Holiday Prep Guide: Promoting Holiday Sales in Your Shop

We’re back with the third week of our holiday prep guide series. This week is all about how you can promote your holiday sales creatively to your customers.

Our site-wide sales are getting better and better the closer we get to Black Friday and Cyber Week. If you haven’t already, it’s time to start letting your audience know about your amazing products and the sales they can take advantage of to buy them. To maximize your sales this season, we recommend sharing an update every day. To help you do so, we’ve put together this guide in which we’ll share some examples from our artist community to inspire you to create awesome promotional posts that grow your business and your following.

Pro tip: Now is your last chance to upload new art and activate new products ahead of the busiest shopping period. Take a minute to update your shop before sharing sales with your followers! Review last week’s prep guide along with our Artist Holiday Checklist and Holiday Success Guide Webinar for more tips.

1. Utilize overlays to create promotional posts

Our holiday promos have begun so you should be sharing these attractive sales with your followers. To help you spread the word, each week, we create custom overlays for you to download and use when sharing posts on social media. You can find these overlays in the weekly Artist Heads Up emails we send out which includes a section that links to our current and upcoming promotional schedule.

To use these overlays:

1. Click the “Download PNG Overlay” tab from the promotional schedule page
2. Open the Overlay in Photoshop
3. Select the product image that you want to promote and drop it in Photoshop as a new layer.
4. Save the image as a JPG and you’re set to post it on social media!

2. Create your own branded promotional posts

If you have a specific point of view on social media, you can still stay true to your brand when posting about promotions. This is a great way to entice your viewers to shop the deals you’re offering them while giving a taste of your unique vibe. When creating promotional posts in your own style, remember to make sure the text you choose is easy to read you should also state the products included in the sale and the discount amount along with the deadline for the sale.

Check out the examples below fromm Kath Nash’s Instagram story

3. Get creative with product images

Download our product and lifestyle images and add your own touch to make them stand out even more to potential customers. It can be as simple as adding a graphic of your artist name to the product preview images or drawing stylized doodles on the background of your post. These little added details can really draw your customers attention to your creativity and turn them from followers into fans.

Artist Doodle by Meg does an awesome job with branding our product previews with her own style.

4. Curate a gift guide and highlight your products

Help guide your customers to the most giftable products by showing them a selection of your favourite 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! You can also put together sets or collections of items that work in tandem for different purposes.

Be sure to include the current promos that are running for those products in your post.

Berlin Michelle has a great eye for pairing items that customers might want to shop as a set.

5. Share a work in progress

It’s important to balance promoting sales in your shop with posting more authentic and personal content. Sharing work in progress pictures or videos is a fun way to give your followers a sneak peak into your creative process. Customers love to see how the design they plan to buy was made. We’ve noticed that timelapse videos of an artwork being created sees meaningful engagement from viewers on social media.

Consider platforms where video performs best like Instagram Reels and Tik Tok. For more, check out our article on tips for posting work in progress content.

Pro tip: you can still mention sales in your shop within your captions!

Bonus: We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. As a rule of thumb, whenever you are sharing a link to your shop on Society6, be sure that you are using your unique affiliate link! For a refresher on how this works, check out our first holiday prep guide article for an overview on the affiliate program.

Don’t miss out on potential sales over the holidays by forgetting to let your customers know. For more tips and tricks on how you can prepare for the busy holiday season ahead, check out our 2021 Artist Holiday Checklist. We’ll be back next week to discuss another topic to help you find success this holiday season!

Find last week’s prep guide about the top 10 products all artists should enable this season here.