In less than 15 minutes, this is a short but powerful episode is packed with the tips you need to plan your holiday marketing effectively! If you’re looking to make this Holiday Season your best yet, I’m here to show you exactly what to promote and when to do it, so you can increase sales without bombarding your customers.
Here’s what we cover:
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The Power of Planning: I’m sharing why your holiday timeline matters and how strategic pacing—alternating between promotions and value-based content—keeps your audience engaged and avoids burnout.
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Catering to the Early Birds: Believe it or not, nearly half of your customers start holiday shopping before Halloween! Here’s how to reach those early birds, start building interest, and grow your customer list before the peak sales days hit.
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Mapping Your Holiday Shopping Calendar: From big Black Friday offers to last-minute gift pushes, I’ll walk you through each stage of the holiday season so your promotions are always relevant to what your customers need.
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Mastering “Promotional Pulsing”: Say goodbye to sale fatigue! Learn how to create excitement with a rhythm of offers and story-based content that keeps customers engaged and coming back without feeling overwhelmed.
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Harnessing FOMO: Urgency sells! I’m breaking down how to use genuine scarcity in your messaging—without overdoing it—to boost clicks and conversions.
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Meeting the Last-Minute Shoppers: In December, it’s all about ease and convenience for those of us buying gifts last-minute. From fast shipping to easy returns, learn how to appeal to procrastinators like me who value efficiency above all else.
Let me know if you like this bite-sized format.
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Holiday Season Promotion Strategy 0:00
Email and SMS Promotion Strategy 2:07
Holiday Shopping Calendar and Early Promotions 3:44
Black Friday and Cyber Monday Promotions 5:53
Late December Promotions and Gift Cards 7:37
Promotional Pulsing and FOMO 10:49
Planning and Leveraging Scarcity 12:15
Final Thoughts and Call to Action 14:19
Full article: https://salenaknight.com/what-to-promote-when-during-the-holiday-season/
Welcome to today's episode of the Bringing Business to Retail podcast. There is one week until Black Friday. Are you ready? Have you been listening to my Black Friday series? Whether you're all in or you're adopting an anti Black Friday strategy, like the one Toby from Shopify shared with us just a few weeks ago, you still need to be promoting. Even if you are not participating in the crazy Cyber Week end, you have to be promoting. So this week's episode is short and sweet. But before we jump in, if you really wish that someone would just come in and wave a magic wand and do the holiday season for you, well I can't do that, but I've got the next best thing. My ultimate sales bundle includes a plug and play email scripts, a super quick walk through of how you can create a crazy successful sales campaign in a weekend, a pricing calculator, a discount calculator to make sure that you are still profitable along with a social media caption bank and a bunch of other super helpful tools to make this your best holiday season ever. And right now, it is a crazy 90% off. Grab it before it's gone over at selenenight.com/bfcm. Alright, now let's jump into this short but sweet episode. I want you to put a timeline on your action. So if you did listen to my Q4 success blueprint episode, what we did was we mapped everything out. We reversed engineered what was going to happen and when. Because timing is everything. You don't want to just be pushing promotions out willy nilly. Oh wow, we need some cash flow. Let's run a sale. No, you can't be doing that in this period of time because if you are just doing ad hoc promotions, you'll either end up with promotional burnout or you'll end up just losing sales because people aren't paying attention or people aren't getting the amount of emails that they need or they aren't seeing the products that they need when they walk into your store. I talk a lot about email because email drives customers and when I say email, I'm going to say I'm using email with SMS interchangeably. I know one of our five X's was just saying recently that her customers don't want emails. They just want SMS's. I don't know about you but I delete hundreds of emails every single day. Whereas in SMS, I still look at and it's funny. I've been getting SMS's from a furniture store recently and it's like, I don't need a new dining table. I don't need new chairs but I have an unsubscribed. I haven't replied stop because I'm waiting. I'm waiting for something in particular. In the minute I see that promotion, I will be clicking. When I say email throughout all of my episodes, please feel free to interchange it with SMS. We need to create a carefully planned promotional calendar which means you need to space out your offers to build anticipation and to avoid overwhelming your audience. Think of it like the perfect movie. There's the hero's journey. Your promotions need to be like that as well. Something big, then tapering off and then something big, tapering off. This