With pumpkin-flavored everything appearing on store shelves as early as August, it’s never too early to start preparing your company for the holiday rush. This preparation should happen long before the first leaf falls. Even in October, however, it’s not too late to implement some effective strategies to increase and maximize sales.
Prepare Your Inventory
Too little—or too much—inventory during the holiday season can result in even more lost revenue than these types of problems would during the rest of the year. If you can, order most of your holiday inventory by mid-October to secure your stock and help mitigate the effect of shipping delays, particularly if you’re sourcing from overseas.
Once the holiday season is underway, review your inventory at regular intervals at least three times a week to avoid selling out of popular items. Implementing automated inventory management technology that uses analytics of real-time data about orders, suppliers and delivery ensures that demand is met without over- or undershooting production.
Offer Omnichannel Shopping Options
It’s not uncommon for a shopper to start a transaction on mobile, continue it via web browser and complete the sale in-store. These omnichannel experiences often result in increased sales for businesses, with retailers such as Ulta Beauty finding that their omnichannel customers spend 2.7 times more than in-store-only customers.
Having a fully interconnected shopping journey ensures that customers have the same high-quality experience in person, over the phone, on the web and on mobile. Customers should be able to engage seamlessly with your company across all channels, maintaining their cart, preferences and previous communications as they travel between each touchpoint. Ultimately, customers should perceive multiple interactions as a single experience.
Enhance Your Channels
If you’re doing omnichannel right, you’ll have multiple customer touchpoints that you need to update and streamline.
Web
It starts with optimizing your website performance. You would hate to lose customers who have gone through the entire shopping process only to abandon their cart at checkout due to a technical glitch. You also want to be able to handle the influx of queries that’ll hit your servers, as well as keep things like searching and scrolling through listings and adding items to the cart as smooth as possible.
Mobile
This goes double for your mobile site. A survey found that millennial consumers plan to do more than half of their holiday shopping online in 2017. They were also the group most likely to purchase gifts, at 91 percent. Companies simply cannot afford to lose their business due to a bad mobile experience. Likewise, if you have an app, make sure it’s up to date and fully compatible with the latest mobile operating systems. It should also be bug-free and fully secured.
Checkout
Finally, bring your checkout experience into the digital age by implementing mobile wallet options and other digital payments.
Send Abandonment Reminders
If you do happen to lose a customer to cart abandonment, it doesn’t have to be the end of the journey.
Shoppers may be visiting multiple sites to compare prices, in-store purchase options and shipping details. In these cases, sending an email that reminds them about their cart contents may push an undecided shopper back over to your business. You can even enhance your efforts and win some upsells by including information about complementary products or guides on how to get the most out of the products they’ve chosen.
If the abandonment was due to technical issues, a quick note and apology acknowledging the issue—and the customer’s frustration—may give you another chance. This works, however, only if the problem is fixed, another reason that technical optimization is extremely important.
Offer Discounts
Studies have found that 50 percent of shoppers use rewards or other discounts for their purchases. While sales are common on Black Friday and beyond, some personalized options at other times are effective, as well. Offering loyalty programs, rewards and membership-based options can boost holiday sales as well as add an ongoing revenue stream, in the case of memberships. The exclusivity of these discount programs may convince customers to keep their holiday spending in your store rather than a competitor’s.
Implement Proximity Marketing
Text messages and push notifications that let customers know when they’re near your business may be just the impetus they need to make a visit. This is especially true if you include discount coupons or personalized offers based on their purchase history.
Someone who recently bought an item from an online baby registry, for instance, can be prompted to stop in and pick up a toy as a holiday gift while in the neighborhood.
