October is usually the calm before the storm of the holiday season. Sure, Halloween is at the end of the month, but October is a brief reprieve between the end of summer and Thanksgiving, the start of school and winter holidays. Typically “get organized” is a New Year’s resolution, but do it now before the holidays, and you’ll go through the busy season much more prepared. Use this time to get organized for the upcoming stress of holiday marketing and personal holiday shopping.
Segment Contacts
Before setting up any holiday email marketing campaigns, it’s important to know to whom—and why—you’re sending those holidays emails. To start, segment your contacts into important lists. Maybe it’s by lifecycle stage (subscribers vs. customers) or by how long they’ve been in your database or by products purchased in the past. No matter what the specific filters, create these lists to know which emails to send to which groups of contacts.
Throughout the holiday season, your business should expect to add to your contact database: new customers, volunteers, leads, subscribers, etc. Having form fields on forms throughout your website that automatically add contacts into a new list of segmented contacts will make it easier to market to those contacts in the future. You can have confidence that they are receiving the current marketing information at the right time.
Get Budget in Order
Personal budgeting is hard. Budgeting for your company or team is necessary. Take a look at where the numbers for marketing are supposed to be at this point in the year and then figure out how much you can attribute to campaigns through the end of the year. Knowing what the actual number is of the allowance for marketing for the rest of the year can help when thinking through how to implement the campaigns your team is working on. It will help keep everything in check and not have any big surprises for the end of the year.
Put Together a Timeline
Life just seems to get busier as the year starts to come to a close: special events, out-of-the-ordianry office meetings, end-of-the-year to-dos. So while your time is still yours, start putting together events and meetings you know you’ll need to take or want to prioritize. Sort out what needs to be done for upcoming campaigns or when certain materials need to be sent out. People often find that color coordinating their calendar helps them to see what’s ahead and remind them of what needs to be done.
Achieve Inbox Zero
In the same way that you’re organizing your schedule for the upcoming months, organize your email inbox. Inbox zero is the ultimate goal for many of us, but we know that emails will always be coming in. Start with what you currently have in your inbox and either answer right away or file away to respond to at a later time. Next, create new folders for upcoming projects that might need their own isolated list. Then set filters to automatically put emails into those new folders or to filter out unnecessary emails to read after the urgency of the end of 2016. Deciding how to divide up incoming emails now will make it easier to determine what’s important when you’re bombared with emails over the next two and a half months.
Or become more relaxed about checking your email—like this guy.
Declutter Physical Space
Organizing your physical space—your cubicle, your desk, your office, etc.—might not seem like a necessity in the midst of deadlines and projects, but it can really to clear your mind and get you ready for the tasks at hand. One method of decluttering is the 5S system and others like the KonMari method. No matter what system you use to declutter and organize your office space, having a clean desk can help you focus on the expectations you have for the next few months.