is not just about picking random products or random dates. It's about crafting a strategic timeline that keeps your audience engaged without overwhelming them. So what does that look like? Remember we don't want them unsubscribing. So what does that look like? Let's talk about the holiday shopping calendar for want of a better word. According to the NRF, 40% of consumers started their holiday shopping before, wait for it, Halloween. I know. I am not that person. I am not that prepared. I am a December kind of person. Maybe I will buy something in the Black Friday sales if I already know that it's on my list of things, my ideas in my head. But realistically, I'm a busy person. I am that person. I am that last-minute shopper. I'm the 60%. But 40% of your customers and I hazard a guess to think that that number is going to be much higher this year as people look to spread their spending out, as people are waiting for the deals to come up. People are tightening their belts and so they want to be knowing that they've got the best value. But there are people out there buying for Christmas before the Jack-o'-lanterns have even gone out and well before the Black Friday Cyber Monday sales. With your customers tightening their belts, I can see that that is a much more likely trend to continue upwards this year. That means that your timeline needs to start way earlier than you think. What I thought it would be handy to do is walk you through a bit of a timeline of what that might look like. In early October, you could start teasing out your holiday offerings. Maybe that's a sneak peek of products or hints about upcoming deals. This is also the best time, I think, to be preloading your customer database. This is the time that you use to increase your email subscribers and increase your customer database. The promotions that you are running in early October might be focused around increasing customers, not just about products or just about sales or discounts. When we get to that late October, early November, you might want to launch your holiday gift guide because this is setting the stage for your promotional season. Remember, we've got a whole season of promotions coming up. I will say that what I have noticed is that the Black Friday promotions, which you used to start a week or two out before Black Friday, seem to be starting much earlier. In fact, some retailers are starting their Black Friday promotions at the beginning of November. Maybe that doesn't work for you, and I'm not saying that that's exactly what you should do. What I am saying is you need to be keeping track of the kinds of deals that your competitors are using to bring their customers in because it might mean that you need to pivot a little. If you've had a big retailer just do the same promotion that you wanted to do, but with a bigger discount, then maybe that's not the best promotion for you to run. You might, well, you will need to be flexible, but you might need to change these things as you go. You may also need to change your timeline. Thinking about being prepared, if you were going to start your Black Friday, Cyber Monday promotion the week before, what I can tell you is that any advertising costs will be through the roof because Black Friday, Cyber Monday is the biggest trading time in the entire year. Many businesses will make more in those four days than they make for the whole rest of the quarter combined. The Black Friday promotions should be your best deals. They should get a lot of hype and they should build a lot of excitement, and they should be the promotions that will bring in the most amount of money for you. Then we move through to early December. What you're going to do in early December is focus on those last-minute shoppers and procrastinators like me. What am I looking for if I'm buying in December? Things like fast shipping times. I want to make sure that it can get to me when I can. Easy returns and exchanges. The ability to buy it in stock right now. Whether I am shopping online or I'm buying in person, I will go to the effort of going to the mall. And as I say that, if you're watching this video, I am rolling my eyes at the same time because you would think someone who is in retail loves shopping. My friend, I do not love shopping, and I do not love shopping at Christmas time in a mall. All the holiday zillers come out, and I'm not that kind of person. And so you need to be thinking about what would someone, what kind of person who is waiting to the last minute, what is important to them, what do they value? And then when you hit mid-December, when you're hitting that 15th of December, maybe the shipping times are just about up. Communicating shipping times is really important, but that could be a whole promotion in and of itself. Remember, promotions don't have to just be sales. Promotions don't just have to be about a product. There could be a whole promotion around the fact that your shipping deadline is approaching. And then when you hit mid-December, so I think 15th of December-ish, that's where you are promoting things like gift cards and digital products. And for those truly last-minute spenders like me, and if I know, here's a tip, if I know getting into the head of a last-minute shopper, if I know that I'm going to buy a gift card for somebody, I will quite often not buy it until Christmas Eve or even Christmas morning. Why? Because I want my recipient to have the