Happy Halloween! I hope there are plenty of nice ghosts and goblins gracing your doorsteps tonight. And for them, I hope you bought full-sized candy bars! I love Halloween for the uniqueness of the holiday and that it sits out there on its own and is not bundled with a bunch of others. And as it relates to my business, Halloween is always a reminder and a warning shot!
As I watch all the stores put up their holiday décor, and my newsfeed is full of pre-holiday gift ideas, it serves as a reminder that I need to get my act together in the coming three weeks before they kick in in earnest!
November is my time to finalize my preparations for the next year. I will work with my preferred suppliers to finalize my marketing plan and sales projections and review my business plan to make sure I am in a good place to finish the current year and crystal ball a bit into the first quarter of next year. If you don’t have either of these documents (and yes, they need to be physical documents and not ideas), make that a priority.
And while I know that business will generally be slow in the coming eight weeks, I know there will be a rush come January 2nd. And I suspect that in 2023, demand will be higher than pre-COVID normal. People are over it and want to travel!
I take advantage of this slower time to dive deep into my email program and pre-schedule all the non-sales email broadcasts for the year. You’d be amazed at how many you can do if you dedicate a few hours to sit in front of the computer and bang them out on the keyboard.
I stress the non-sales emails because no one likes to be sold to. But everyone like to be remembered. And as Mike Marchev always says (and yes, I will beat this saying into the ground until the day I die) “you need to let them know you exist.”
The days I like to hit my clients with a simple email to let them know I exist include:
- Halloween
- Thanksgiving
- Holidays (personally I shy away from specific holidays, that’s your call)
- New Years
- Valentine’s Day
- St. Patrick’s Day (might be perfect for a subtle mention of a trip to Ireland)
- Happy Spring (all calendars will tell you the first day of Spring)
- Happy Summer/School’s Out
- Fourth of July
- Labor Day / Happy Fall
- Special Dates (birthdays/anniversaries)*
*If you are using a CRM effectively, you can likely export a list of birthdays by month and then send it to the appropriate list each month.
The beauty of doing this now is that all emailing programs have a copy or duplicate feature, and no one will remember the contents of that Halloween email you sent a few years back—so the content can be relatively evergreen.
Now is the time to rev those engines and ensure everything is in place to hit the ground running on January 2nd. It will be here before we know it!
