and what I have seen in this year with this kind of mindset of possibly recession, depression, I don’t know. And now I want to talk about something that I did very recently and just kind of share a case study with you of something that I’ve done in my own business very, very recently surrounding batching bootcamp.
For background, when I originally created that course back in 2020, it was a course and for an entire year, that’s, it was just a course and I ran it live three times, which was great. I love doing that. I’ll probably continue to do that in the future, but I ran it live, taught it live. And then after each live round, I would send out feedback questionnaires and say, Hey.
What did you like about it? What’s missing? And over and over and over again throughout all three rounds the feedback I got from everyone was this course is incredible. I love it so much. I love what I’ve learned I wish there was some sort of ongoing accountability. Well in order to Be able to put the time into ongoing accountability.
I knew I needed to turn this into a membership. So club content batching was born. The whole membership surrounded the idea of holding people accountable to actually doing their batch week. Like, Hey, you know how to do batch week, but let’s make sure you’re doing it month after month. And the membership was successful.
It did really, really well for me. But the only way to get content matching bootcamp was through the membership. It wasn’t for sale outside of the membership. And over time, I began to hear from more people who were interested in the course, but not the membership. Over time, I began to see the enrollment in the membership go down.
Because again, as we headed into this recession, no recession kind of mindset, people were less interested in spending all of that money on a membership when they just wanted the course. And the membership existed for about two years and in about a year in I began to feel like it wasn’t the right fit, but I wasn’t really sure how to move forward.
And so I sat with that for a while, um, for about a year before I figured out what I needed and wanted to do. And What that was was make all of this more accessible. I loved having a membership, but I didn’t love The price point my entry level was at so I have a standard level for my membership And I also have a VIP member level and I was pretty happy with the the VIP level price at, um, 127 at that time.
And I felt good about that because, you know, my VIP members get a ton of one on one attention that, that felt fair to me, but I didn’t love that. The standard membership was also 127. And the way I had set it up originally was that you enrolled and after a year, you are automatically a VIP member. And so it was like, Oh, you get all this extra attention.
after being in for a year and that’s great and I didn’t, I didn’t love that after it had been going for a little while and I wanted to switch it up so that it was more accessible and so that people could choose. Hey, instead of waiting a whole year to be a VIP member, if you want to just be a VIP member, join the VIP tier.
If you have no interest in that extra one on one accountability, I wanted it to be more accessible and I also wanted content batching boot camp to be more accessible. I didn’t want it to be hidden behind the membership any longer. And so what I did is I took content batching bootcamp and I turned it just back into a solo course.
It on its own is a course you can enroll. It is by itself, you know, go for it. And that made that more accessible because you didn’t have to buy into this membership that was a year long commitment and all of this stuff. It, you know, all of these things that were taught about this is a great way to get members and hold on to them and all of this fun stuff.
I pulled it out. So that it’s just a course and you can just enroll and it’s accessible and it’s easier to get into. And then I took the membership and totally chopped up the tiers where there’s a VIP tier and there’s a standard tier. The standard tier is 27. The VIP tier is 147 and you get to choose which one you want to be in so that it’s accessible to your needs.
There’s also no kind of commitment. It’s month to month. You stay as long as you want, and when you’re ready to go, you give two weeks notice. So I wanted to split those up and make them more accessible, and already there’s been a huge success. When I opened Content Batching Bootcamp just as a course. I had a ton of sales immediately right away for people who’d clearly been waiting for that to be an option.
The membership itself has been much more successful having that accessibility and having those two different tiers where you could decide which one you actually wanted and the amount of support and accountability you actually wanted. So And the membership itself is totally different. It’s no longer surrounding content batching.
It’s just simplifying marketing in general. We’ve got each quarter, we’ve got a quarterly theme that we’re working through. And if you want to learn more, you can go to amandawarfield. com slash community. But basically it’s. I still have a membership, but it’s totally new in a lot of ways. So that’s not really what this episode is about, but there’s that peek behind the scenes.
And by making both of these accessible, I’ve seen much more success with them. And so that’s what I want you to consider as well. In order to keep on going through and make it through the recession, you have to make your offers more accessible. We can’t keep doing the same things that have worked in the past because…
That’s just the nature of business is change is going to happen change is going to be necessary and we’re going to have economic shifts So you want to make sure that you are? recession recession proofing your business with accessible offers making some changes to the way your offers are structured and really Maybe switching up the difference of where your focus is for me I went into this year really hoping to focus on VIP days and one to one offers and I’ve realized that that just can’t be the case right now that if that’s my focus I’m not gonna see the sales I want so instead I focused more on some of my smaller offers and making those more accessible So that’s something to consider, but how do you make them more accessible?
Well, like I said earlier, DIY options are much more enticing right now, because a lot of people are more interested in. Taking the time to do something themselves versus spending the money to have someone else do it. So creating DIY options for your one to one offers if you don’t have those. Instead of doing it for someone, can you teach them how to do it?
Can you give them tools to do it? Creating offers surrounding that kind of mindset. You can also offer payment plans, like I mentioned with my courses. All of my courses, there’s a one time payment, and there’s also a three month payment plan, where they pay three payments. Of whatever that one month payment is split.