longest amount of time possible to be able to redeem that gift card. Now, I'm not saying everybody thinks like me. I'm just trying to give you a little bit of an insight as to what I'm thinking when I'm buying those gift cards. So do not think that stopping your emails on the 23rd of December or even 24th of December is an option. You could be sending our emails on Christmas Day promoting gift cards. I mean, I don't know about you, but we've had those situations where the girlfriend of someone came that we weren't expecting and you're like, "Oh, I really should get them something." Cheap gift card, a cheap gift card, an easy gift card where you can just buy online. So do not forget that people are human and we have a lot going on and some of us get caught in certain circumstances and situations and some of us just plain old forget. Now, within this framework, you need to strategically space out all of those individual promotions and you can start to see why now. We've talked about what do we have five or six different times that you can promote and we didn't even factor in Halloween, Thanksgiving, Father's Day, all that kind of stuff. And so when you map this out, you will start to see that there's probably going to be a lot of promotions happening. In fact, you may have promotions happening on top of each other and here is where the concept of promotional pulsing comes in. You may not have heard of that, but instead of a constant barrage of deals, it's really about creating those peaks of promotional activity followed by the quieter periods and having those different types of campaigns, having the customer acquisition campaigns followed by, oh, that was an up followed by a period of maybe just some updates and knowledge and things like that and then followed by things like sales. So this is what keeps your audience, your customers anticipating what is next without feeling bombarded. Now, one of the reasons I don't like going to the mall in at Christmas time is I don't have sensory issues and I don't know how anyone who has sensory issues can do it, but just the constant barrage of things like sales in every single window. All of that is just way too overwhelming, which is why I'm actually an online shopper more than anything else. You don't want your customers to feel like they're being bombarded either. If you do this promotional pulsing, you will find that they are much more likely to spend rather than wait around to see if there are better deals elsewhere or just unsubscribe. What might promotional pulsing look like? Well, you might run a three day flash sale and then you might just follow that by a week of regular content. Maybe it's a product review. Maybe it's featuring one of your customers. It's not a call to action, which is buy my stuff. And then you might have a one day exclusive offer for your VIP club members. You start starting to see here the importance of planning because you might have two campaigns running at the same time, one to your everyday customers and one to your VIPs. All of that takes planning. Hopefully you can see that prior planning gives you peak performance. The four P's, I hope you can. Another crucial aspect of your timeline is leveraging scarcity and urgency. If you aren't aware of FOMO, everyone's aware of FOMO, the fear of missing out, it is so powerful in marketing. Studies show that emails with a sense of urgency have a 14% higher click to open rate and they have a double the transaction rate of email twice as many transactions will occur from emails that have a sense of urgency. So think about your messaging. It doesn't matter if it is in your window. It doesn't matter. This is why we see while stocks last 24 hours only flash sale, three days only. All of that is fear of missing out. So think about how you're going to incorporate FOMO into your messaging and it could be 24 hour sale or while stocks last or for the first 20 customers only or only 12 available. But here's the key. You've got to make sure that these limited time offers or limited product offers. They have to be genuine because customers can spot fake urgency a mile away. I mean, I go to Timu every now and then. I don't like buying from there, but every time I go there to have a look at something, I've clicked on Google Shopping and I've clicked on something and I'm on the Timu website and it says buy in the next four hours for free shipping with a little ticket going on. I'm like, but you have free shipping all the time. This is just BS. Customers can spot that stuff from a mile away. And honestly, if you eroded, if you erode their trust, they will just unsubscribe. They just will stop shopping with you. A well planned out timeline is about avoiding burnout, but also creating that narrative arc for the holiday season that keeps your customers coming back for more. Thank you so much for listening. I hope this has been a timely reminder for you. Reach out and let me know if you like these bite-sized episodes or not, because my goal is to create the content that you want and need. And just remember, if you need an almost done for you holiday sales campaign in a box, head on over to my ultimate sales bundle, which is a crazy 90% off for a limited Black Friday time. Grab it at SelenaNight.com/BFCM. And of course, I'll make sure that there is a link to it in the show notes. SelenaNight.com/BFCM for my ultimate sales bundle, and I will see you on the next episode.
