Summer eCommerce Holiday Planning Tips to Stay Ahead of the Season

Christmas in July isn’t just a fun promotion strategy. July is also a great month to kickstart your eCommerce holiday planning for the upcoming season. While there are many months between the hot summer and the holidays, planning early can put you in a good spot to maximize the additional buying traffic. Here are four good eCommerce holiday planning techniques you can start now, and be ahead of the busy season.

eCommerce offers

With so many different holidays in the last three months of the year, it’s important to plan ahead for your promotions, offers, and deals. Get out a large calendar and mark out your markets. Plan any established sales days (Black Friday and Small Business Saturday are two great ones). Then, add any unique offers for your shop to your calendar. By seeing everyone laid out, you can be ahead of the curve and begin taking the steps needed to implement each eCommerce offer.

Photography and imagery

Good photography takes time. That’s why it’s better to plan ahead for the busy season and schedule photo shoots, gather your stock photography, and create any unique promotional designs for your eCommerce offers. If you’re working with a professional photographer, it’s always best to schedule your shoot early enough to allow for editing on the back end. If you’re working with a designer to crete unique promotional images, it’s also important to allow enough time for them to be creative, and even allow for some needed edits.

Social media strategy

While the platform is different for each age group, social media is still a great way to reach your target market. The summer months are a great time to begin to identify which platform you want to maximize, and also a great time to start strategizing. Look for trend reports so you can align your stock to match the trends, and for potential hashtags you can utilize. This is also the time to get your calendar out and add content posts alongside your promotions.

Email promotions

While many may say that email is dead, the truth is that email promotions are one of the easiest ways to reach people. With such a wide reach, these are also one of the best holiday promotion ideas to begin to implement in the summer. Create drafts announcing each promotion, so that you are doing the work up front and not last minute. It’s also important to add each email you plan to send to your central calendar to ensure that you aren’t over sending information to your audience.