The Holidays Are Big Business
Over $45 billion dollars are spent in online sales during the holiday season. This means there’s plenty of profits to go around. The major holidays that can boost your sales include Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and more.
Now it the time to get started. According to Bill Murphy Jr article in Inc.com the Holiday Shopping Season Is 6 Days Shorter in 2019
You’ll make more sales and earn more money if you’re intentional with your promotions. That means creating a plan ahead of time so you aren’t flying blind. Here are a few tips to help you get started with your holiday promotions…
Mobilize Your Website
The bulk of online holiday sales come from desktop users. However, many of these customers will first visit your website while they’re on a mobile device like a tablet or smartphone. They do this so they can learn more about your products, research your prices, and seek out coupons.
Later when they’re ready to make the final purchase, they’ll use their desktop computer. This means your site needs to be optimized for both desktop machines and smart devices. If you’re using a WordPress website, see if your theme is marked “responsive”. If it is, your website will automatically adjust for the device a visitor is using.
Look at Your List
The next thing you need to do is look at your mailing list of subscribers. A mailing list that’s grown cold because you haven’t messaged them in months isn’t likely to be receptive to a sudden surge of product offers.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can’t do any holiday marketing. Instead, start by warming up your list. Send a message to let them know what you’ve been up to in your business and life. Provide a link to a free gift or a valuable blog post. Do this two to three times a week and you’ll quickly find your list toasty warm again.
Check Your Socials
Just like your mailing list can grow cold, your followers can forget about your brand or message if you haven’t been regularly engaging with them. So, take some time to check out your social media profiles. Are your banners and profile pictures up to date? What about your biography and hours? If they aren’t, go ahead and update them.
Then focus on your content. Have you been posting valuable links, useful tips, and other content that your followers will find helpful? If not, go ahead and schedule a few updates to go out in the next week. This content will get you back on track and remind your fans why they’re subscribed to you.
Preparing for your holiday sales is smart business. You’ll see bigger profits and enjoy your own holiday season more when you have a holiday profits plan in place.
Related Article: Enjoy your holiday without stress
Create The Offer
Make a Bundle
If you already have a few products released, then you can bundle some of them together for a low price and offer it your community. Usually, you want to do a bundle around a theme.
One web designer did this by offering a bundle of a pre-made logo, WordPress theme, and business card design. She called it the “Quick Start” package and targeted the people in her community who were just starting their digital brands.
If you don’t have a lot of products yet, consider partnering with someone else. Think of products that would naturally complement each other. For example, if you have a product about healthy eating then partner with a solopreneur who has a digital yoga studio. You can both promote the bundle then split the profits.
Special Perks
Sometimes, you don’t need to bundle a bunch of products to make holiday sales. Earning more can be as simple as adding a new perk to an existing item. For example, one blogger added workbooks to an existing webinar series she had been selling. Not only did she sell more, but she also had the satisfaction of knowing her customers were implementing her advice.
Your perk bonus can be digital resources like tutorials, workbooks or checklists. But they can also be group calls, workshops, or even an exclusive coaching group on Facebook. Whatever the perk, be sure to add a dollar value to it so customers understand the value of what they’re getting for free.
Coupons
Coupon codes can be a good way to prompt a customer to take action. If someone was already considering a purchase from you, then seeing a coupon code can spur them on to complete the transaction. Other times, your coupon code might be enough to convince a new customer to give your products or services a try.
Be careful that you don’t cut your profits too low if you offer a huge coupon. You can prevent this problem by raising the regular price of an item. Now when you offer a coupon code, your customer still feels like they’re getting a deal but not at the cost of your profit margin.
Create a Payment Package
There are times when you may have a product or service that you sell for thousands of dollars. This could be a VIP day with you, a series of coaching calls from you, or even a done-for-you service.
A customer may want to take action but with the holidays feel they can’t fully invest in your product quite yet. You can still make the sale by offering a payment package. Of course, you should charge a little extra if customers choose this option as processing fees for multiple transactions can start to add up for you.
Deal of the Day 
You can also offer your community a “deal of the day”. One digital business owner had a “12 days of Christmas” theme with her holiday sales. Each day, she highlighted one product and put it on sale for just 24 hours.
You can try the same thing. Email your customers or announce on social media that you have a “deal of the day”. The quick deadline can spur many of your customers to act quickly and lock in your great deals.
The Define Your Day planner can make your holiday offers more productive.
Optimize Your Sales Page
Once you know what your holiday offer will be, you need to put together your sales page. It’s important that you take your time with this step and don’t rush it. A good sales page can make the difference between lackluster earnings and a healthy dose of holiday profits. Here are a few tips for optimizing your sales page…
Choose Your Software
Creating a landing page doesn’t have to be hard or require hours of technical set up. You can do it easily using a service like LeadPages or ClickFunnels. You will have to pay a monthly or yearly fee for these services but they can help you build stellar landing pages.
If you’d rather host your landing pages yourself, you can do that with a WordPress theme that has a “landing page template”. The Genesis Framework already has this feature with many of their child themes. There are also free plugins like WordPress Landing Pages that you can use to design sales pages quickly and easily.
Add Video
Videos are a great way to convert visitors into customers. When it comes to text on a page, users quickly 
start skimming and that could cause them to miss out on the important features of your product or the amazing benefits of using it.
But videos are different. Videos capture attention differently than text. In between reading paragraphs, your visitor might also be on Twitter, playing music from Spotify, and downloading a crossword app. With video, your visitor is more likely to pay attention which boosts conversion rates.
