(recorded April 7, 2021) - 1 hours, 43 minutes
Imagine if your jewelry store had a stead monthly income you could count on even if no one stepped through your door. Today we’ll explain how you could implement your own jewelry subscription service to generate that monthly revenue. After that we’re discussing how the new Apple iOS release will impact your marketing.
This concept is viable for local jewelers. They could set up a subscription serving offering the same. It would be a new stream of income.
The items that are rented through Rocksbox are all lower than $175 retail. Assuming the retail pricing is triple-key, the most expensive item is $58 cost. There's not a lot of exposure for loss of product.
Shipping is free both ways, so you'll have to set that up with your carrier and send return shipping labels. The box you use would need to be a little more sturdy so the person can back and ship the items back, and you'd probably want to get special boxes printed with your brand identity. They could also bring them directly back to your store.
Items are curated according to the person's taste.
As we've mentioned in the past, subscription services are more and more popular and have perks. Rocksbox is a low end fashion jewelry service, but as a fine jeweler you could have different service levels. You could have a $100/mo service, $200/mo service, all the way up to as high as your insurance company is willing to cover.
If you're a jewelry designer, when you look at the Rocksbox model, it's nothing more than a more advanced memo program with 30 day terms. When people don't return the jewelry they are charged to their credit card on file.
To make this work, you'd need a curated catalog on your website showing the items that might be sent out every month. Keep in mind that the items you send to one customer this month could be the same items you send to another customer next month. Of course you have to clean them between subscribers, and you might have to service the items, like polishing them, repairing them, etc.
Setting up a subscription service is something that you'd want your website to do for you, with automatic billing. But as a test program, you could use PayPal as the merchant system that will automatically bill people every month.
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iOS 14.5 is supposed to be released this month. What's significant is the app tracking. You'll see messages like the one on the link.
For those paying for ads, this means that you will eventually see a drop in the reach of your ads, along with an expected increase in the cost of your ads.
To put it more plainly, if you're paying an agency for your ads, you can expect that they will be changes to the service you're currently getting. Some agencies charge a service fee every month along with a media buy budget. Some services, like ReachLocal, will guarantee a minimum reach and clicks for your chosen media budget. Those types of agencies might need to contact you to update that guaranteed minimum, or ask you if you'd like to increase your media budget.
The real impact of the new Apple iOS privacy policy won't be known until a few days after it's officially released. As users of iPhones, we might be a bit annoyed by all the popups we're going to see right away. If you don't often update your apps, then you can expect that you'll need to update every app on your phone before you can use it again. From a personal point of view, this privacy is a good thing.
From a marketing point of view, this privacy will drive up costs and limit our ability to surgically target customers. Topics of privacy are in the news so much that I expect many people to press the "Ask App not to Track" option when they see it. Opting out doesn't mean that ads will disappear. But rather, it means that targeting will turn off. For example, a single man using a fitness app to track his workout while at the gym may not see ads for Nike sneakers or gym clothes any more, instead, he might see an ad for a baby monitor.
Similarly, you might have your Facebook ad targeting set to show ads to white collar, self purchasing women who make more than $100,000 per year, but now your ads might now appear on the iPhone of a blue collar car mechanic who never wears jewelry because they have hands with perpetual oil stains on them.