- Do you have a sales calendar planned out
for your e-commerce store?
Let's do it together in this video. Let's go
(upbeat music)
Hey guys, Sam here from keycommerce.com.
And today I'm going to show you how to plan out
your sales calendar for your e-commerce store.
What is a sales calendar?
It's basically just a list of all the sales
that you're going to run throughout the year.
This is really important, guys,
because you need to be prepared.
And to plan out the year and to know
when you're going to run different sales.
You don't want to run out of stock and not be prepared
or not have your emails ready to send out discount codes
and let all your customers know that a sale is coming up.
You want to really capitalize on these dates
and on these sales days so that you can make way more money
and profits for your e-commerce store.
And honestly, guys, a lot of your customers
are expecting you to run these sales,
especially as you grow this store bigger and bigger.
You just need to give them the discount code
if you're running a discount code
and let them know that you're running a sale.
Because, guys, you can get a huge volume of orders
and make a lot of money by running these sales
and planning them out so you know,
hey, we're going to get all this cashflow in December
or in October because we have this sale here
and this sale here.
It's really, really helpful for your store,
as well as getting extra sales and profits.
It's also fantastic for increasing the repeat customer rate
of your store because you're getting customers
that have already purchased
to come back and buy again.
And guys, as long as you have good products,
if they keep buying more products from your store
then there's a really good chance
they're going to go tell people
about your products and your store
which is going to result in a huge increase
in your brand and reach
without needing to do extra marketing.
Guys, let's jump into my computer
and I'm going to take you through it right now, let's go.
Okay guys, we're now on my computer
and here is the sales calendar template.
I'm going to leave a link to this template
in the description, so you can go get it for yourself.
Just go up and click File and then make a copy
so that it will make a copy in your own Gmail Google Drive,
because you can't edit my one
because there's going to be a lot of people using this.
So click make a copy and then you'll be able to then edit
and fill in the things.
So, pretty much here what I wanted to give you guys
is a template, basically all the months.
Right now, it's for 2020 because right now it's 2020,
but if you're watching this in 2021, 2022,
you can just edit the year and, and update it.
'Cause you know,
every year is going to have the same months of course.
And so then what you do is you use this
to basically plan out when you're going to have your sales
throughout the year.
I recommend doing this so you know a year in advance
more or less the general sales that you're having.
And it's going to depend on your niche.
If you're in, you know, a niche that's for example, jewelry,
then you know Valentine's Day is going to be a huge sale
for you guys.
You know, depending on your location as well.
So I've put in a few different dates here,
but of course there are so many.
I only put a couple of to illustrate what you would do.
But basically you want to go through and figure out
for your niche, for your country where you are selling to.
Different countries, different sales, different holidays
where people buy things.
So think about your ones
and you just want to go through and plan out.
And so I put an example here
where it has the duration of the sale.
So some sales may just be for one day.
Sometimes you'll have a sale for the whole month.
This one is a new year sale, which is for the whole month.
I like to put the promo code there,
so my team and I, we know exactly what code we're running
and we know what is it going to be for,
some notes about the sale.
And you can put in, you know, the dates are in here.
Or you can just put in one day.
But it's going to be like, what sort of sale is it?
What products is it going to be affecting?
And who you're marketing this to?
So is it going to your email list?
Is it in some sort of banner ad?
Who's actually going to get access to this?
That's going to help as well.
And the advantage of doing the sales calendar
is that you can plan out all these sales for the whole year
and then plan to ramp up towards it.
So say, if you've got a black Friday, Cyber Monday coming up
then you can let your email list know beforehand
leading up to it.
Hey, we're going to run this epic sale, just so you know.
So they're getting really excited,
they know what's going to happen.
It also means your whole team, if it's just you,
at least you'll know and you'll keep yourself accountable,
but if you have a whole team doing your marketing,
you can clearly prepare and coordinate
to make sure that you run the sales well.
Okay guys, super, super important.
Anyway guys, like I said,
go through and I can't make this for everybody
because there's many countries,
different countries watch my channel,
I see that in the analytics.
And there's many different stores, many different niches.
Go through and create this for yourself.
What I recommend doing is just Googling holidays
in United States, or sales holidays in United States.
And you'll see a lot of different lists
of all the different holidays that exist
and you can prepare your sales calendar around these.
But I also recommend adding in other sales
depending on who you're selling to.
You know, you could have a sale every single year in April
that's all like a huge April sale that happens
every single year and your customers,
they're actually going to get used to this.
You're going to have people on your email list
that will buy from you for years and years to come,
especially if you're building a strong brand.
And they're going to know April is the month for your store
where you have a site-wide 40% off
or something crazy like that.
That's pretty crazy, but you can do something like that
and have a sale.
Even a sale of specific items for that month
could be really cool.
Maybe it's the April apparel sale,
where you've got a store in a niche
and you've got some apparel on there,
that all your apparel is 15% off.
That could be a cool idea too.
But I'll let you do it, you've got to use your creativity
and think about how you're going to plan this out.
But this is how you basically plan it out.
Use this template, write it out.
There's three different columns.
And then you're all prepared for the year ahead.
I always like to be at least 30 days ahead,
I know what sale we're doing in 30 days
because this can be a guide
where you prepare for the year and you go, okay, cool,
we have one sale every month,
that's a good, good, estimate
of how frequent you should have your sales.
Once per month is really good
for your email list especially.
You can plan that.
You can always change it
but at least you know what's coming.
So that just is going to help.
It's also going to help for stock.
So if you know you need to get more stock
in a certain product or certain category,
you know that you've got a sale coming up,
you can prepare for that so you know,
okay, let's get more of this product.
Anyway, guys, that's how you plan out your sales calendar.
I'll leave a link to this spreadsheet here,
this Google sheet, super easy.
All you need is Gmail or G Suite account, but Gmail is fine.
And just click File, make a copy
and you'll be able to edit it yourself.
I'll leave that in the description
and in the comment section, so go check it out.
Thanks for watching guys. I'll speak to you soon.
Okay, guys, so that's how you create a sales calendar
for your e-commerce store.
If you have any questions or even just feedback
and you want to say, hey, Sam, thanks for the video,
leave them in the comments below, I really appreciate it.
And if this video was helpful, hit that thumbs up button.
And if you're not subscribed and you want to learn more
about growing your e-commerce store,
hit the subscribe button
and you'll get notifications when I release new videos.
Anyway, guys, thanks so much for watching
and I'll see you in the next video.
Bye for now.
(upbeat music)