Should I practice running a sale before the big holiday season, and why?

Yes, absolutely practice by running a sale before Q4. Pick any date or occasion—your birthday, Halloween, any event between now and the holidays—and run a practice sale. It doesn’t matter if you fall flat and don’t sell anything; you’re going to learn a tremendous amount. You’ll get comfortable sending emails, following up with people who didn’t open, increasing your posting frequency, and handling all the moving pieces that go into executing a proper sale. More importantly, you’ll get data from your various marketing channels—email, Facebook, Instagram, etc. You can analyze which traffic sources were most engaged, had the most add-to-carts, stayed on your site longest, and use that intelligence to focus your efforts for the next sale. You don’t want your first time executing a sale to be during the biggest selling season of the year. Get a couple of practice runs under your belt.

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Asked by an artist preparing for their first major sale · Answered by Patrick Shanahan · art-marketing-podcast · 2019-08-13