MBA1114 How to Prepare for The Holiday Season To Get More Sales

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Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. Because your business deserves the best version of you. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar is at home. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn how to prepare for the holiday season to get more sales. Yes, I know it's still mid October and we're still about two months away from the holiday season. But we need to prepare now. We need to make sure that we maximize the holiday season. Many people start shopping from the start of next month. So in today's lesson I'm going to give you five tips, five things you can do in your business that's gonna help you increase sales and maximize your potential during the holiday season. Remember, when it's the holidays, people are already in tuned and inclined to buy. Whether for themselves or for gifts. Everything around them is all about spending money. Now obviously you want customers that are a good match for your product and business. But you wanna make it easy for those consumers, for those customers to choose you for their holiday shopping. I'm going to show you how. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. The holidays are almost upon us. And it's a very busy time for most businesses. Online businesses, courses, software, e commerce, it doesn't matter. There's always a way for you to make sales, make more sales during the holidays. And this is what I'm here to show you. All right, let's start with number one. And this one is probably the one that's most neglected, one that a lot of people just overlook and that's to start early. A lot of people wait until December or wait until Black Friday or Cyber Monday to start promoting holiday specials, holiday promotions. I encourage you to start even earlier, before Black Friday, before Cyber Monday. Now, if you're not familiar, Black Friday is the Friday after Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday is the Monday that follows that. Cyber Monday is known for online deals for online businesses. But I've run promotions for the holidays a week before Cyber Monday that have done so well because I was just there before anybody else. I was in their inbox talking about holiday gift ideas before the other competitors or companies would flood their inbox with hey, check us out next Monday. So essentially I was two weeks ahead of everybody else because I was promoting our promotion that was gonna happen a week before Cyber Monday, a week before that. Being first to mind and first to inbox really matters. It really gives you an edge and gives you some sort of first to market advantage. The other thing is that you're getting to people before they've spent their money. A lot of people are sort of cashed out by the time they get into December or maybe the first couple weeks of December before Christmas. So by getting in early, you're reaching customers when their budget is still not spent. Now how early, that's up to you and you can be creative about it. I've seen companies do like it's 45 days until Christmas and that's 45% off for you, stuff like that. So don't worry about being too early. I think once you're in November, you're good to go. And the worst case scenario, if they don't buy during your promotion, you're first to mind. They thought of you when they started thinking about Christmas shopping and it'll revisit your website when they are ready to buy. All right, so, so number one is start early. Number two. Now you might be thinking, if you order these things early, are they going to get them early? What if somebody wants to order a gift that gets shipped directly to somebody for Christmas? Well, that's where number two comes in. Delayed delivery. Whether your product is a physical product, where it actually gets delivered to somebody's doorstep or it's a soft product like a software or a course and they're going to get access delivered to their inbox. Many people don't want that sent to them, to their friend, to their family member until it's Christmas day or Christmas Eve or whatever. So you should definitely have an option on your website to have delayed delivery so it's delivered at the right time. So they can buy now and they check out and they pay their money, but you make sure it gets delivered when they want it delivered. Now I used to do this when I had an E Commerce store. It was a men's clothing line store and basically it was a physical product that I wanted to have deliver at a later date. Now they would buy, they would check out, they would pay for it, they would get a receipt and everything. But I would tell my warehouse software only ship this product out to be delivered on this date. So it would basically backtrack how many days it would take to ship. And I would add an extra day just in case. Cause it's holiday season. And then my warehouse or my fulfillment center will be notified to ship it out on that day. Now it depends on how you ship out your products. You may be doing it yourself and this is just simply a reminder to yourself, like on your calendar to ship it out on this day so they can get it on, you know, Christmas day. Or if you're using a fulfillment center or dropship center, you need to be able to coordinate this with the software you use. But if you're in E Commerce, even if you're in, you know, again selling courses or software, you can delay the delivery to make sure it gets sent, whether it's a physical product or an email on, on the proper day. This removes all kinds of worries from the consumer, saying, hey, I like the deal you have right now, but I don't want to have to deal with it or hold it on or I want to get, get it sent directly to the customer. This solves the problem and kind of makes it super simple so they know that that gift is taken care of and it's going to get delivered at the right day and the right time. So delayed delivery is a fantastic option to add to your website before the holiday season. All right, number two is decreasing discounts. You want to reward action takers. So I've seen this done many times with E commerce stores where they'll run a sale, a promotion before Christmas, maybe a month before Christmas. Let's say, for example, the sale is 40% off electronics. But as they get closer to Christmas, that percentage off gets less and less. In some companies, they have like a dynamic coupon code. So the code will take off a certain percentage depending on how many days left are in Christmas. So say, for example, you're launching a promotion 40 days before Christmas and the percentage off is 40%. But the day after it'll be 39% and after that it'll be 38%. 