No doubt your team knows how to optimize product pages, how to make checkout easier, and other holiday best practices. But perhaps your holiday sales numbers weren't as attractive as you'd wanted, even after you followed all the day-to-day best practices...

As part of a proper holiday postmortem, don't just focus on campaign effectiveness and operational challenges. Expand the process and evaluate your internal and external capabilities in light of your strategic priorities such as brand advocacy, customer experience, and LTV. In other words, explicitly link your capabilities with customer value.

The best retailers in the world succeed because they do things differently. They typically have strong brand loyalty, are known for a seamless customer experience, and maintain meaningful relationships with customers. Linking value to customer experience or brand loyalty can be difficult, but this should be attempted on a regular basis.