9 min read

Black Friday/Cyber Monday and the Holiday season are just around the corner. You must be juggling multiple tasks to make sure you have everything ready to boost your sales. So here’s a checklist to keep in mind during the sales season.

1. Use data to identify products for promotion

To ensure smooth sales, it is crucial to plan in advance the products you intend to promote. This is particularly important if your inventory relies on suppliers.

There are various methods to forecast seasonal demand:

• Analytical reports: There are different tools you can use to track your sales.
• ABC analysis: To identify which products are performing better and which are underperforming.
• Inventory system: Essential to keep track of your inventory, and know how much stock you have or will need.

2. Establish your shipping and return strategy

Review your shipping strategy during busy seasons like Black Friday and the Holidays, to evaluate what options your customers have, and to see if you can add special shipping offers to boost your sales during the season.

Communicate your shipping policy and offers through your marketing channels, such as social media, emails, and FAQ page. Additionally, ensure that you display the estimated shipping times at checkout before customers finalize their purchase. This will provide them with information on when they can expect to receive their delivery.

On the other hand, make sure you have in place a clear and easy return policy and communicate it in you website. Common places to showcase it is:

• In the footer (as a link to the Shipping and return policy)
• On the FAQ page
• On the product page
• Order notifications emails

3. Organize your upcoming sales and create contingency plans

To ensure you stay well organized and don’t miss any dates or details, keep your sales timeline in a planner or an Excel spreadsheet. Include all the necessary details such as dates, item prices (both full and on sale), implementation codes (if applicable), and the marketing channels used to promote them.

Keeping promotions organized in a calendar will help you avoid inventory problems and know exactly when you have to have all products ready to be shipped, as well as avoid any problems with suppliers or manufacturers.

While organization is a key element in preventing worst-case scenarios, you need to prepare for any problems that may arise, and not find yourself in the middle of a Black Friday weekend troubleshooting. Ask yourself worst-case scenarios and see if you have a plan. For example, do you have a backup system if the site crashes?

Even prepared, problems may arise, but being well prepared will help you to cope with them in a more practical way and be able to solve them with more agility.

4. Reward your loyal customers

Give your most loyal customers a treat by rewarding them offering your best deals. For example, for your email subscribers, you can offer exclusive sales, extra discounts, or early access to sales. You can also boost sales by offering a customer loyalty program with benefits such as spending rewards, extra discounts, and referral bonuses. By retargeting your previous customers, you’ll strengthen your relationship, motivate them to purchase your products, and help expand brand awareness through word-of-mouth.

5. Retarget past visitors and customers and strengthen your top sales channels

There are different applications that can help you remarket to your past customers and visitors. One option is Meta pixel, which helps you track and collect valuable customer data on your site, such as the pages they have visited, their purchases, and the items they added to their cart. With this information, you can assess their interests and create personalized sales and marketing strategies.

Regardless of the application or method you choose, keeping track of your past visitors/customers is crucial. It can help you increase conversion rates and return on investment (ROI) since they already have brand awareness.

And lastly, during the holiday sales, it is important to identify the channels that are most effective and bring more opportunities for your business. Focus on these channels to maximize your chances of success.

6. Email marketing campaign

Email is a vital tool for your marketing strategy. Therefore, it is essential to plan ahead and launch your email marketing campaigns early. To achieve this goal, make sure to add fields on your website where users can sign up for your newsletter and provide their email addresses. However, be mindful of not overdoing it by adding excessive pop-ups that may disrupt the user experience. Place them strategically within the flow of your site, without covering other content.

It is better to have a smaller quantity of high-quality email addresses than to have hundreds of low-quality ones that may be marked as spam. This can negatively impact your reputation and not benefit your sales. Additionally, it is important to obtain customers’ consent before sending promotional emails.

When creating your emails, don’t forget to personalize the subject and body. Address customers by their names and include offers and products based on their previous purchases.

