Planning and Preparing for Black Friday Promotions with Abbey Ashley
Episode 379: Show Notes
Our guest on the show today is Abbey Ashley, the founder of The Virtual Savvy! After running her own successful VA business for a few years, she has gone on to help other aspiring virtual assistants launch and grow their own at-home businesses from scratch. We get to pick her brain today, and the reason we’re so excited is that she has an amazing business philosophy which involves keeping things simple while still making a major impact! She has perfected the art of doubling down on the areas that work and remaining laser-focused on those rather than getting distracted.
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In this episode, you’ll learn about her launch game plans as well as how she deals with Black Fridays, teaching us how to set ourselves up for a booming year ahead. You’ll be thrilled to know that Abbey will also be a speaker at our upcoming Boss Project Summit, another great reason to sign up and get your pass!
Abbey’s Simplistic Approach to Business
Out of all the business owners we know in our industry, Abbey runs her business in the most refreshingly simple way. But don’t be mistaken, her business is exploding, and we believe it comes down to intentional focus. The basis of her business is the two main things she promotes, which involves a signature course and a membership site. Since the beginning, she knew that she wanted to solve a very specific problem for a specific audience and that she would master that before attempting anything else – and it has truly paid off! Because she chose to focus, it meant she wouldn’t attempt to solve all the problems her audience might have, and this led her to partner with some amazing affiliates who could help to address those needs. She does two launches for her signature course each year – January and July – and then she has an evergreen funnel that runs in the background all the time. Her membership site also runs permanently for which she does Spring and Black Friday sales. She does this wash, rinse and repeat, while simply making small tweaks here and there.
Remaining Focused Amid All the Distractions
With new programs and opportunities coming up daily, how does an entrepreneur stay focused and avoid getting caught up in the expectations of each new customer or trend? The key for Abbey lies in those affiliate relationships. She always keeps her eyes peeled for opportunities to collaborate with others so that she can keep providing for the changing needs of her customers while also remaining focused on what she wants to do. This allows her to refer customers to her friends and associates in the biz who focus on those niches. Abbey also has the healthy habit of weighing the time she will spend on something versus the potential profit she will make from it and she uses this as a filter before saying yes to something. When it comes to teaching people to become virtual assistants, she has a value-first methodology, which means she provides something useful to her audience before asking them to buy something. In addition, she plans her promotions calendar in advance and only pushes her audience towards an offer once a month. Typically, she does a launch in the first quarter, a Spring sale in the second, another launch in the third quarter and a Black Friday sale in the fourth. In the other months, she focuses on providing additional value by way of YouTube videos, blog posts, going live and giving a lot of free value. Many people ask her to do different things and to collaborate, but she often says no because she doesn’t want to overwhelm her audience with too many offers.
Thoughts on Profit Highs, Lows and Payment Plans
For Abbey, January launches are particularly helpful because they give you a nice cash injection at the beginning of the year, and this is also when people are most motivated to make big changes. But most of the money that comes into her business is from payment plans, and Abbey really pushes this model because – like us – she doesn’t enjoy the extremes of feast and famine that launches tend to bring about. She also feels that, because her course is on the pricey side, she wants to make it more accessible to people who cannot make a big investment at once. She also has a pretty forgiving return policy, which encourages people to sign up. Offering a payment plan also makes the pitching process much easier and less weighty. And you will have people dropping out and asking for refunds, but because you are making it more accessible, a lot more people can experience your offering.
Advice for Preparing and Running Your Black Friday Launch
Abbey runs all her launches along pretty much the same pattern. One thing she has done from day one is to follow other people’s launches and pay attention to the kind of promotions they are doing. Make a folder for all those Black Friday emails – you can learn a lot of new techniques from others. She also starts by providing some sort of content (remember, value first!) such as going live for a couple of days before and then open up the special on that Friday morning. So, she directs all her audience streams to her lives and tells people upfront that she’s going to have Black Friday promotions. This creates anticipation, which gives people time to think about and prepare for making that purchase on the day. Abbey used to be apprehensive about sending too many emails, but for Black Friday, you just have to get over and do it, especially because the competition is so strong. She also lets her specials run until Monday night to include Cyber Monday too, but the biggest savings will be available on Friday to double down on the scarcity and urgency effect.
