How to Prepare for the Holiday Sales Season

If you haven’t prepped for the holidays yet, don’t worry! On today’s episode of the podcast we talking about the all things you want to do as soon as possible to ensure you have a stress-free and profitable holiday season.

1- Review your stats from last year. 

What went well? Did you hit your goals? What do you want to reuse from last year? What do you want to try differently. Sit down with your notebook, jot some things down to help think strategically. 

2- Write down all the important dates. 

All the important holidays and dates from your shipping carrier need to be in your planner so you can use those to plan your promotions. 

3- Continue building brand awareness.

Even though you are deep in planning mode, don’t stop the marketing you are currently doing. Keep up with your social media and emails. Those are helping build brand awareness for your business. 

4- Start writing and scheduling out your promo emails and social posts. 

Knowing that your emails and social media posts are taken care of is going to make it so you can focus on customer service, shipping orders, managing your team, and other important things. You won’t be rushing to write an email the night before it’s supposed to go live.

Pro-tip #1 -  Keep it simple. It can be really tempting to try every new thing you hear of to get more sales, especially during the holidays, but it might not be the best timing. It’s almost always better to keep it simple. Try those fun more complicated promotions for your business anniversary sale. 

5- Start making inventory adjustments.

You may need to be ordering more stock, creating more inventory, or even adding in different products so your shop has some great gift options. It’s important to do this early. You don’t want to be stressing about shipping delays from your suppliers. 

6- Consider hiring part-time help.

If you need help for the holiday season, hire them in the fall. This gives you time to train them and work out any problems before your busy time. 

7- Go through all your customer journey and make sure it’s running smoothly.

People are a little more demanding during peak season, so run through your customer sales journey and make sure it’s running smoothly. This might even be a good time to add new options for things like returns, live chat, or gift wrapping. Anything you can do to make purchasing easier. 

8- Make your website updates.

If you want to make a few updates to your website, I beg you to do it no later than October! Nothing is worse as a web designer than when a client asks for changes to their website on Tuesday the week of Thanksgiving. Let’s be real, technology always has it’s hiccups. Even the simple things can run into unforeseen problems. Plan ahead and get your websites changes done early. 

Pro-tip #2 - Reuse successful promotions you’ve used in the past. If something worked in the past USE IT AGAIN! There is absolutely nothing wrong with reusing things you’ve used in the past. Swap out pictures and copy to make it relevant to right now, and you are good to go.