Nick Chasinov is founder and CEO of Teknicks

If you’re a seller, you look forward to the holidays ecommerce and retail businesses make more revenue in November and December than any other months of the year. But what about the rest of the year?

After a fruitful holiday season, a sales drop can set in instantly. No matter the overall state of the economy, households spend less after Jan. 1. Many brands try to ride out the slow period, but that’s the time they should redouble their efforts to engage customers. A revenue drop in January and February may not seem like a big deal—after all, it happens to everyone, right? But it might mean playing catch-up the rest of the year.

Brand loyalty might also take a hit, as more aggressive brands may attract customers from you. Customer engagement isn’t a race that ends after the holidays, and brands can boost the new year’s sales if they strategize. In 2020, home and garden stores are advertising a “Spring Black Friday.” All outdoor products will see steep price drops as retailers kick-start the warm weather with deals on grills, patio sets, landscaping equipment, and more. Apparel, kitchen appliance, and even cosmetic brands could leverage this idea to sell seasonal items to their target audiences.

If you want to beat other ecommerce retailers, you have to step up your game. Here’s how you can capitalize on early opportunities:

1. Shift the timeline for customers
It’s likely that during the holidays, your customers spent time—and money—at your business. Why end the relationship there? Holiday purchases can be the start of the customer journey.

Use surveys, loyalty programs, and special targeted offers to bring shoppers back for spring savings. Reaching out to your holiday customers with a special coupon they can use later in the year will keep them engaged during a critical time.

2. Remove barriers to impulse buys
Whether they’re trying to save money, eat better, or exercise more, people are likelier to stick to their guns early in the year. But 84% of Americans have made impulse purchases, so you should prepare to court customers’ spontaneous moods.

Think about a time when an unforgettable deal pulled you in. How likely were to purchase before seeing it? Sending mobile-friendly content to customers with a streamlined path to checkout gives you the best chance of breaking customers’ post-holiday resolve.

3. Tackle efficient SEO link building
Link building connects your website to other credible ones in your industry, alerting Google to your trustworthiness. The more reliable and trustworthy your site, the more traffic you’ll see. If you’ve created useful content and worked on link building the previous year, you can still draw in customers during the slow winter and early spring months (even if traffic decreases overall). Acquiring links is no easy task, so here are some link building tools to help.

4. Retarget holiday traffic
In the information age, we have new ways to reach customers who enter our digital properties. One is retargeting: Users leave cookies on your site when they visit, and you can use them to retarget those users with custom post-holiday advertisements on Google or Facebook. With this strategy, you can continue to engage customers who either bought or considered buying your products during the holidays.

5. Launch a new product or feature
Depending on the products you sell, you can entice customers with a newsworthy move in after the holiday season. If you’ve been developing a new product or service, save it for then. A product release or feature announcement during a month devoid of popular U.S. holidays means you may have the news cycle all to yourself.

Don’t be a brand that blows all its best sales ideas during the holidays. With planning, you can form strategies for attracting and engaging customers all year long.

Teknicks is a research-based internet marketing agency.