Make the most of the retail holiday season

Think big for your business by getting ready for key shopping dates surrounding popular gift-giving holidays. Now’s the time to prepare to rake in your share of the more than $800 billion American shoppers are set to spend in the next couple of months.  

Don’t sleep on these hot holiday season retail dates

Check out the list of key retail holiday milestones, below.

November 

• Thanksgiving Nov. 24 
• Black Friday Nov. 25 
• Small Business Saturday Nov. 26 
• Cyber Monday Nov. 28 
• Giving Tuesday Nov. 29 
  (Hot tip: Your brand can show up authentically by sharing a portion of profits with a charitable organization)  

December 

• Super Saturday Dec. 18 
• Christmas Eve Dec. 24 
• Boxing Day Dec. 26 
• New Year’s Eve Dec. 31 

Prepare for this holiday shopping season now 

To get the most out of the end-of-year peak shopping period, you might need to adjust your typical run of business, spend a more on marketing or experiment with new ways to meet consumers. You need as much time as possible to make it all happen. Consider the following tips to make sure you’re ready for the next two months. 

Map your marketing 

If you don’t know how you’re going to market your business for the holidays, now is the time. Plan and create content for your social channels, and consider paid placements. This is a great time to use email to let customers know about new products, holiday promotions, or anything else you’ve got going on. We recommend you take time now to create all the emails you want to send between now and New Year’s. Future you will be glad you did.  

Adjust operations 

Ask yourself: What might need to change from the daily run of business that worked well last month to meet next month’s needs? Do you need to hire temporary staff? Do you need to add new order fulfilment options, like next day delivery for last minute shoppers? Run through likely shopping scenarios and imagine the best ways to exceed your customers’ expectations.  

Optimize for easy gift-giving online 

Online shopping isn’t new for consumers, but it might be for your business. Ensure that you have easy-to-gift items or curated, giftable packages of your best-selling products for customers who want to share your brand with their family and friends. So, if you’ve been putting off starting or updating your website, consider this your deadline.  

Experiment with experiences 

People love pop-ups. They love to try before they buy or get pampered when preparing to purchase. If your products are a natural fit for any fun or innovative retail experiences (think holiday markets and the like), consider investing and experimenting with new tactics to highlight your brand.  

This season’s data is the secret to bigger profits next season  

For many founders, the holiday season can be stressful, full of wondering what worked, and what didn’t. The only way to learn is to track your data as you go. Mark down new ads, special events or promos you ran, and map them to data from your point-of-sale system. Did you see a jump in website traffic? Spike in sales? Did a new tactic result in more marketing email sign-ups? Which products were best-sellers?  

All in all, this year’s data will help you enter next year’s holiday shopping season smarter, better prepared, and ready to learn even more. Here’s to the holidays!   

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