Start early by sending teasers or hints about your promotions. This can generate excitement, and customers will eagerly await your announcements.

After the sales period ends, send follow-up emails thanking customers for their support. However, be mindful of not over-sending emails. Wait at least a week to send thank-you notes, as customers may still be receiving purchase and delivery emails.

Lastly, you can create abandoned cart emails to help recover some of those lost sales. During the sales season, customers are more likely to abandon their carts. Set up automatic emails to assist you in converting those missed opportunities.

7. Evaluate your checkout experience

Test your checkout process, on desktop and mobile, making sure there are no problems and that customers can quickly fill in all the fields. Enable autocomplete so that the process can be done faster, there is nothing worse than not being able to autocomplete, and having to manually fill in everything. This situation can turn into an abandoned cart. You can use online payment services such as Shop Pay, Apple Pay or Google Pay to speed up the checkout process. If the process is quick and easy they will have less hesitation, or time to rethink their purchase. Simplify the checkout process and increase conversions.

8. Make sure your eCommerce site is responsive

Mobile purchases are on the rise, with users being more likely to shop via their cellphones than on their desktops during sales.

Ensure that your website is responsive and provides a good user experience. Test your website extensively, ensuring that the purchasing flow is easy and seamless.

9. Test and prepare your store for traffic peaks.

During sales, traffic to your site skyrockets so make sure your site is well optimized. A slow or crashing page can be very detrimental to your profits.

It is key to test and analyze the speed of your website, so you can improve the loading speed, which can result in increased sales. There are different optimization analysis tools that can help you discern if there are elements that are overloading your website.

Finally, on your product pages include clear calls to action, good product descriptions, payment methods, and all the valuable data your customer needs to know to make a purchase.

10. Streamline order and fulfillment workflows

Optimize your logistics and back office systems to keep your sales running smoothly. Here are some tips to get you in order:

• Organize your wharehouse, and ensure that the area where you fulfill your orders has the necessary supplies, and keep your star products accessible.
• During peak periods, such as Black Friday or holiday sales, make sure you have enough staff to process orders more quickly.
• Communicate internally with your staff, so everyone has clear instructions and key information about orders, customers and fulfilment.
• Organize and prioritize your orders for a smooth process. You can organize and group your orders by:
  • Customer priority: you can process and ship your most loyal customers first.
  • Shipping methods: prioritize orders that have paid for expedited shipping, so your customers receive them first. You can also group orders by delivery method, and process and ship them simultaneously.

11. Provide good quality customer service

Prompt, quality customer service is essential to customer satisfaction. What does good customer service look like?

• Being polite and respectful to customers
• Being empathetic to their situation
• Giving a quick response
• Good guidance (how to solve a problem, or questions about your products)

Train your team on topics such as: conflict resolution, problem solving, how to be a good communicator. Create standard phrases to deal with customer problems and a clear roadmap on what to do in the most common cases: lost or delayed order, unsatisfied customer, damaged product, returns, etc.

12. Transform occasional shoppers into year-round customers

After the sales period, you can gain new customers who will become repeat buyers. Maintain a relationship with your new customers to keep them interested throughout the year. You can do this through social media or email newsletters. If new customers don’t follow you on social media or haven’t subscribed to your emails, you can first re-engage them through your marketing channels and hopefully they will come back to your store.

Learn from the experience

Preparing for and going through the holiday sales can be overwhelming and stressful. If it’s your first time, take it slow, try to plan ahead and be aware that you’re doing the best you can. You will learn from experience. And if you’re an expert, every year is a new experience from which you can also learn. At the end of the sales season, reflect on what worked and what didn’t. Keep a record and collect as much data as you can, as it can help you reshape your strategy and tactics. Keep all your decisions and results well documented, as they will guide you for next year’s holiday sales.

Being prepared, organized, planning ahead and starting to implement your strategy early is critical to having a successful holiday season.