When holidays come around, you want to be sure to prepare your business so that you are raking in sales as opposed to putting out fires and scrambling to keep up.
Follow these four steps to stay ahead this season.
1. Create a Holiday Offer They Can’t Refuse
It is important to think long and hard about the sales you will be pitching to customers this holiday season. You want a sale that creates urgency but is not pushy. Something that creates buzz but is not overplayed. There are many possible ideas to get your holiday season off to the right start such as running a holiday themed contest. This may be just the thing an online retailer can use to drive traffic to the site and generate buzz.
If you are a local store, plan an event for customers, employees, merchants or whomever supports your business. Showing gratitude for those who support you, encourages the kind of goodwill that will put your business in the black. Or maybe you want to spread that goodwill to even more people. Consider partnering with a non-profit that fits your business’ image, like a bookstore teaming with a non-profit to improve literacy.
Lastly, an exclusive discount served up via email lists (or offering to give one if they sign up to your email list) can create the targeted urgency that will help push your holiday sales skyward.
2. You Can Do Anything, but Not Everything in Advertising
You have a multitude of advertising choices at your disposal, but for holiday promotions, it’s best to have a more focused approach. It may not be a bad time to shake things up and try a new advertising medium or a social marketing campaign. Google’s Adwords or Facebook advertising becomes increasingly competitive and lucrative this time of year.
Producing content and releasing it via blogs may be a new way for your business to generate traffic and conversions. Or perhaps it is time to finally develop or tap into that email list. Whichever way you decide, remember to stay focused in your approach to see the biggest results.
3. Learn From Your Mistakes
Learn from your mistakes, or someone else’s, otherwise you are doomed to repeat them. If this is not your first holiday season you should have prior experience to draw on. If you did not properly track former holiday sales results with analytics, now is the time to begin. This way you will be able to learn from your mistakes.
If you have a young business, you probably have had some type of holiday sale already (Fourth of July, Back to School, Columbus Day), look back and reflect on what worked best. Of course, you are not the first person to own a business and there is a wealth of firsthand information online to learn from so you can succeed where others failed.
4. Think Long Term
Your business should see its highest number of customers in the month of December, what are you doing to make sure they come back January through November? As the founders of Zappos.com, a highly successful online shoe retailer, proudly proclaim, they strive to deliver WOW through service. To them, that means super easy customer service, randomly upgraded shipping and other small things that add up in a big way.
Which holidays do you prep you business for?
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