The biggest holiday season of the year is just around the corner. As you already know, with the Christmas and New Year’s Day just a few weeks away, the holiday sales are going to be rolling in soon. Before you know it, you will be so busy with each moment, and how you handle sales during this period will greatly influence the next year.
This is why it is important to plan ahead. Planning ahead helps you handle the activities of this peak period without feeling stuck in the middle. In this article, we will be discussing how you can plan now and enjoy the sales without hassle.
Conduct Your Performance Analysis
If you truly want to make a successful plan in anticipation of the holiday sales, there is an important step to take first. This involves properly analysing your past performance and taking note of your current situation. Without the proper understanding of how you did in the past and how you got to the present moment, it would be hard for you to make predictions for the future or plan for it.
To analyse past performances, don’t just observe the period around the Christmas and New Year’s Day. Cover the whole 4th Quarter of last year – October, November, and December. Take note of sales trend around this period. Ask yourself the following questions:
- When did the traffic start increasing? Around when did the traffic hit its peaks?
- When did the store revenue hit its peaks? Do those revenue peaks match the peaks of the traffic?
These questions will help you figure out your customers behaviours. If the traffic peak came earlier than the revenue peak, it might mean that they came in earlier to have a look around before coming back to buy. If the revenue peak was just before Christmas, it might indicate that your customers troop in to get Christmas gifts for their loved ones.
Your interpretation of these trends would inform your marketing strategy, and advise you on the best time to increase your marketing spend, just in time to meet the customers’ shopping desire.
Conduct Your Product Analysis
During the holiday season, some products do better than others. This is the perfect time to figure out the products that drove in most sales. While doing that, make sure you figure out the products that drove in the highest revenues. Those products aren’t always the same.
When you know these products, you would know which products to stock well. You will also know the right products to market aggressively. There is no point pouring too much marketing budget into products that don’t do so well during the holiday seasons. This is the time to optimize every ad spend.
Analyse Your Marketing Campaign
Just as important, this is the time to analyse which of your investment into marketing is really working for you, and which ones did poorly. How was your social media marketing? Which of the social media is converting best? What about SEO marketing? Which search engine brought in the most traffic?
Analyse your ad spends on each platform. Find out which ones are bringing in the most traffic, and which ones are bringing in the most sales and revenue. Observe if those data actually match. Understand the spending habits of different users on different media channels.
Set Your Store Goals
Now armed with information from the analysis, this is the time to translate them into goals and objectives. If there were any product that kept running out of stock around this period, make sure you bring up your purchase. If there are products that convert poorly around the holiday season, this is the time to reduce the purchase, so that you don’t incur loss.
If your site couldn’t handle the traffic during the holiday season last year, make sure you improve your site’s performance now, in anticipation of similar traffic trend this year. Discover the best performing products to market more aggressively this holiday period.
Draw Up Your Strategy
Bring in every department and partner now and make sure everyone knows their role and plays it. Your interaction with everyone must be seamless. Stay up to date with your suppliers and your staff. Make sure you have the right plan for your store. Your plan must be able to handle the traffic. Build the right landing pages to match this seasonal trend.
Time For Action
There is only one way to know if your plan worked according to plan, and that is if you act. Quickly analyse, set your goals and draw up your strategy. The only thing that would matter eventually is how well you can execute those plans. So, don’t wait till the last minute to think about it. If there is a time to start your plans, it is right now.
