One of the most exciting seasons for business owners is the holiday season. It’s when most shoppers purchase many things for themselves and their loved ones. In short, it means an opportunity to increase your business sales.
You must be fully prepared to make the most of the holiday season. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself at a disadvantage.
Fortunately, there are countless ways to increase your holiday season sales. If you don’t know where to get started, here are some small business Saturday ideas and other ways to level up your sales:
- Get Your Preparations Right
Although you can start preparations a few months before the holiday season, it’s never too late to start today. Whether you’re running a small or a big business, you still have plenty of time to get things ready to boost your revenue.
When preparing, you may consider the following:
- Marketing Strategy – Determine what marketing channels are most effective in engaging with your potential and existing customers. Then, think of the possible content that best conveys your holiday promotions.
- Product Inventory – It’s essential to check your stocks before the holiday season, especially if you have several best-seller items. Besides, you don’t want your products to go out of stock as they may hurt your sales over time.
- Promotional Materials – Plan how you’ll spread the word about your upcoming offers to achieve sales success. For example, you can decide whether to use print ads, social media posts, online ads, or flyers.
- Embrace Cross-Selling
Another way to increase your holiday season sales is to consider cross-selling, which involves suggesting items to go with the services or items your customers have purchased previously. For instance, if your customers have bought a set of earrings, you may suggest a matching necklace. Cross-selling is an excellent way to add value to your customers and increase your sales concurrently.
- Offer The Best Customer Service
Solving your customers’ concerns proactively during the holidays is the key to winning them in the long term. Unfortunately, maintaining high customer service levels can be challenging during this season. You can easily miss urgent customer queries between timely shipping, ensuring product stocks, and regular website operations.
Therefore, consider planning to improve your customer service before and during the holiday season. To get started, keep the following in mind:
- Hire more people for your customer service team to provide better online support via email, live chat, and social media.
- Use chatbots to guide users and provide basic help.
- Update or create self-help pages to quickly resolve the most frequent customer queries.
- Create Seasonal And Unique Landing Pages
Campaign-specific landing pages are necessary throughout the year. However, giving your landing pages a holiday flare or theme is extra helpful. Make it clear that you’re providing something special for this particular time.
Create a landing page for every service or product to offer customers a clear picture of your special offers. Because it includes all the essential details and a specific call-to-action (CTA) on a single page, your conversion rates will likely increase.
When creating landing pages, you can use various landing page builder tools that provide everything you need for your campaigns. If possible, make your landing page scannable and easy to read. It’s also crucial to keep them optimized for mobile and desktop use. As many people shop online using mobile devices, it’s also critical to provide a mobile-friendly landing page to make sales.
- Offer Special Discounts
Customer loyalty can make a difference in increasing your holiday season sales. Providing rewards, discounts, or gifts to your loyal customers will make them feel appreciated, encouraging them to browse your current offers and purchase from your store.
Remember that retaining your existing customers is typically more profitable than searching for new ones. So, offer special discounts in any way possible to maximize your profits and get more loyal customers in the long run. For example, you can offer exclusive discounts to your regular customers or new consumers who want to avail themselves of your products and services.
- Make Your Website Look More Festive
Like offline stores, it may come in handy to make your website look more festive during the holiday season to attract new customers. This will let the target consumers know that you’re prepared for the holidays and offer great deals.
Start with changing your homepage or landing page to give your website a festive look. Highlight your holiday season’s offers and incorporate appealing visual elements. Depending on your budget, you can invest in producing quality videos and images that represent the season. You may even change the fonts of your website.
However, as you improve your website’s appearance, avoid potential distractions like annoying pop-ups. Some consumers don’t want pop-ups when browsing a store. If you need to use one, make sure to match it with your theme and highlight your biggest offers so that your customers may find it helpful.
If you’re unsure how to make your website look more festive, you can hire designers to change your current website theme or style. Professional web designers know the perfect design ideas that work best for your business.
- Streamline Your Checkout Process
A lengthy checkout process can be a barrier to making sales because consumers have a short attention span and prefer to make a purchase quickly. Hence, if your checkout process requires plenty of information or is complicated to navigate, you may lose sales eventually. The best solution for this is to streamline your checkout process.
If you don’t know what to change or improve with your checkout process, get insights from your data analytics and test it again. You may also ask someone to make a test purchase and get feedback about the process and possible issues they encounter.
To make your checkout process simple during this holiday shopping season, consider asking for essential details only and allow guest checkout. Through this, your customers can make a purchase immediately without needing to go through the registration process.
Conclusion
The holiday season makes people crazy, which often leads to impulsive buying. That’s why it’s also a perfect opportunity for businesses to make more profits and increase their sales. To make that possible, keep in mind the tricks discussed here and implement them wisely to get satisfactory results. If you have doubts, ask for help from marketing professionals for other strategies and ideas you can consider this holiday season.
