Business Owners,

It’s time to start your holiday check list. Have you written your letter to Santa yet? How about preparing your business for the holidays?

We are officially five weeks out from the busiest shopping holiday of the year (And only 65 days away from Christmas. Yikes!). Adobe Analytics forecasts a record $207 billion holiday season online (U.S.), and $910 billion globally.  Here's a short list of ideas of how you can prepare your business so you can get a piece of the billion-dollar pie. 

1. Start Early

Surveys have found that consumers start looking for deals as early as the second week of October. Get ahead of the competition by making special offers, promotions, and coupons early. Now is the time to advertise and entice customers. Don’t wait until the week before when consumers are already shopping, and your business becomes an afterthought. “The future started yesterday and we’re already late.”

2. Make Good Use of Social Media Platforms

Social media can either be your greatest foe or your most powerful ally. Either way, it is a necessity in 2022. Therefore, it is paramount to keep your social media sites updated and optimized properly. In 2020, purchase rates increased by 42% for e-commerce companies through social media. Don’t miss out on maximizing profits because you didn’t utilize your social media pages to their full potential. Luckily for you, if you’re not all that tech savvy, there’s a company that can assist you with your social media marketing at a competitive price. *Cough* Keystone Connect. *Cough*

3. Apply Promotions and Discounts That Make Sense

During a time when every move counts, make sure that yours are calculated. As long as it is still reasonable for your business, the bigger the discount the better. You want to stay competitive. Consumers are looking for an average of 20% off or more for the holiday. Look at your inventory and see what’s manageable. Don’t be afraid to get creative as well. Promotions for first-time buyers or a larger discount for purchasing several items are often home runs with customers during this time. Test the waters and you may find a tactic that helps you for years to come. Check out 8 Holiday Promotions to Help You Sell More  for holiday promotions and tips to help you this holiday season.

4. Utilize Email Marketing Campaigns

A fairly simple and cheap tactic to garner more customers this holiday season is an email marketing campaign. Custora reports that over 25% of Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales begin with email marketing. Email allows you to connect with your loyal customers, as well as easily reach new ones. You will want to make sure, once again, to start your email campaigns early, as to give your loyal and new customers time to plan their holiday shopping. It’s also essential to make sure that the headlines for these emails are not bland. Give the consumer no choice but to open the email due to an intriguing headline. Otherwise, they will end up being ignored or deleted.

5. Check Your Site Speed

Unfortunately, digital marketing is both a sprint and a marathon so there’s not a lot of room for error. A slow website will often turn customers off. In fact, 46% of shoppers said they will never return to a website if it is slow. The ideal loading time for eCommerce websites is zero to four seconds. A quick loading site has a 12% to 30% conversion rate. Slower than 4 seconds and users begin to abandon their purchases. Transactions decrease by 1% each second added to that. You can test your website’s loading speed with Google’s PageSpeed Insights so you can know for sure if it’s running optimally. When nearly every business is running promotions on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you don’t want to give the consumers a chance to look elsewhere.

Now that you have some tools in your business toolbelt you need to … HURRY.  RUN. DON’T WALK. Put those tools to good use as soon as possible to get a jump on the competition this season.  It’s going to be a rough race.  Godspeed, soldier.