In a few weeks I'm going to start planting my summer seeds, specifically peppers.
It might sound funny but some plants need a really long time to get going. Otherwise they won't grow enough before their season ends.
Even though you just finished the main winter holiday season, you might need to start thinking about the next one. Especially if your staff or contractors need a lot of lead time.
Say you're finally planning on that redesign (and getting onto Shopify's Online Store 2.0). If you need 3-4 months for a redesign and 2-3 months to create holiday campaigns using that design, you need 5-7 months of lead time. Toss in an extra month or two because most projects end up longer than hoped and you're looking at 6-9 months of lead time before the holiday season.
Which means you need to start them in February if you want to guarantee everything is done by the end of October.
That doesn't even count how more stores are starting "Black Friday" deals in October these days.
My, how quickly time flies.
What I recommend is printing off a calendar for the whole year, one page per month. Hang that up somewhere visible and start marking it up with your big deadlines and promotions. Next you can start to fit in your big projects for the year and see how much time you have for them.
It might be surprising how quickly the year (and your buffer) disappears.
Eric Davis
P.S. You can also do this on a small scale to plan warming up customer segments for repeat purchases. Repeat Customer Insights collects data on buying times which can help plan how long of lead times you need for warm-up campaigns.
Did all of those holiday shoppers ever come back?
Compare how your last winter customers performed over the year with the Winter Holiday report in Repeat Customer Insights.