The 2018 Retail Calendar: Don’t Forget About These Key Holidays and Sales Dates

Although any day is a good day for shopping as far as we’re concerned, as a retailer there are a few key dates that you should be marking in your diary in permanent marker.

That’s why we’ve put together the 2018 Retail Calendar which has all of the important shopping, sales, events and holiday dates in it so that you can hit the ground running next year.

You don’t have to make a fuss of every single one of the days listed, just pick those that are most relevant to your business. Think strategically about how you can make the most out of those days or periods to boost sales and start planning ahead of time.

Here's a few ideas to get you started:

• Sales and promotions - what can you offer to entice shoppers to buy?
• Email marketing - you could send an EDM orseries of EDMs in the lead up to a specific shopping date. For example if you sell jewellery, you could send a Valentine’s Day email with specials on a few of your loved-up pieces.
• Facebook ads - ad targeting has become so granular it's almost creepy (which is good news for retailers). Using the jewellery example you could target ads with different priced products based on "length of time in a relationship" or "income". Try a remarketing campaign with an extra discount for those who engaged but didn't buy.
• Influencer marketing - select relevant influencers and bloggers to promote your products on instagram and other channels. Give influencers a unique promo code to incentivise shoppers to buy.
• Social media - fill up your social calendar ahead of time with fun, interactive, engaging content.

And of course, don't forget about your back of house operations:

• Inventory and stock control - will you have enough product to cope with increased volumes? Are you managing your inventory efficiently?
• Preparing your staff - will you need to hire for a particularly busy time like the Christmas period, or do you have additional training requirements?
• Your ecommerce platform - choose a robust ecommerce platform that has the infrastructure and bandwidth to cater to busy times, allows multi-channel sales, and makes managing orders, inventory, fulilment and shipping a breeze.

Print the calendar off, pass it around, pin it to your desk and forward it onto your team so that there are no excuses for not knowing what’s going on.

Neto is the only Australian retail management platform that provides a complete solution for ecommerce, point of sale, inventory, and fulfilment. Our integrated back-end technology enables exceptional and consistent customer experiences via any channel, be it in-store, online or through a marketplace. We automate repetitive tasks and integrate with multiple sales channels to manage orders and shipments.