2022 Artist Holiday Success Checklist

Have you started prepping for the holiday season? We’ve put together this checklist of important steps you can take to set yourself up for success.

With the holidays approaching, it’s time for you to start preparing your Society6 shops for the influx of customers who will be shopping for special gifts and festive items. The holiday season is typically the busiest time for shoppers on Society6 and presents exciting opportunities for increased traffic and sales. With this in mind, we want to give you our top five tips for ensuring holiday success this season. These simple tasks can add up to big wins during the busiest shopping season of the year!

For more holiday tips, check out our 2022 Holiday Creative Brief.

1. Refresh your shop

Think of your artist shop as a physical storefront. You want customers to come in and feel like they’re in the right place for their holiday shopping! 

Now is the perfect time to upload those new pieces you’ve been holding onto. In general, artists with more designs see more success on Society6. Do you have a current bestseller? Consider updating it in a new color. Do you have season specific designs? Don’t forget to make those available in your shop now.

It’s also a great time to refresh your banner and avatar and to make sure your bio highlights what you want your customers to know about you.

Did you know you can sort your shop to show-off certain products first? You can also select whether to display popular, new or random designs by default. Simply navigate to your shop, click on “Edit Shop” then “shop settings”. From there, adjust the settings to your liking.

2. Create collections

Want to guide your customers to specific products and designs that you know will be a hit this holiday season? Consider building a curated collection to share with your fans and followers. Collections are a great way to put together gift guides, which are a helpful sharing tool for the holidays. The key here is to pick a theme within your collection and stay consistent. We’ve refreshed our entire collections feature this year and now it’s easier than ever for customers to add items from your collections to their carts. In case you missed it, learn all about creating collections and more here.

During the holiday season we see a shift in customers looking for products that make great gifts. Help guide your customers to the most giftable products by showing them a selection of your favorite products from your shop. We recommend focusing on what you might consider to be stocking stuffers since these are easy to gift, affordable, and functional! Below is a list of products to consider enabling and adding to your holiday collections if you haven’t already. Check out our tips for using the bulk-enable tool to make this easier than ever!

•  Framed Art Prints
•  Art Prints
• Posters
• Throw Blankets
• Apparel (Adult & Kids)
• iPhone Cases
• Coffee Mugs
• Puzzles 
• Socks
• Stationery (Wrapping Paper, Stickers & Notebooks)
• Bags (Totes, Duffle Bags & Carry-All Pouches)

3. Create a Holiday Marketing Calendar

A good marketing calendar is just a series of minor goals to help you achieve your major ones. Having a plan for your promotional schedule can reduce a lot of stress and anxiety you may feel when it comes to sharing your content on social media. 

Check out our guide to building a marketing calendar here.

This time of year, customers are always seeking out the best deals so great holiday promos, new products, and adding new designs to your shop are all things your customers want to know about. You’ll also want to consider what your customers might be looking for at different times of the month—for example, November will still be the strongest month for traditional gifting and December is where we typically see customers shopping for last minute gifts that will ship quickly. As always, remember to reference our holiday creative brief here and our promotion schedule here.

4. Add links to your social media

Avoid missing out on sales by making it easier for customers to find your products by adding or sharing links to your social media pages. Some links you’ll want to consider including are:

• Your holiday gift guide collection. Once you’ve merchandised the products in your collection, click on the share button on the collections page, copy the link and paste it in your bio. Not only will this bring customers directly to a merchandised set of products, but your affiliate link will be automatically applied to the link! If you haven’t already joined our Artist Affiliate Program, you can learn more and sign up here (its quick!) 
• A design details page. These pages are perfect for showcasing any popular or new designs that you’ve uploaded along with all of the products it is enabled on. Each one of your designs now has a Design Detail Page, which you can access by clicking on any product, scrolling down the page, and then clicking on the button that reads “Shop all products with this design.” The share button on this page will also include your affiliate link by default.
• Your main shop page. Make sure you’ve prepped your shop by adding a bio, avatar, banner, and choosing your default product settings. If you’ve joined our affiliate program, you’ll want to add your unique affiliate link to your shop URL. We’ll explain how it works below:

Using artist AliRae Aguirre’s shop as an example, AliRae’s shop link is society6.com/aliraeaguirre. Her custom affiliate link is ?curator=aliraeaguirre. So to use AliRae’s affiliate link, AliRae could share their shop with: society6.com/aliraeaguirre?curator=aliraeaguirre. This method can be used for any page on Society6.

5. Review your pricing to maximize your sales

Earlier this year, we added the ability to set your prices on all products in your shop so you are now in control of how much you earn on everything.  Maximize your earnings this holiday season by setting the markup you wish to earn. When it comes to choosing a markup and setting your prices it can be hard to know where to start. Take a look around at your peers and artists who you feel your work might be similar to on Society6 and what they’re charging for their products. 

Learn more about setting markups here.

We’ll be sharing advice throughout the next few weeks to help our artist community make the most of this busy shopping period. Stay tuned for more and cheers to a successful holiday season!