37, 36, you get the point. Till it's Christmas Eve and it's only 1% off. But it encourages people to shop early because they're going to get more of a discount. It creates a sense of urgency. Also, it kind of goes hand in hand with your supply and demand as you get closer to Christmas, as you get closer to, to the holiday season, your inventory is gonna get less and less supply and demand. You get it. So decreasing discounts creates a sense of urgency that's real and works for your business. Number four. Now, we talked about all the strategies we can do well before Christmas, well before the holiday season, but there's some great things you can do when it comes to last minute shopping. A lot of people wait until, you know, the 21st, 22nd to start thinking about shopping. And you've seen this option on websites. You should have this on your site where it says get it by Amazon has this great option where it tells you, it calculates how much time you have left until you can get it by Christmas. So he says if you shop or you buy this thing in the next, you know, 24 hours, you can get it by this date. If you have an E commerce store, this is a must. If you're on Shopify, there's tons of tools and apps you can use for this. If you have a course that you're selling or any kind of soft product, you could do this simply with a countdown timer in the banner using something like Sumo and, and you can adjust this every day. In fact, soft gifts or soft products like courses or software or apps are one of the best gifts for last minute shopping because they can email it straight to the customer, to their actual friend or family member with a great note. And it's just in time, even if that means Christmas morning. So make sure you promote that in your promotion. Say, hey, I know that this last minute, you may have forgotten a few people. Take care of them right now in five minutes. Check out here. That's your strength as a soft product. Make sure you utilize it.

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All right, to wrap up number five, the fifth thing you can do to increase sales during the holiday season, and this is one that people forget. If you have an online presence, if you have an e commerce store, if you have a website on the web that people are checking you out, you need to make sure your hosting is up to snuff. Your hosting is powerful enough to handle the traffic of all the promotion that you're doing during the holiday. There's a lot of companies where 40 to 50% of all their sales happen during the Christmas period. So make sure your hosting company, your web hosting company is upgraded, it's ready to go, it can handle the traffic you need to find out how much traffic you get per month. You could check out Google Analytics or, or you can use something like SimilarWeb.com, it's not super accurate, but it'll give you a rough idea of how many visitors you get every month. Let's say, for example, you get 10,000 visitors normally every month. I would recommend that your hosting company, your web hosting company, whoever hosts your website, can handle three times as much at least. And if not, upgrade your plan to make sure that when people visit your website it's not slow, it's not sluggish, that the experience is seamless, and most of all, your site doesn't go down. Listen, I am not too proud to say early on in my entrepreneurial career I didn't do this and my site went down for several hours during the holiday season. It probably cost me thousands of dollars. I didn't even want to do the calculation because I was so depressed about it. A simple email or phone call to your web hosting provider to make sure that you are at the right level where you can handle the right amount of traffic can save you thousands of dollars. Can save you thousands of missed dollars, right? All right, to recap, to wrap up, what are the five things that we can do to prepare for the holiday season to get more sales? Number one Start early. Number two Delayed delivery options. Number three Decreasing discounts. Number four have a get it by a certain date option. Number five Making sure your hosting is prepared for that kind of traffic. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. Don't forget, if you hit subscribe, you will never miss an episode because it gets a downlo to your device automatically. It's also your way to access thousands of episodes in our archives. It's the only way you can access our archives is if you hit subscribe. Alright, before I go, I want to leave you with this. I find the earlier I prepare for the holiday season, the less stressful the season is. Actually, by the time it's Christmas time, I can relax and enjoy my holiday with my family. Because I've done all the work beforehand. I want that to be you as well. I learned that the hard way. You don't have to. So prepare as early as now and you'll get to enjoy the holidays like your customers will. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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