Keys to Winning at Thanksgiving

Early Marketing

You should start promoting your Thanksgiving meal options as soon as September arrives because the best clients do not wait until the last minute to make arrangements for their functions.

There are people with money who love to entertain and bring family and friends together during the holiday season, but they are not at all interested in doing all that cooking. Those people are not going to wait until the day before Thanksgiving to decide to place their order.

Marketing your Thanksgiving options early and often is how you make life easy for those folks. People with money are happy to pay you to make their lives easier because their money is useless if they're not going to use it to make their life easier.

Be the chef who makes life easy for people who have money. They will introduce you to more people who have money.

Email Marketing

Sending an email to your existing customers is the easiest way to make a sale.

These people already know you and your food. Most of them already know what they want to order. You just need to send them an email letting them know that you're taking orders, along with instructions on how to place their order.

Limited Quantity

Figure out how many meals you want to prepare and set that as your limit.

You will advertise this limit in your marketing materials so that people know that if they don't place their order, they will miss out. 

This will give people a sense of urgency and will keep them from waiting until the last minute...especially as you send a new email every week showing fewer and fewer remaining dinners to order.

Ordering Deadline

I recommend setting the deadline a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, but you can do whatever you want.

The most important thing is to set a deadline so you're not scrambling around with your hair on fire because somebody waited until the last minute, as if Thanksgiving doesn't come on the same day every year.

By setting a deadline, along with a limited quantity, you will know exactly what your workload is in advance. No fire drill necessary.

Easy Ordering

We've all been spoiled by the Amazon experience, for good and for bad.

The closer you can make your ordering process to the Amazon experience, the more money you will make. I recommend HoneyCart for this.

Imagine sending an email with a link to your Thanksgiving menu where people can place their orders and pay without you having to be involved.

And when you've sold out, the system stops allowing people to place orders.

HoneyCart does that for you and lots more.

Pricing

It All Works Together

Read through all the sections above again and you'll see how they reinforce each other. They're all ingredients in the recipe. 

If you haven't already started an email list for your business and been sending an email every week, shame on you because I emphasize the importance of it all the time.

Your email list makes you money because of all the emails you send where you're not selling anything. Your cooking show and food photos, kitchen tips and tricks, etc, are all excellent gifts to deliver into people's inboxes every week.

And then when it's time to sell something, you're not the person who just shows up with something to sell.

Your cooking show is the foundation, but building your business has many other pieces.

They all work together.