Welcome to the 4th quarter of 2018.
You've made it.
Soon things are going to start getting crazy. Hopefully in good ways. Ways that involve order notifications and large deposits.
I'm an over-planner by nature so whenever I see a busy period coming up, I'll try to get a head start on things to make it easier to be busy.
In that vein, here's a few things you can start on right now that could smooth out your holiday season.
Don't feel like this is a checklist of things to add to your todo list. Think of them as brainstormed ideas that you can tackle now to make the busy season easier.
- Backup your Shopify theme and save it somewhere safe. e.g. Dropbox, Backblaze, that spare USB drive from 2009.
- Export and backup your customer list and orders from Shopify.
- Backup your email list.
- Brainstorm 10 subject lines for email.
- Brainstorm 10 ad headlines.
- Write a handful of blog posts that don't reference a specific time or season that you can publish whenever.
- Write a dozen Facebook/Twitter/Instagram posts that can be published whenever.
- Review the first email your email subscribers get (welcome email) and change two sentences in it to make it fit your brand better (e.g. fun, funny, serious, wacky, dour).
- Check that you've emailed subscribers something useful and non-promotional in the last month.
I'm sure just by reading this list you've thought of your own ideas. Do them too... if you want.
The key is to have a few of these 20 minute tasks finished while the pressure is low so you can pull them out when everything is crazy.
Another idea that would be useful to do ahead of time is to learn more about your customers.
The better you understand them, the better you'll be able to help them.
If you haven't installed Repeat Customer Insights yet, it can help. Especially with segmenting your customers and timing your marketing.
The newly released Cohort report could help you spot your best marketing campaigns that you want to copy.
Eric Davis
Retain the best customers and leave the worst for your competitors to steal
If you're having problems with customers not coming back or defecting to competitors, Repeat Customer Insights might help uncover why that's happening.
Using its analyses you can figure out how to better target the good customers and let the bad ones go elsewhere.