Keep in mind that you don’t need to go book a professional studio or record a thirty-minute monologue. A short video in a casual setting can be enough to convince visitors to add your product to their cart.
Include a Call-to-Action
At the bottom of your sales page, you should include a call-to-action. If you’re not familiar with the term, a call-to-action is when you instruct your visitors on the next thing they should do. So at the end of your sales page, you want a button that says something like: Add to Cart, Buy Now, or Download Instantly.
You can also experiment with adding a call-to-action to your sales video and the middle of your sales page. Some marketers even add a CTA button to the top of their sales page because they have customers who auto-buy everything they release.
Include a Countdown Timer
If you’re running a special holiday promotion, it can be helpful to add a countdown timer to your sales page. This countdown timer can be effective for an offer that expires like a flash sale that ends after 48 hours or an introductory price that ends after a few days.
The reason that a timer is helpful is that it adds urgency to the sale. When a customer is browsing, they might be tempted to make a purchase but then they stop and decide to do it later. Of course, many of these customers never make it back to their shopping cart. When you create a sense of urgency, you force your customers to make a decision right away, instead of putting it off.
Keep in mind that you can continue to tweak and improve your holiday sales page once it’s live. Use a metrics program like Google Analytics to look for ways that you can improve your conversion rate this holiday season.
Sharing Your Holiday Offer with Your Mailing List
Send Content that Leads to the Sale and Encourage Subscribers to Share
Add s social media buttons to the end of each email you send. Then encourage your subscribers to use the button to share the message on a social media platform of their choosing.
Subscribers can be rewarded for doing this with a discount code. Your subscribers will love getting the savings and you’ll see more traffic referrals from social media than she was last year.
“It’s all about making it easy for your subscribers to get the word out about your offer,”
Nudge Your Mailing List Again
You may think you can only message your list once about an offer. But that’s not true. Consider emailing your subscribers the details of your holiday offer three to five times. Each email should contain a link to your product and highlight a different feature or reason that your offer is worth looking at.
Follow Up with Subscribers
Sometimes, a subscriber will put your product or offer in their cart then leave your website. This is called “cart abandonment”. Subscribers can do this for a variety of reasons–maybe they need to discuss the transaction with a spouse first or they have a technical problem preventing them from completing the purchase.
When you have a new holiday offer, the first place you should share it is in your messages to your subscribers. Remember, your subscribers are usually your biggest fans and they’re eager to hear from you!
Promoting Your Holiday Offer on Social Media
When it comes to the holidays, your fans and followers will have their newsfeeds crowded with advertisements and promotions. That means you’ll want to work hard so you can stand out and boost your own profits. Here are a few tips to help you do that…
Use Holiday & Winter Hashtags
On many networks like Twitter and Instagram, hashtags are how people find content. That means if you want to increase your visibility, you should consider using holiday and winter-themed hashtags.
Some of the best hashtags for this time of year include: #Christmas, #HolidaySpirit, #Snow, #NewYearNewMe, #Holidays, #Grinchmas, #Frost, #December, #HolidaySavings, #Chilly, #JollyHoliday, #NewYear, #StockingStuffers, #Hanukkah, #CyberMonday, #Winter, #UglyChristmasSweater, and #AwkwardHolidayPhoto.
Create Social Coupon Codes
If you plan on offering coupon codes, create ones that are specific to the platform you’re using. For example, you could share a coupon code with your Facebook group, that’s FBMAS. Not only is this code easy to remember, it gives your community another reason to follow you on social media.
There’s also a hidden advantage to using special coupon codes on social media—you can tell which sites are sending you the most traffic. Spend a couple of weeks experimenting and you might find that you get the most traction from discount codes on Twitter. But you sell the most bundles from a coupon that you pinned in your Pinterest account.
Update Your Social Media
A simple way to celebrate the holidays on your social media platforms is to update your profile picture and header. You can do this with your profile picture by adding snowflakes or a Santa hat to your photo.
For header pictures, you can broadcast your holiday offer. Some brands even add coupon codes to their headers so a visitor’s first look at their profile reveals valuable savings and makes them more likely to purchase an item.
Use this Define Your Day Planner to create Quicks Tips to Prepare Your Business for the Holidays
Share Behind-the-Scenes
Another way to promote your holiday sales is to share behind-the-scenes holiday moments. For example, one beauty blogger shared a video on Instagram showing as she put on her makeup for the event. This allowed her to share valuable information with her community while she promoted her new skincare line.
Holiday moments can also be personal in nature and you can relate them back to your business. One mom blogger shared a photo of her child jumping in the leaves and encouraged her community to start building their businesses so they could be home with their children, too. She sold many copies of her training course simply because she took the time to share a behind-the-scenes moment.
Boost Your Posts
On Facebook and Instagram, you can “boost” a post. That’s a simple term that social media companies use for advertising. Twitter and Pinterest also allow you to share your holiday sales by setting up ads.
You don’t have to boost every post you make and you shouldn’t. However, it can be smart to strategically boost posts once or twice a week.
The best time to boost a post is when your offer first goes live and again, a day or two before it ends. The initial boost can get your fans talking about your product and the second boost can encourage them to make a purchase or risk missing out.
Track your social media statistics. This will give you insights into which products are a good fit for your community as well as which coupon codes perform the best.
Keep organized and focused for the 2019 Holiday season offers with the Define Your Day Planner
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