Ok, so for those of you who thought that you had a little time to relax before the start of the shopping season I am here to tell you it's time to stand back up and start running.  If you've forgotten how crazy the upcoming shopping season is then here is your wake-up call.  Your customers are going to be spending money with someone.  The question is, will it be you?

A lot of time and effort needs to go into planning your marketing for the upcoming shopping season and if you haven't started figuring out what that marketing strategy is, it's time to do so because you are going to be so overwhelmed by everything else during that time that you may forget about it all together.  And that can be a very costly mistake.

Now I know with all of the different ways out there that you can market it can be a little overwhelming so I want to guide you through the most important thing you can do right now to get started.

The absolute most important thing you need to have in place is......YOUR EMAIL MARKETING.  Now some of you might be surprised that I didn't say social media, but there is still massive debates about whether or not social media actually puts dollars in your pocket.  Email marketing, on the other hand, has been proven year after year, and it works!  Now, when I say email marketing I am not talking about a few emails that you are going to send out here and there.  These need to directly reflect your promotions and special offers, your Black Friday and Ciber Monday deals.  You need to stop thinking about email marketing in terms of sending out a broadcast email and start thinking about campaigning. 

What do I mean by campaigning?  I mean a systematic series of emails that go out to your list with one goal in mind.  GET THEM TO COME BUY SOMETHING.  Now, that doesn't mean that you send out a bunch of email campaigns that are all SELL SELL SELL.  You first need to provide some great benefit to your consumer as well.  You need to give them some incentive to come and buy from you.  This can be handled in a lot of different ways.  It could be a coupon, it could be a free gift with purchase or something like that.  If you are running a promotion make sure you put a time limit on it and base your campaign off of that, and send several emails out to your list to make sure they don't miss it, and make each email more urgent than the last.

Bottom line, start thinking about those promotions and have them in place before you fall behind, get too busy, and forget about it.