3 Steps to Creating a Stress Free and Profitable Holiday Promotion

With the holiday season quickly approaching, now is the perfect time to quickly arrange for a holiday promotion for your business. The Thanksgiving to Christmas time period tends to be an extremely profitable season for online shops and businesses, with many retailers seeing exponential sales and traffic in this time with the aid of some well planned and executed holiday sales. Now, if you have never planned out a holiday promotion, or have yet to do so this season, I’m here to tell you that the process is much easier than you think and doesn’t have to involve complicated marketing planning or lots of time and effort. You do still have plenty of time to pull off a successful holiday promotion without stress or extra long work days, but you do need to act fast to get your plan in place to maximize sales before Black Friday kicks off in a few weeks! In order to help make this process even more streamlined for you, I have also created a free DIY Holiday Promotion Planning Guide that you can use to plan and keep track of your promotion. CLICK HERE to get the FREE Guide and get started today!

Step # 1: Decide the logistics of your promotion

There are many types of promotions and sales specials you can run during the holiday season to drum up excitement for your business and increase traffic and check totals in your shop. You can do something as simple as create a special coupon code for a percentage off items in your shop, you can put together bundles of popular products that coordinate, or simply discount your best sellers. You can make your sale as simple or complicated as you’d like and do one or more of these things, but decide what works for you and your business and of course, plan out how long you want these promotions to last. I’d highly suggest running a sale on Black Friday at the very least. Personally, this year I plan to create some limited time only bundles, provide a coupon code to VIPs on my email list and social media followers, and I also plan to host a giveaway to entice sales during my promotion which will last 3 days from Black Friday to Sunday. If you don’t want to discount your products due to product constraints, you can also create non-sale promotions that include either a giveaway wherein customers during the time frame are opted in to win a prize. You can offer a digital freebie to drive traffic to your shop or even give a free gift with purchase. Think about what will work for your sales goals and business and outline the details of your promotion asap!

Step #2: Shoot your promotional images

If you run an online business, you know how important great product and styled shots are to driving sales. Once you know the parameters of your promotion, you can arrange for a quick photoshoot and get all your images ready for your shop, social media and any ads you may run. If you don’t feel confident in your photography skills or need help understanding how to take great photos that sell, definitely check out my Charmed Digital Styling Lightroom Photography Course. It’s a video module based course with 3.5 hours of content that you can watch while taking notes and arranging your own photos. In the course I teach you everything you need to know to quickly get your styled photography under control and streamlined to make shooting promotional images a breeze! I’d highly recommend taking the course if you need great photos for your holiday promotions, it will save you time and money in the short term if you are someone who pays for stock photos, and the course even includes photoshop tutorials that will teach you how to create promotional sales graphics and advertisements as well!

Step #3: Start spreading the news

Once you have your promotion planned and your images are ready to go, you can start sharing the news of your promotion through your various communication methods and continue to do so through the duration of your sale. I’d suggest starting to actively promote your holiday sale anywhere from 2-4 days before it begins using any and all methods you use to communicate with your customers. If you have an email list, you will want to send a list to your email a few days before the sale starts and give some previews of the sales to come, and if you use social media or YouTube, make sure you tell your audience in these locations as well. If you use any methods of advertising, you also want to get those set to go for about three days out from the sale to drum up excitement and provide a call to action to get new potential customers onto your list. Finally, if you have an affiliate program or even a network of friends who can help you spread the word, make sure you coordinate with them on promotional messages and details that they can share with their audience as well. It’s the holiday’s after all, so the more the merrier when it comes to cross promoting sales and specials!

That’s it! Three easy steps to a stress free and profitable  holiday promotion. You still have time to get your promo planned and off the ground and I’d highly suggest planning something rather than nothing because failing to promote during the holidays means you are leaving a lot of money on the table. Make sure to grab my free DIY Promotion Planning Guide to help keep you on track!

Wishing you a productive and successful week and holiday season ahead!

xoxo,