How to prepare your shop & business for the upcoming holiday season
We're fast approaching one of the busiest times of the year again when consumers are shopping for presents, decor, and the tools they'll need to prepare themselves for the coming year! As a digital planner shop owner, are you ready for the increase in customers and demanding products that you'll be seeing from now until January? You'll be working double duty the next few months as you play the role of a consumer shopping for your very own holiday gifts and a business owner who needs to meet the demand of their own target audience. Holiday deals are popping up left and right and you don't want your shop to be forgotten as everyone else is in your potential customer's inboxes and Instagram feeds.
So how can you successfully get through this busy time without overworking yourself? To effectively deal with the added workload, it's best to get as much preparation for the upcoming holiday season out of the way before the crazy really begins! Believe it or not, there is much you can do before the holidays actually had to be prepared so that instead of feeling stressed about doing your own shopping and making sure your online shop is prepared, you'll be cool and confident as you spend time with your family and continue to make passive income.
Get out your pen and paper and write up a quick checklist of all the tasks that we're going to be talking about in this blog post that will help you prepare in the coming weeks. We'll be covering 8 tasks that you can complete to get ahead!
Task 1: Map out your offer timeline
There are many holiday events and sales you can run, but you don’t have to do them all! Take some time and look at the events coming up…
Halloween — October 31st
US Thanksgiving — November 24th
Canada Thanksgiving — October 10th
Black Friday — November 25th
Cyber Monday — November 28th
Christmas — December 25th
New Years — January 1st
Now you can decide which holidays or events you want to focus on! Choose the ones that you think will resonate best with your audience, then create a timeline for when you’ll start creating new products when you’ll start marketing them, and when they’ll actually go live in your shop. This helps you build a schedule for the weeks to come and keeps you organized!
Task 2: Map out your offers
You don’t need to overwork yourself creating new products for each major event this holiday season! There are many ways you can keep your audience engaged and create a fun experience for everyone. Choose some offerings from the list below and assign a timeline to each of them…
Bundles
Special bonuses
Early-bird access
Discounts & flash sales
Giveaways & contests
Task 3: Create a new product waitlist
Build excitement for your upcoming launch by telling your audience that something new is coming! Invite them to join an email waitlist, where you can warm them up and position yourself as an expert through a welcome sequence and nurture content. When you do this, your audience will be ready to buy from you when the time comes for your launch and you won’t have to go out and find new people — they’ll already be right where you want them!
💫 Speaking of waitlists, you can join the waitlist for our 2023 planner collection waitlist here.
Task 4: Optimize your shop
We need to make sure that your shop is prepared to handle all the traffic and new customers you’re going to be receiving! Review areas of your website that you may not have looked at in a while. Read over your FAQs and keep the answers simple and easy to understand. Maybe you’ll see that you haven’t updated your frequently asked questions in a while and need to add some more questions that keep ending up in your inbox or DMs. Add in new testimonials from previous launches or beta testers of your new products to show your audience that your products work and solve a problem!
Task 5: Enable cart abandonment
We want to make sure that your offers stick in the minds of your customers! People will be doing a lot of shopping during this time of year and so chances are, they’ll add products to their cart but never actually place their order. Help your business stand out by creating a cart abandonment sequence that reminds your potential customers that they left something behind. You can even offer them a small discount in hopes of helping them decide to complete their purchase. A cart abandonment sequence can look something like this:
Send your first email 1-3 hours after the cart has been abandoned reminding potential customers that they left something behind
Send your second email 24 hours after the cart abandonment and include a time-sensitive discount code that can be applied
Send a third and final email 48 hours after the cart has been abandoned reminding your potential customer that time is running out to use their discount code and grab the product they were interested in
Psst! You can use a cart abandonment sequence any time of year! It's been found that "44.1% of abandoned cart emails are opened almost a third of clicks on abandoned cart emails (29.9%) lead to a recovered sale" (source).
Task 6: Set up your social media presence
One task that will take up the most of your time during this busy holiday season is being present on social media. Instead of having to open the app every day and endlessly scrolling for hours, try to write your captions, design your graphics, and schedule your content to be auto posted before hand. Repurpose content from past launches in holiday seasons to save yourself time! Instead of reinventing the wheel every year, take a look at what has worked for your social media in the past and repeat the same content marketing strategy to ensure a successful launch without having to be active online for hours every week.
Task 7: Stock up on content
I'm going right along with what we just talked about, planning out your content before it needs to be posted or sent to your audience will eliminate much stress! It's not just your social media captions that you can batch create beforehand, but it's also your email newsletters, promotional email sequences, blog articles, TikTok and Instagram Reel videos, even your product descriptions, and more.
Stick to three social media posts per week, one blog article, and one newsletter to warm up your audience to your upcoming launches and sales. Then during the times when something is happening, increase your content so that your audience is hearing from you each day! This will ensure that the work you're doing isn't falling into the background as your audience is flooded with content from a variety of businesses. We want you to be the center of attention!
Launch offers & schedule sales with our upcoming workshop
We hope these eight tasks will help you to face this holiday season without feeling stressed, overwhelmed, and wondering how you're going to pull off all of the big things you have planned while also being present with your family! To make things even easier our signature program – Digital Planner Academy® – contains all the swipe files you need to write emails, draft social media content, and plan your lunches successfully.
