In episode #129 of the Joy Joya Jewelry Marketing Podcast, I share some special tips to coincide with the unofficial beginning of summer after Memorial Day weekend. For many jewelry brands, summer can be a slow time of year. Major gifting holidays like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day have passed, and some would-be jewelry shoppers are enjoying their summer vacations; maybe they’re focused on buying jewelry from the destinations they visit. The next major gifting holidays are in December.

What can you do during the summer months if your business slows? In this episode, I’ll share some marketing tasks you can work on behind-the-scenes to prepare yourself for holiday and beyond. View the transcript of the episode below.

Let’s get to my tips for how to survive a slow season for your jewelry business. And summer typically is the slow season for many jewelry brands that I work with. So first, you definitely want to make sure that your e commerce website assuming that you have one is firing on all cylinders. How is the user experience if you are too close to your own e commerce experience? This is a time where you definitely want to hire an e commerce expert or web developer who can audit your website. This is something I actually offer as part of my brand audit. I look at the whole user experience and say, What can be improved about this? How can you maybe update your visual merchandising strategy online? How can you make the navigation and menu experience better? How can you ensure that your site is optimized for mobile shopping? Is your website optimized for Google search, these are all things that you can definitely do in your off time. And you would be surprised how really small changes can make a huge difference in the shopping experience. So definitely focus on your e commerce presence. And if you don’t have one, here, slow season is definitely the right time to build one up. And you can get started as simple as signing up for a Shopify account and exploring some of the more free or low cost options or even consulting with an e commerce web developer who can help you find the solution that’s right for you.

Next, this may sound premature, but it’s really not you want to start putting together your holiday marketing calendar. If you haven’t already done that as part of your year long marketing strategy. Let me tell you that holiday prep will be here before you know it with a lot of brands even starting to be kind of aggressive in their strategies in August at least with the planning. So if you can get a jump on that in the summer and kind of audit where you are with your planning and what needs to be done, like for example, will you need new photographs Will you need to kind of refresh your merchandising, we need to refresh anything about the customer experience. Those are all things that you can sit down and plan now, trust me, it’s not too early to start thinking about holiday, when business does start getting busy. These things will be put on the back burner. And Black Friday will be here before you know it and you will probably not feel like you have prepared enough. So hopefully, you want to get all your ducks in a row for that busy season for your jewelry business.

The slow season is also a really great time to start experimenting with new marketing tactics that maybe you haven’t had the time to try in the past or were hesitant to try in the past. This is a good time to like get a little bit creative. Try new things that you’ve been meaning to try. Maybe that’s influencer marketing, working with a good fit influencer, whether that’s a nano influencer, or even someone big with a bigger presence. This is a time to maybe do a giveaway or a brand partnership. think outside of the box with this. Maybe you can implement a rewards or loyalty program. Maybe you can do a creative in person event, whatever it is, I think a slow period is a time to try something new. If it doesn’t work, fine, but you really have nothing to lose. If it does work, then that’s awesome. You have a new tool in your marketing toolbox to implement again in the future and know that it has shown you success so you won’t feel so nervous about trying and again.

The slow period is a really good time on focusing on getting customer reviews and just reaching out to past customers in general. Your past customers already know you they have been buyers in the past they have proven to like your product, they have a relationship with you. They’re definitely low hanging fruit. So if you haven’t personally reached out to some of your VIP customers. This low period is a Great time to do that, and perhaps offer them some kind of incentive or special promotion to get them to buy during your slow period. Just because they’re not buying from you now doesn’t mean they suddenly don’t like you. Maybe they’re distracted thinking about other things. And if you haven’t reached out to them in a while, they may have even forgotten about you. But that doesn’t mean they don’t like your products anymore. You can also reach out during that same time to past customers to try to get customer reviews. These are so valuable. And it’s another way to kind of prepare for holiday. Because the more social proof the more user generated content you can have, the more that these new customers who hopefully flood your shop and look at your products when the holiday season is approaching, those people will then trust you more if your past customers have kind of already vetted you on on their behalf. So that’s definitely somewhere you can focus during a slow period.

You can also take this slow time to really dig deep into your data. If that’s something you personally don’t feel comfortable doing, you could definitely hire a marketing consultant to help you look at your Google Analytics. For example, if it’s been a while since you’ve kind of crunched the numbers and looked at what is and isn’t working in terms of what the data is telling you, now’s the time to figure out what are you doing well, and where can you stand to improve and your data is the thing that’s going to let you know that you want to really audit yourself in your marketing efforts using that data. And you can start brainstorming ways to address those weak points, figure out how you can implement those things moving forward. Again, when it’s busy, you’re not going to have time to stop and think about these things. But they are so super valuable. This low period is also a really great time to implement a content marketing strategy that I know you’ve been putting off. So in some past episodes, I’ve talked about the importance of content blogging, in particular, why it matters for search engine marketing, how it can help drive new traffic new customers to your site.

This is not something that’s necessarily easy or quick to implement at the beginning, it can be kind of more easy once you get it running. But I know that a lot of people kind of put it off because it can be a really big effort up front. So you know, use this slow period to start thinking about content, start filling up your content bucket in a strategic way, so that when you are more busy, and you do have to like take a little bit of time away from the content, you’ll still have built up a store of it that you continue to work on, whenever it gets slow for your business.

A slow period is also a really great time to kind of audit your email marketing. So what I usually suggest is every three to six months, my clients look at their email list and create a segment of people who have been inactive for a long period of time, whether that means they haven’t opened any campaigns in a few months, or they don’t necessarily click on anything, they just don’t seem to be engaged users, you may want to send those people a reengagement campaign to see if they’re actually still interested in receiving your messages. Or even just segment them to a part of your list that maybe doesn’t receive as frequent emails. Definitely, if the bulk of your list are people who are not engaged, it can actually hurt you moving forward, it can hurt the deliver ability of your email. So if people are like marking you as spam or ignoring you, your emails may be getting sent to spam folders. So you want to keep doing everything possible to ensure that your emails are getting delivered and that they’re getting opened. So using this low period as a chance to clean up your email list can be really useful for you.

And then finally, you may want to consider revisiting who you think your target customer is. I think a lot of jewelry brands don’t realize that this can potentially change over time and evolve. And if it’s been a period, since you have looked at your target customer, maybe now may be a good time to reevaluate that get in touch with who your customer is how you can more strategically develop products for that customer moving forward, and how you can better reach that customer. It’s always good to revisit these things on a periodic basis. So what do you think of these tips are you going to try any of them the next time you have a slow period of your business, I know that having a slow period can be a little bit anxiety producing, you may have a lot of doubts, wonder if it will ever turn around. But if you’re focused on productive tasks that will keep you moving forward. You won’t be so like micro focused on these pretty normal lols in business, I mean, that’s kind of normal in any industry or business there’s, you can’t just have like, consistent growth constantly. I mean, unless it’s some sort of outlier miracle, there are always going to be slow periods. So if you can figure out how to use marketing to fill those periods in a productive way, then you will better set yourself up for when business starts to resume or when you start to see growth again.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Links mentioned at the beginning of this episode:

“Introducing new insights for Reels and Live“

“10 eCommerce Trends All Online Shop Owners Need to Know in 2021 [Infographic]“

“Pinterest Now Facilitates More Than 5 Billion Searches per Month“