Smart online and offline retailers always focus on their sales graphs, especially during the holiday seasons. So, if you want to make the most out of your retail store, it’s important to change how you do things during the Christmas and New Year festivities. Here are tips on how you can increase your holiday sales during the peak season.
Plan Your Inventory
Interestingly, many retailers don’t do proper inventory planning in readiness for the holiday sales. Proper inventory planning calls for determining the old inventory that should be moved and identifying the right items to order for the season. Since many suppliers don’t like transporting large cargo during the holiday season, you need to prepare yourself in advance to avoid last-minute rushes.
Furthermore, it’s possible that your supplier may run out of stock during the holidays. So, if you don’t have enough funds to place your order in advance, click here to get up to $1,000, 000 same day business funding to purchase new stock. You should consider planning and purchasing your inventory around August.
Choose a Sale
In case you don’t have the inventory or the motivation to prepare for your holiday sales, you can also choose a particular holiday that you can leverage. This means you need to do some research to know which holidays will interest your potential customers the most.
Once you pick a date or period to maximize your sales and marketing strategies, give it your full attention. This is particularly crucial if this is your first major sale. In fact, to avoid floundering your campaign, consider focusing on a single holiday at a time.
Hold an Event
Holding an eye-catching event that will attract your existing and potential customers is another viable approach. So, if your town doesn’t have activities such as Santa visits, Moonlight Madness, and Businesses in Action that your retail store can participate in, consider holding one yourself. Families who attend your event will not only get entertained but also purchase a few items from your exclusive sales.
The secret is ensuring that the event you host in your neighborhood or town is tied to your product offerings. For instance, if you offer kitchen appliances or food items in your retail store, you can hold a cooking class to boost sales.
Use Proximity Marketing
Smart Antenna or iBeacon are effective tools for reaching out to shoppers in your area. In your targeting, ensure that you personalize your messaging so that prospects can easily identify with your unique holiday offerings. In other words, with these smart tools, you can invite shoppers into your retail store, and they’ll definitely consider checking you out.
Get Organized
Some retail store owners fail because they get confused or overwhelmed along the way simply because they’re disorganized. Apart from ensuring that your customers know that you’re in the running for the peak season, get organized on how to execute your campaign.
Find out what your competitors are doing in terms of spreading the word and branding so you can plan accordingly. For instance, you need to time your sales, run your email campaigns, schedule strategically, and update your site.
Update Your Payment Options
Make sure you accommodate all kinds of customers by updating your payment options. While some shoppers may prefer using older payment methods such as credit cards and PayPal, millennials may want to use newer options such as Stripe. However, you need to ensure the payment method you choose has affordable service fees that won’t eat into your profits.
Launch Email Campaigns
While social media marketing is a powerful marketing strategy, consider launching effective email campaigns. According to a McKinsey report, email marketing has a customer order average of 17 percent, making it more effective than social media. Send out marketing campaigns and email newsletters to promote your holiday sales or special discounts.
Adjust Your Return Policy
Regardless of how friendly your return policy is, ensure you tweak them slightly to make them even better for the holiday sales. In order to beat the competition, you must offer attractive and flexible guarantees in your return policies. A good return policy will secure a repeat customer who may end up being a loyal customer down the road.
Offer Gift Certificates
Businesses such as web designers, hairdressers, or automotive repair shops can gift their customers during the holiday season by offering them gift certificates. While you may not make money through gift certificates, they give profitable opportunities to cross-sell. You can promote the gift certificates on social media or through your email marketing campaigns. In fact, gift certificates are also great for offering discounts.
Getting more sales is directly correlated to getting more customers. Assuming your retail store has the best products, the more prospects who visit your store or interact with your product, the better your numbers. With the right tools and a little ingenuity on your part, you can create your own holiday season rush.
