From October through December, millions of businesses will be shouting their promotions from the rooftops and I promise you, you’ll see a few “sales squirrels” among them and I don’t want it to be you.
What’s a “sales squirrel” you may be asking? A business without a sales plan in place who keeps darting from one deep discount sale to the next, trying to crack the code to increase sales, but sadly never succeeding.
This month let’s talk about how to avoid this scenario in your own business and instead embrace planning out intentional promotions for that work for you and your customers!
Start Planning It All Out Now
Sit down with your inventory of products or services for the upcoming holiday season and start creating a plan! Allow your focus to come from creating a promotions experience for your customers rather than a random sale to encourage them to purchase. Obviously, whatever promotions you create should, in fact, encourage sales, but you want to make sure you are choosing something specific to what your customer finds valuable! Perhaps it’s about offering free gift wrap with a custom card for items from your shop or doing a free gift or donation on their behalf when they purchase a certain amount or book a specific service? For discounts you plan to offer what could help them see added value and excitement but not take away from your bottom line? Think about things that encourage your customer to hit a specific threshold transaction amount or encourage them to buy or book more with you.
Once you have a brainstorm of ideas down, take time to home in and make decisions on which promotions you will run for which holidays and solidify your plan.
Create a Holiday Sales Calendar
Your calendar is your new BFF in your business this holiday season. It will help you stay on top of your marketing, shop or website updates, inventory needs, and your own personal life! For each promotion you’ll be running throughout the holidays, include your “what, when and how” to help you stay organized and create concrete tasks with deadlines. Remember to create this calendar in a way that is realistic for you to stick to it! Have all promos set up in your shop, social media content ready, emails scheduled with an understanding of your promo timeline as a whole.
A great goal is to have this calendar set up as early as you can so you don’t get overwhelmed.
Prepare Your Audience in Advance
As each holiday promotion approaches, don’t keep everything under wraps! This is your chance to prepare your customers and leads for what they can look forward to and keep their eyes open for! It doesn’t mean you have to share the exact details, but create a sense of urgency with reminders and countdowns when you are dropping something special, similar to how you would treat a launch. Work on building a marketing and sales strategy that helps you warm up your audience, so they are ready to buy from you – especially as holiday gifts for others! Design a graphic or two listing out your kickoff dates for your sales and customer benefits – get excited, show behind the scenes on social media, create a sense of urgency with cutoff date reminders and any limited inventory of your products or services.
Hustle & Heart Challenge
This month start narrowing down which products and/or services you’ll be concentrating on selling during the holidays. Once you have these selected, begin thinking about how you can create added value for your ideal customers, both new and returning, through promotions. Don’t limit yourself to what you’ve done in the past and think outside the box! Choose 1-3 sales strategies you’d like to implement!
