The biggest period of the year for most companies is undoubtedly the last quarter. Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, all of these holidays come and go. Many companies make 70% of their annual revenue from last quarter sales. This is a strategic period not to be missed, regardless of your industry. Here are some tips on how to increase your year-end sales.
Prepare your company for the end of the year holidays
First of all, a preparation work is necessary to increase your sales during the end of the year period. You must anticipate weeks in advance the functioning of your company during this period. From stocks to offers to marketing strategies, everything must be planned. But what can you do to prepare?
Stocking up
In order to meet the increased demand of the holiday season, it is recommended to plan the necessary stock. The objective here is to avoid any situation of shortage or out-of-stock condition, especially for flagship products. Dissatisfied customers are disappointed and you lose money.
Of course, it is not about overstocking. Rather, it’s a matter of having enough stock to cover the demand.
To do this, place your orders a little earlier with one or more suppliers. They too will be busy during the holidays. They may have difficulty delivering on time.
Strengthen your team for the period
Orders are in and inventory is expected? That’s great! That’s great. However, this is not the time to rest on your laurels. You’ll also need to plan for the human resources needed to handle the extra activity during the festive period. Strengthen your team if necessary with new seasonal hires. Whether it’s a physical store or an online store, make sure you have the necessary staff to handle all the customers or process all the orders.
Prepare your store and window display
It’s time to create that festive and attractive atmosphere at home. Whether it is for an e-commerce site or a physical store, do not hesitate to put your location in the colors of Christmas for example. The window display and merchandising are also strategic for physical stores. They play a considerable role in the attractiveness of the place. Visitors are more apt to make purchases when they are in this holiday atmosphere.
Making special offers with featured products
Special offers are a must to increase sales at the end of the year. Attractive promotions on featured products encourage visitors to take action. Apart from the well-known direct discounts, you can incorporate new concepts into your offers to increase your sales. Here are some ideas:
- Gift Sets;
- Buy 1 get 1 free offer;
- Contests;
- Free samples with a buy-back promotion;
- Buy 1 get 1 free offer; Buy 1 get 2 50% off offers;
- Packaging in Christmas colors;
- Etc.
In short, all means are good to incite the buyer to be tempted by one or several products.
In addition, you must play on the urgency and rarity of your promotional offers to trigger compulsive buying and increase your sales at the end of the year. Your offer must be valid only within a certain limit. Your prospects will be afraid of missing out on a good deal by missing out on these special year-end promotions. Countdowns work well on e-commerce sites.
Boost your communication
The end of the year period is the ideal time to boost your communication if you want to increase your sales.
Whatever means you usually use, redouble your efforts to make your promotional offers visible.
In this highly digitalized era, we can’t talk about communication without mentioning web marketing strategies. Indeed, it would be wise to use the following means to be visible online during the festive periods.
Social networks
Social networks are real information channels that gather billions of users. Your potential customers are undoubtedly on one or more of these networks. You must plan an effective strategy for your presence on social networks. Think about building and developing a community around your business during the year. This way, at the end of the year, you will only have to animate your audience while communicating enough about your current offers. Contests are a great way to do this.
Online advertising (Ads)
Here, it will be a question of using one of the advertising agencies to broadcast advertisements to users qualified for your offers. We talk about target or potential customers. These advertising networks allow you to show your ads to people who are likely to take action on your store. This is an effective way to increase your sales at the end of the year.
Email marketing
Email marketing is useful when the company has a database of prospects or former customers. It allows to make known its new end of year special offers to its existing customers, without spending on advertising.
Many customers buy occasionally, and mainly during the holiday season. It is therefore the time to relaunch those who have already made a purchase during the festive period as well as your customers who remained inactive during the year.
It is important to try to improve the opening rate of your promotional e-mails. Pay attention to the subject line and the title (short and punchy). Original content and a clear call to action will make your email campaigns more effective.
Collaborate with partners
Partnerships are a very effective way to increase your visibility on networks and, in turn, increase your sales at the end of the year.
To create partnerships easily and quickly, it is recommended to find a company whose activity is similar to yours. It would be more profitable to target a partner with a larger community that could potentially be interested in your products.
The principle of partnership is win-win: the parties will promote each other’s offers by quoting the other’s brand to their audience.
Make customer service a priority
Customers will be sensitive to the quality of services, to the welcome and even to the small attentions they receive. You must have an irreproachable customer service to keep them loyal. Why not offer them a small gift when they check out? Offer them Christmas cakes to taste?
Moreover, one aspect that enters into the customer service is the delivery time. If you have an online store, keep a close eye on your logistics in order to get your orders to your customers on time.
To avoid any misunderstandings, specify on your e-commerce site all the necessary information to customers, delivery, estimated dates of receipt of their package, etc..
Prepare your business now and put all the chances on your side to increase your sales during this intense period.
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