Strategies for Getting Final Sales Before the Promotion Ends
Whatever your Black Friday offer is, you might think about letting it end only on Monday evening. Usually, Abbey does some kind of discount, such as 10% off her membership and then she’ll also add in some bonuses. These bonuses might be a freebie you used to promote or a future live masterclass. So, the discount and bonuses will apply for Friday and only the discount for the rest of the weekend until Monday night. She likes to remind her audience about the cut-off time for the promotion by sending an email both in the morning and in the afternoon. What she has recently started doing is incorporating stories because it highlights real-life examples and it resonates with people. The fact that stories are not perfect and reflect reality also draws people in much more. Social media today is about showing up for your audience in an authentic way where people feel like they can relate to you, and stories are super impactful in this context. This is one area you should not delegate or leave for someone else to manage – you need to part of it!
What Story Means for Abbey and A Vision for 2020
Story for Abbey is about sitting down and letting the creative juices flow. Many entrepreneurs in this field are creatives and artists, and we can easily neglect this aspect of ourselves in the rush of running a business. We forget to make time to create and that’s why Abbey is determined to prioritize creativity in 2020. She would like to take the time to think of funny video ideas or think of beautiful ways to capture testimonies, for example. Thinking introspectively would also be important for being authentic, and even vulnerable sometimes, which is what the audience wants to be experiencing with people they follow. There are so many things we could be doing, but really asking yourself what your motive is and whether it is serving your unique purpose will prevent you from over involving yourself and doing things just for the sake of it. We need to step back and get out of other people’s boxes.
Understanding There Is No Silver Bullet to Profitability
Most of us tend to look for one solution that is going to solve all our business problems, but it simply does not exist. When you look at profitable businesses, they are the people who stick with it and keep going. You pivot a little bit along the way and experiment with different things, but copying and pasting someone else’s approach or concept very seldom works. While it’s fine to observe and learn from others, you must apply what they are doing to your own style and your audience – put it through your own filters. It’s also necessary to distinguish between pivoting and rebranding: making changes is cool, but you should not be scratching everything and starting all over again multiple times. You need to also get to a point where you choose profit over ego, and the only two things that matter are whether you are making a profit and helping people.
Quote This
I think everybody is looking for the magic silver bullet ... and the longer I’ve been doing this, I really don’t think that exists.
—Abbey Ashley
Highlights
Abbey’s Simplistic Approach to Business. [0:04:19]
Remaining Focused Amid All the Distractions. [0:09:51]
Thoughts on Profit Highs, Lows and Payment Plans. [0:14:10]
Advice for Preparing and Running Your Black Friday Launch. [0:17:33.1]
Strategies for Getting Final Sales Before the Promotion Ends. [0:27:50.1]
What Story Means for Abbey and A Vision for 2020. [0:32:52.1]
Understanding There Is No Silver Bullet to Profitability. [0:37:20.1]
#TalkStrategyToMe [0:42:42.1]
Choose your special offer.
Partner up.
Prepare pre-content.
Plan out scarcity and urgency.
Email plenty!
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abbey Ashley
The Virtual Savvy
Abbey Ashley is the founder of The Virtual Savvy, helping small business owners create, launch, and grow their businesses. She earned her bachelor’s degree in marketing in 2012 and turned around to earn her master’s degree in management & organizational leadership shortly after in 2013. In 2015, she started her own virtual assistance business and sold out her services within months of launching. Knowing that she wanted to help others turn their passion into profit, she started The Virtual Savvy in 2016. With an entrepreneurial spirit herself, Abbey prides herself in helping small business owners on their path to success through online marketing efforts.
KEY TOPICS
Virtual assistant, Simplicity, Focus, Black Friday, Promotions, Payment Plans, Launches, Story, Creativity
