Christmas is upon us! People have already started looking for Christmas present ideas, have you started planning for the busiest season of the year yet?
We all know this Christmas is going to be like no other, even though there are some stats and various insights on how it might be like. Amazon has said that they’ve already seen an increase in people shopping for presents, some resources support this and say this if going to be the best one ever, and some other resources say they don’t expect it to be as busy as there are a lot of people who are having a hard time with their finances. Either way, there is an intent and you as a business should make the most of it!
We’ve put together some tips for you to end 2020 and start 2021 on the right foot:
1. Start planning
We live in unprecedented times and people are being encouraged to plan ahead, start Christmas shopping early and be prepared, hence the panic buying! I’m not saying stock up on toilet roll, I’m just saying you should have started your Christmas campaign planning yesterday! Plan your Christmas products, update your website, start telling people about it.
And when you plan ahead, you can avoid the stress and panic the holiday season might bring to retail businesses. Create your strategy, make sure your content is aligned throughout all your channels and start updating your customers. Tell them what’s coming up, when the last order date is and even set up auto-responses because this year Christmas shopping will be a bit more challenging so help your customers as much as you can! Which brings me to the second tip:
2. Help
Christmas shopping can be stressful at the best of times: so many family members and loved ones to shop for and I don’t know about you but I always count on walking around the stores to see if something catches my eye. This year, we’re needing to do most of our Christmas shopping online so people need help and guidance on what presents to get their loved ones. One way to help people is creating gift guides based on age, gender and interests. Create different collection pages for each group. Another idea is to offer free shopping advice or livechat with a personal shopper so people can ask questions and get an answer from an expert quickly. If you can’t do any of these, you can still help by writing blogs and creating social media posts about advice on buying gifts.
3. Make Your Website Convenient
Normally people go online to shop as it’s not as time-consuming as actually going to a shop somewhere and also because it’s convenient – right now people go online because they don’t have a choice, especially if the second lockdown gets extended to December. Either way, you have to make sure your website is convenient and easy to use for people. Especially with really high amounts of traffic expected until the end of the year, check everything’s working as they should on your website and it doesn’t take a long time for your pages to load as that’s definitely a reason for people to leave your website and not come back! Smallest of annoying issues and glitches might cost you a lot of sales, so get your website in order before the holiday shopping mania begins.
4. Choose Products Wisely
Choose which products to promote wisely! Unfortunately, you can’t make decisions based on what worked during previous years, I’m afraid you’re going to have to make educated guesses. With the pandemic, a lot of our wants and needs have changed, people spend more times at home getting dressed in casual clothing. Based on this people will be more likely to spend money on their houses and clothes they’d wear at home. So make sure you consider these when you update your website and create Christmas themed social media posts and shout out about the right products.
Ps. Make sure you update your homepage to have specific Christmas products section, so people can reach these easier.
5. Create a sense of urgency
Urgency is what makes people buy! Have you ever put something in your basket and left the website thinking you can go back to it and buy it later? And how many times have you actually bought it? If there was a limited time offer on it, I can assure you that you would have bought it right then and there. So use it, create different offers and deals each day, like the 12 days of Christmas campaign Amazon does every year. It works because people don’t want to miss out.
Add countdown timers to your website so people can see the clock ticking, which is basically a way of saying ‘you better act quick’. Also make sure all your social media, website and email promotions are aligned so people can be aware of these deals.
6. Get Creative
Everyone’s working on Christmas campaigns, what makes you different? If you want people to choose you over your competitors, this is the time to get creative.
Start with your content, a very different Christmas is ahead of us, try to come up with some content ideas that can help people, not just gift guides but answer frequently asked questions, think about what will help people get through these rough times. If things were normal, you could create content around how to wrap weirdly shaped presents, why not try showing how you pack your orders so that people can see what they will look like when they send presents to their loved ones through you? It’s not just social media content that needs to be creative, make sure your emails have eye-catching subject lines so they don’t get lost in the millions of Christmas campaign emails we all get.
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and think of what worries you have about Christmas shopping this year. Then see what you can do to help customers with these kinds of worries.
7. Tell Them Why
No one is there to be sold to, so don’t just say ‘look at what we have, buy it’ on social media, tell them why they need to buy that.
Why would you buy your products? Think of that reason and use it for your social content to show people why your products are attractive and make great presents.
8. Have Fun
Social media is fun, it doesn’t have to be so blunt all the time. Yes, you are trying to sell something but why not have fun with it in the meantime? Show your followers that there is an actual human being behind the screen and don’t be afraid to show them your personality!
People are desperately in need of some socialisation, and they go to social media for this. Share content from other accounts, engage with people on these platforms and they will definitely appreciate it and this will only make you look good. In the end, the trick is to be human!
9. It’s Next Year That You Should Be Focusing On
Do you know why it’s important to sell this year? It’s so that you can build loyalty and sell even more next year! The more people buy from you this year, the more people will remember your products next year. And I don’t mean next year during Christmas. Even if you turn 10% of your new customers, into loyal customers. That’s 10% growth year-on-year. So you should be focusing on selling now, to build loyalty for next year.
Here are 9 tips for a very weird Christmas ahead, use them wisely and turn this short period into a profitable one!
Source: https://socialb.co.uk/
