With Black Friday about to begin, you do your due diligence. All of your most popular sellers are well stocked. You and your staff worked late into the night to lather your store in Christmas cheer, and you even had the forethought to pre-purchase a bulk of Christmas cookies and coffee from the bakery down the block to give to your first arrivals. In the morning, you head down to your store, but instead of a line outside, you are greeted by a few stray, crunchy leaves blowing silently past your doorstep. So now what? What Christmas business promotion ideas can you lean on?
While Christmas for retailers is a boon to the tune of over $700 billion dollars in sales, many retailers find themselves standing under the mistletoe without a soul in sight. Promoting your business during the busiest shopping season of the year may on the surface appear counterproductive. However, in today’s cut-throat retail environment, you must not just try to get your brand voice to stand out above the din of the others; you must shout it out as loud and as clear as you can.
How can you accomplish this by projecting your uniqueness without using a cookie-cutter marketing approach, but also avoiding the temptation to reinvent the wheel? Believe it or not, small retailers have the edge when it comes to holiday marketing. While Big Box stores seemingly regurgitate the same ad campaigns year after year, smaller retailers have the advantage of being creative and flexible in how they get their holiday brand voice out to the world.
Finding Your Voice on a Budget
The first step in any promotional activity is getting the word out. Commercials and advertisement placements have long been surpassed by the ease of social networks and shopping review websites. Now, you may be thinking about the challenges of growing your reach in these areas fast enough to be impactful for this holiday season. But, since most of you probably already have a social media presence or a page on review websites like Yelp, the network you need to spread the word most likely already exists.
Using your all of your customer engagement points to your advantage will make a large difference in promoting your holiday sales events. Offering referral incentives, such as BOGO deals for bringing a friend, will aid in driving your promotions forward. This is also a great opportunity to make use of your customer loyalty program, as this will give you a list to start with when launching your holiday promotions. Further, it will provide an accurate look into which items would be best received, allowing you to easily develop a promotional plan.
Fun Christmas Promotional Ideas for Retailers
Getting ideas for holiday sales is fairly easy to accomplish. Accurately selecting products that suit the trends of your clientele is not possible without having the data in place to indicate featured products or enticing price points. This is an area where having an innovative POS platform at the ready can make a large difference in your holiday promotions. The ability of analyzing data from past Christmas seasons, matching this with year long purchasing trends, and developing a price that gives the customer a deal without too much of a draw from your margins is only the beginning.
Analyzing the data you have gathered from the past year, as well as previous holiday shopping seasons, will give you clarity around more than just product offerings. Store hours can be adjusted to provide improved access to your shelves, and to reduce the stresses of the holidays on your staff. You will also gain vision into which aisle end caps perform best during the holidays, and obtain knowledge around customer traffic store throughout your store.
The data will give you an accurate picture of which products are your biggest draws, as well as if certain items are only purchased when on sale. The ability to master product placement and to identify the best products for promotion will aid in boosting sales and revenue during the holiday season. Pricing will be easy, as you will be able to compare the price you pay versus the competition to set a fair, yet inviting price.
Christmas Shopping Isn’t Just For Retail
Restaurants, salons, spas, and fitness centers are just a few examples of small businesses that could use a promotional boost over the holiday season. No longer are Christmas sales the sole dominion of the retail sector. Spending trends have shown upticks in experience and niche market items over the past seven years. This means that all businesses can greatly benefit from developing a holiday promotional strategy, and can largely do so by relying on gift cards and vouchers, making an impact on the time of you and your staff minimal.
The Magic of Promoting Gift Cards
Gift cards can be a valuable promotional item to help streamline the shopping experience for your customers. Physical gift cards, while very familiar to all consumers, can be limiting in many ways. Easily lost or stolen, and the lack of convenience for monitoring balances has seen its time pass. The flexibility and engaging qualities of digital gift cards, such as sharing purchases on social media or easily adding them to Apple Wallet, is quickly elevating these to the top of the gift card world.
Digital gift cards, when integrated into a POS solution, such as a gift card offering, can provide you with even more benefits. They can act as marketing tools, or to establish a customer loyalty program to extend your relationship with holiday shoppers into the length of the year. When integrating a gift solution into your business, you gain greater flexibility into the minds of your customers, giving you a clear advantage when seeking to cater to the shopping experience you offer your customers.
Expert Guidance on Tech-Driven Christmas Promotional Ideas a Click Away
Driving business through your doors during the holiday shopping season can set the tone for where your business is heading. It can reverse your course after a disappointing year, or be used to jump-start sales heading into the next year. The feeling of the holidays should be spent warmly engaging your customers, and not tucked away in your office, crunching numbers and trying to determine your next steps.
Integrating a highly capable POS software platform can give you this luxury. Involving a consultant in this decision is just as important, as they can be your guide to finding success beyond the holiday season. They must work with you as a partner, and free you from the chains of your desk and spreadsheets so you can enjoy the sights and sounds of the Christmas season with your treasured business guests.
Modernizing your business requires cutting-edge technology typically found in a next-gen POS solution. Jump starting your holiday sales is just the starting point, as talech works with you to keep the party going into the next year. Our goal is to let you leave your desk to mingle with your customers in confidence. Contact us today for a free demo and more information on how to bring cutting-edge technology to your customers.
