Holiday Promotions: What Works and What Doesn’t

Are visions of holiday promotions dancing in your head, and you’re wondering if they’re going to work? Cin7’s list of dos and don’ts completely takes the guesswork out of it.

The holiday season brings a familiar contradiction to every small and midsized business owner: it's your most profitable time of year and your most stressful operational challenge rolled into one. And we’re not just talking about Christmas here. Shopping “holidays,” like Prime Day and Black Friday, also promise big returns if you execute flawlessly.

This love/hate relationship with high-demand shopping events stems from the inevitable inventory mayhem they bring with them. In our Cin7 2025 State of Inventory Intelligence Report, 530 inventory pros told us that spikes in demand make it harder to manage inventory-related tasks, with 52% saying shopping holidays “create the biggest inventory challenges for their business.” 

And these inventory challenges aren’t just about making sure you have enough inventory to meet demand spikes (though 40% of respondents say they struggle with that too). You’re also trying to figure out how to attract customers to the inventory you do have.

We get it, which is why we’ve put together the best list of dos and don’ts you’ll find anywhere about how to build smarter, more profitable holiday promotions.

But that’s not all. 

We’re also highlighting how the right inventory management solution (IMS), like Cin7, can help ensure your inventory management processes are dialed in so your promotions give you optimal results.

Holiday Promotions: What Doesn’t Work

Let’s tackle the common mistakes first! If you’ve done a couple of these, don’t worry! Learning from our mistakes is how we grow. As the great Henry Ford once said, “Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to worthwhile achievement.”

With this in mind, here’s a list of things to avoid when it comes to holiday promotions:

• Don’t offer deep discounts without a plan. To be clear, discounting items is not a no-go, but it must be done strategically. Calculate how long you can afford to offer such big discounts while ensuring you have inventory in place to cover the hoped-for surge. Slashing prices may bring in a few more buyers in the short term, but in the long term, it can hurt your margins and brand value.

• Don’t do last-minute sales blasts. Just like deep discounts without a plan, last-minute sales blasts can lead to negative consequences. Even though last-minute sales can increase customer engagement, the unplanned sales event can also cause fulfillment errors, overtime costs, and stockouts. The result? Lackluster benefits for you and a frustrating experience for your customers. 

• Don’t offer one-size-fits-all promos. While blanket promotions can yield a few wins, they often produce more losses. By not personalizing your promotions, you’ll miss opportunities to connect with your prime customers and to let them know how your products fit their specific needs.

• Don’t overspend on cold audiences and reactive ad campaigns (CAC). Targeting strangers who have never heard of your brand drains your resources during one of the busiest times of the year. Focus on your warm audiences for a better ROI. 

• Don’t ignore supplier lead times. Ultimately, your goal for holiday promotions is to attract more customers and make big sales, but if you don’t have products in stock to sell, it will truly all be for naught. Supplier lead times should always be top of mind when planning for the holiday shopping season (not to mention all year long) so that your warehouse is stocked to meet spikes in demand.

Holiday Promotions: What Does Work

Now that we’ve got the don’ts out of the way, let’s dig into the fun part: the dos.

• Do bundle products. When you combine different products, you not only allow customers to get more for their buck, but you also increase your average order value. Bundling helps you clear your shelves and create space in the warehouse for your more popular items.

• Do offer limited-time offers, exclusive drops, and loyalty/VIP-only deals. Limited-time offers for individual items enable you to create a sense of urgency in your customers and eliminate race-to-the-bottom discounting that won’t pad your pocket. As for your best customers, VIP-only deals will make them feel important, ensuring they keep coming back for more, and you’ll protect your margins in the process

• Do practice omnichannel consistency. Nothing irks customers (and employees) more than different promotions across multiple platforms. If customers see a deal online and go to the brick-and-mortar store to take advantage of it in person only to find it’s not available, they quickly become unhappy. This can also trigger frustration for your frontline employees. 

• Do optimize your paid ads. Paid ads are especially important during the holiday season. Because of the increased cost during Q4 consider:
  • Targeted spend: Focus ad budgets on warm audiences (email lists, past buyers, high-intent lookalikes) instead of mass-blast ads that drive costly clicks.
  • Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs) with inventory control: Use tools that pull from current stock levels to ensure you’re not advertising sold-out SKUs.
  • Planned post-holiday remarketing: Use paid ads to move leftover stock post-season—without panic discounting.

• Do offer inventory-informed promotions. A common theme running throughout our dos and don’ts revolves around your inventory knowledge. To have a successful holiday shopping season, you must have real-time, accurate stock data. Having updated, correct inventory data means you know what’s available and helps you avoid selling what you can’t fulfill.

How Cin7 Helps SMBs Run Smarter Holiday Promotions

The idea of running effective promotions during the holidays without overloading operations and hurting profitability seems cut-and-dried, but as you’ve just read, there are a lot of “do this” and “not that” that can gum up the works. Thankfully, you don’t have to try and go it alone.

Cin7 is used by over 8,500 customers around the world! We deliver connected inventory intelligence with more than 700 vital integrations that help you streamline your sales channels and back-end inventory needs. Guessing what products you do and don’t have in stock is replaced with black-and-white inventory data from a single-source solution. Talk about a confidence boost! 

With Cin7, you have:

• Real-time inventory syncing with sales, so you don’t waste advertising spend that promotes products you can’t fulfill.
• Integrated channel management that helps keep online, retail, and marketplace promotions aligned.
• Order automation and fulfillment management to reduce errors during busy periods.
• Demand forecasting and purchasing tools to help you stock smarter before peak season hits.

Boyd Goodson, General Manager, Lofta, confirms that inventory, order, and fulfillment happiness is possible with Cin7. “We now have a single system that’s totally scalable. We can keep track of all customer orders and needs and keep them happy. Before Cin7, we had order delays and inventory adjustments, and after Cin7, we have responsive fulfillment operations and dead-on inventory.”

Such dead-on inventory is a necessary ingredient to holiday promotion success, which means investing in Cin7 is very much on the do list! 

If you’re interested in learning more about Cin7 and how we can help make sure you don’t have a blue Christmas (or any shopping day or season), we encourage you to schedule a free demo today.