The holiday season is coming, and Print on Demand is becoming more popular than ever! With an increased demand for production and shipping, tons of things need to be planned out and prepared for the busiest time of the year.
Take the stress out of the holiday season and finish everything in time by starting earlier this year. Preparing for the holidays helps reduce all the headaches you might get later, and it lets you reach the 61% of consumers who start shopping as early as November. “Consumers have been kicking off their holiday season early in order to spread out their budgets and avoid the stress of holiday shopping.” As online shopping is the number one shopping destination, starting early and getting ahead of your competition is crucial. Getting prepared for this overloading sales season will always be a necessity.
In this blog, we’ll let you in on our best-kept secrets to get a head start on the holiday season with Gooten so that you can stay in control of your eCommerce business while delivering a fantastic experience for your customers.
Step 1: Add the right products
The first thing you’ll want to do to prepare for the holidays is to choose the right products and get a head start on creating your holiday-themed products.
We suggest deciding which holidays are the most profitable and vital to your business. By looking at your current customer base, you can start researching online to see which holidays are most popular with your target customers. You can even directly ask your regular customers which product they would like to see. Getting customer feedback is a great way to get some insight into what they want you to introduce to your shop for the holidays. This allows you to produce the best-printed products with the highest demand.
Consider adding unique items your competition doesn’t have for the holiday season. Maybe they aren’t offering any ornaments, or they aren’t offering themed products. It’s the perfect time to start adding new holiday products. You can even bundle your holiday products together, creating holiday sets. Think about adding ornaments and stockings to your shop with new designs explicitly themed for the holidays. These tactics help intensify customer demand for your limited-time designs and prints.
Remember that you don’t want to oversaturate your customers with so many holiday products, so it’s essential to choose the right ones to add. Use social media trends, customer feedback, and other data to plan what products you want to add for the holiday season.
If you want to add new holiday-themed products to your store, check out the trending holiday products we’ve researched!
Step 2: Set your customer’s expectations upfront
Get to know our turnaround times and set your customer’s expectations with our production and delivery times by frequently communicating with them to set their expectations upfront.
Most of the time, customers usually forget the time it takes to produce a product. We highly recommend you communicate our estimated production and shipping times for each product category that you are selling. There are many ways that you can communicate this information to your customers. You can:
- Create a dedicated page outlining the average days it takes to produce and ship your products, depending on their product category.
- Create an FAQ page discussing the difference between production and shipping and showing transparency with the different turnaround times.
- Announce and remind your customers of estimated production and shipping times via emails scheduled every couple of weeks.
- Ensure your expected delivery times are easily viewable and available on your website, social media, or marketing advertisements.
We update our current production and shipping times daily during the holiday season to ensure we set the expectations for our partners so that you can communicate this information to your customers.
Step 3: Announce and remind your customer about order deadlines
It’s incredibly important that your customers order your products in time so that they can receive them for the holidays. You wouldn’t want your customers to order a little too late and then not receive their holiday orders, leaving them frustrated.
Remind your customers via different channels about ordering as early as possible to receive their orders in time for the holidays by announcing the order submission deadlines. Similar to the production and shipping times, you’ll want to:
- Create and market an order submission deadline subsection or page on your website to inform your customers to order ahead of time.
- Announce the order deadline dates through an announcement email so that you set the expectation upfront.
- Schedule notifications to your customers about ordering earlier rather than later using pop-ups on your website, emails, or social media posts.
Step 4: Plan your holiday marketing campaigns
Plan your holiday marketing campaigns early and maximize your revenue while offering your customers incredible promotional deals (free shipping, discounts, deals, etc.) to offset the cost of shipping.
Send out pre-holiday sales promotions as your customers start thinking about holiday purchases. As we mentioned earlier, roughly 61% of consumers started shopping earlier in 2021, which will continue to increase in 2022. As the holiday season approaches, you can start sending pre-holiday promotional emails ahead of time. This can include things such as
- Teasers for your future holiday products
- Discounts on your pre-holiday products
- Promo codes
- Free shipping on orders
- Bundled product deals
Offering free shipping can be a huge promotion that you can offer for the holiday season. You can change your product prices to include the shipping cost while offering free shipping to your customers. This can help offset the increase in shipping costs and increase your revenue.
You can also use retargeting to show holiday-themed products to users who checked your site before via social media. This powerful marketing tool lets you keep in touch with your prior clients and invites new ones. The prior customers can benefit from affordable deals throughout the holiday season.
Step 5: Set up your store pages and communication channels
Boost your cross-selling and upselling by preparing your online store with promo webpages, emails, or notifications for new products or deals for last-minute shoppers.
You can set up your store to send emails or notifications on your store catered to last-minute shoppers, who may already be primed for conversion. The abandoned cart reminder is an important email that significantly benefits your sales this season. These emails make your customers feel a rush to push their hesitation away.
You can use cross-selling and upselling tactics to streamline your sales and marketing strategy, ultimately boosting your revenue. Start by adding notifications that bundle your holiday products, promotes a new holiday product trending in your store, or show your discounted products with free shipping.
These tactics help you build long-term relationships with your customers. When your cross-selling and upselling are successful, you create more value for your customers by giving them the products they want. This eventually makes it difficult for them to forget your brand when they spend more money with you.
Happy Holidays from Gooten!
The holiday season is always a challenging yet rewarding time of the year. You can achieve maximum revenue with a carefully planned strategy and preparation early. The most significant holiday preparation should start no later than one month before, and we wouldn’t recommend scrambling at the last second. Here’s to providing the best possible holiday service for your customers!