There’s a lot of conflicting ideas about whether or not a payment plan should basically cost someone more. The kind of two schools of thought are, one, it penalizes people who are, aren’t privileged enough to be able to pay up front. The other school of thought is that, well, when you have to chase someone down because they didn’t finish paying for something, it costs you extra time and money and inconvenience, so.
Those are the two school of thoughts. I see the pros and cons of both. At this point in time, I am playing around with just simply the three payments add up to the one payment and that is what it is. Um, but maybe in the future that mindset changes. I really don’t know. But regardless, offering payment plans of some sort can help make your offers more accessible, especially if they are something, basically anything of mine that is over a hundred dollars, I’ve tried to put a payment plan into to make it more accessible.
The other thing you can do is lower prices. Normally, this isn’t something that you would. want to do all the time, it’s not necessarily always fair to people who have bought at that higher price. You have to try to figure out, you know, how can I make it right to the people that have bought at the higher price and things like that.
But that is an option. Like I did with the membership. I wasn’t comfortable with that. Hey, you’re going to immediately buy in, right? It basically the VIP tier, but you don’t get VIP tier. perks until after you’ve been there a year, I decided I didn’t like that option. And so I lowered prices and I made that right with the people who had bought in.
Tiered pricing is another option. So you can do similar to how I did with the membership is basically just adding another tier where, Hey, You can get this for lower at this price. You don’t get as many perks, but it’s there as an option. So you can add tiered pricing. You can also run free trials. People are more hesitant to put their money down for something and so you can say, hey, here’s a free trial.
Check it out. See if you like it. If you do like it and you want to stick around, This is how much it is to join. And so you’re giving people the chance to try it before they buy. Kind of like a test drive for a car, right? Give someone a free trial, they’re more likely to give it a try. And if they like it, and if, you know, your sales page matches up with the offer, and you’re actually solving the pain point, um, they’re more likely to actually buy into it.
You can also do scholarships, where, you know, it’s basically a marketing campaign to get more eyes on it, but also, hey, here’s a scholarship where I can let someone in for half price, or even, you know, They get the course for free or whatever that may look like. That’s something that you could do as well.
And then of course, there are also bundles and limited time offers. You can bundle multiple offers into one offer. You can give a limited time pricing, like, Hey, for just this weekend, it’s 50 percent off or 20 percent off or whatever, so that you’re giving people different ways to get in at. More accessible prices and offers.
So again, just to run down that list, DIY options, create them if you don’t already, payment plans, lowering prices, tiered pricing, free trials, scholarships, bundles, limited time offers. There are a lot of different ways that you can make your offers more accessible. Another thing that I want to throw out there, Is to make sure that you’re transparent in your pricing, particularly when it comes to one on one things.
I know for a fact that if I go onto someone’s page and I’m interested in a service they have, but they don’t have their pricing on there, I’m immediately done. I’m not interested because it’s not worth my time to find out. If the pricing isn’t listed, I automatically assume I can’t afford it. If the pricing is listed, I know right away whether or not it can work in my budget.
And that way I only reach out if it’s reasonable and realistic. And like I mentioned earlier, I’m seeing less inquiries, but the ones I’m getting are, I’m absolutely ready to get started. And I fully believe that that’s because of the price transparency on my website. You can go to my website and see exactly how much it costs to work with me.
And then you can decide, is it worth my time to move forward with? And that way nobody’s wasting anyone else’s time. And it just makes me feel a whole lot better knowing that I’m not trying to convince someone to work with me. When they’re ready to work with me, they come to me. So just want to throw that out there as well.
It, it kind of makes your offers more accessible, but really it just helps save you time and save your potential clients time so that they know what is realistic for them. Now, your action step for this week is to choose one offer that you have, and then choose one way to make it more accessible and put it into practice this week.
So maybe that means that you’re going to create a DIY option. Maybe that means you’re going to add a payment plan. Maybe that means you’re going to offer a free trial, whatever it may be. Choose one offer, one way to make it more accessible and put it out there and see what happens. See if that helps bump up your sales a little bit.
Your book recommendation for this week is You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone by Rachel Lynn So
No surprise that this one is in here as well. Um, this one is about two sisters, I believe they’re twins. And their mother, I think, has hunting tendencies. And they have to do genetic testing to find out if one of them has, or if either of them have the… You know the genes for the disorder themselves and all of that, and it’s a little bit different from her usual, you know, meet cute kind of book, but so good and well worth read.
So you’ll miss me when I’m gone by Rachel Lynn Solomon. And until next time my friend, I hope that you’ll go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
Thank you so much for joining me here today, friend. You can find this episode’s show notes as well as all of the resources you need to simplify your marketing over at amandawarfield. com. If you liked what you heard here today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. And if you could take a moment to leave a rating and review, it would truly mean the world to me.
Ratings and reviews are the number one way that you can support a podcast. And ensure that it sticks around for many more episodes to come. I’ll see you next time. Now go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
+ view comments . . .