Put your best effort to take advantage of the Christmas sales season.
Every serious business owner needs to build a plan for the holiday sales season to get the best results. Every year, it’s better if you remind all of your potential customers to get ready for Christmas sales, but some have proven to leave it too late. Christmas is the uppermost retail period of the year and you will need to prepare ahead of time.
Click to Enlarge
The holiday buying season can regard for 20% to 40% of total sales revenue and as much as 80% of profit for some retailers. Specialty retailers that open for the holiday buying season rely on holiday buying for 100% of their business. Still, there are lots of issues to cover if you want to get the best results at Christmas. First, you need to do some business planning. One unique way to do it is by plan it backwards:
How long does it take you to pick, pack and ship? You need to determine the last date for selling online and delivering by Christmas. Remember there may be backlogs in delivery so check with your shipping agent or Australia Post.
What is the maximum number of orders that you can handle each day and still get the deliveries out? If you are thinking ahead maybe you need additional staffs or part-time workers to help.
The stock you will need on hand
Content changes you need for your web store
Photos and new stock information from suppliers
Christmas promotions and sales
Christmas gift cards and gift wrapping materials
Make sure that you have enough hosting capacity and bandwidth to handle your requirements. If you are unsure about this matter, talk to your hosting service provider and they can help you reviewing your usage overall.
It is a good idea to clean up your store by clearing out old products that are no longer available. Be ready for the holiday business ahead. Expect to see more activity from mobile devices:
QR codes
Gift buyers
Price comparisons
Special offers
Shipping and delivery
Social media
Prepare your plan and strategy
It might be a good time to review your overall eCommerce strategy and to look at how you can develop a more successful online business. You can take some time to consider how you will deal with:
Content – fresh and up to date
Pricing & inventory – availability and competitive,
Logistics – shipping as a differentiation,
Service & support – be available longer hours leading up to Christmas
Payment & refund/returns – be proactive and offer after Christmas support,
Security – got your SSL and payments in order – consider PayPal
Marketing – look at your Adwords campaigns and budgets,
Social media – get started long before Christmas offer gift advice,Quick Response (QR) codes in printed media – bring people to your website from their smart phone.
Is your online store ready?
It is no use waiting until December to set up the store since you just won’t make it in time. If you have an existing store, then now is time to clean up old content and get rid of out of date product and stock information. Each year there are new fads, styles, colours and collections so be up to date and prepared to take advantage of the demand.
Preparation for mobile and QR codes
Quick Response (QR) codes take shoppers from printed media direct to your website and allow you to promote products and sell online. There are many services that allow you to create QR codes (just do a quick Google search) these codes are simple images that contain information like a URL that a mobile phone with a QR code app can read. You should have your website URL on all printed material and traditional advertisements. However, QR codes can turn static printed promotional materials into dynamic links to your online store and direct to your products and promotions.
Make sure you have adequate stock.
Getting the stock can be tricky the closer you get to Christmas so you need to know what you will need now. Buying stock early can have a negative cash flow effect on your business so look at the possibility of commitment with deliveries later.
Enable a safe payment process.
Do you have a safe checkout process setup like PayPal Express, now the leading Australian payment method, eWAY, SecurePay or Payment Express all safe Australian payment providers? Consumers will be more careful this Christmas and look for security when buying online. Add an SSL certificate to your webstore, as it will increase buyer confidence. Trust and security can help dramatically improve shopping basket conversions and reduce abandonment.
Think about promotions.
You can setup special Google AdWords Campaigns just for Christmas and help drive Christmas traffic to your store. Go talk to your SEM partner you will be competing with lots of other businesses for customer attention but we know that most online purchases with start with a search and around 70% of those will be via Google. The use of a well prepared and funded online search engine marketing campaign leading up to Christmas can be a good investment.
Learn from Click Frenzy.
Will your business be effected by the Click Frenzy campaign that starts on November 18th 2014? Click Frenzy drives consumers to search online and look for great deals. If you are part of Click Frenzy then you should be prepared early and ready to track activity. If you are not taking part you can still expect an increase in traffic online so setup some nice offers and promotions to take best advantage of the opportunity.
Use the price comparison portals.
Open an account and add products to price comparison portals to promote your products and special offers, hope it can drive qualified traffic to your webstore. For example, offer free shipping for purchases over a certain value. Offer free Christmas gift cards and gift wrapping. Discounts are less of a value proposition at Christmas for buyers.
Offer Christmas specials.
You can put up special Christmas only products that have special pre-Christmas offers. Gift buyers come in many different types and good quality novelty items sell well at Christmas.
Add Christmas keywords.
Make sure that you add the Christmas keywords to you Meta-keywords with plenty of time to get crawled by the search engines before Christmas. Also make sure that you add Christmas Gift category names and description text to match up with you keywords. But remember timing is important! How often does Google crawl your website homepage? For most online stores it might be every 5 – 10 days so to get your changed messages out there it is not instantly available. Now might be a good time to setup some web analytics and a Google Webmasters account.
Add products by price range.
Products are all important and you might think of price ranges for gifts so that you fit everyone’s budgets.
Enhance your product descriptions.
It is easy to go through some of your products that might great gifts and add “gift advice” information to the descriptions. You can make recommendations and also setup your cross-selling so that combinations can go together. Make it easy from people to see how your product might appeal and what other products might be complementary.
People buying gifts want ideas.
So give them some. Set up special categories like “Gifts for him”, “Gifts for Mum”, “Gifts for the dog”, “Take a chance gifts” and so on. Be inventive as you need to stand out in a crowd. Also consider setting up a product category based on price so that visitors to your store can quickly find products within a price range.
Preparing for your SEO strategy.
Don’t forget that Google might take time to crawl and index your new content so allow plenty of time and don’t wait till the last minute.
Gift wrapping and gift cards.
These can be easily added in the shopping basket so you might want to think about offering free gift wrapping and free gift delivery.
Multiple shipping addresses.
You can have multiple shipping addresses so your buyers can ship directly to an alternative address. Offer this service and make sure you get the gift there on time.
Free shipping at Christmas.
Free shipping can be a great incentive to buy online. If you are selling a product online you can structure an average shipping price into your costs. Then allow free shipping by Australia Post. You can time the shipping and delivery so that as you get closer to Christmas shipping is no longer free but maybe at a premium to ensure delivery. Don’t be greedy.
Delivery cut-off date for Christmas.
It is no use selling to a customer who expects pre-Christmas delivery if you cannot get the product delivered on time. So you need to tell your buyers what they can expect if they buy on the 24th December. Make sure that you provide specific advice regarding returns and refunds as you do not want to get stuck after Christmas. Talk to your shipping company. Make sure that you check with your logistics provider and find out what the shipping cut-off dates are for your location. Christmas Day 2014 is on Thursday so you can expect most deliveries to be done by Monday 22nd December.
Give your store a Christmas theme.
It is easy to setup a new style and change the colours and banners for Christmas. You can even start doing that right now and make that the live style later in the year. Set up a countdown to Christmas – it can be a easy as a little added text to your home page. Don’t go overboard.
Keep selling after Christmas.
After Christmas is a great time for specials and people on vacation like to shop around for bargains. So don’t think everything stops on December 25th. The smart store operators will be ready with the Boxing Day and New Year’s specials campaigns come December 26th.
Christmas is the most important retail selling time in the year and you need to be prepared to get the best results. Your online store needs to be complete and setup for Christmas as soon as possible and you need to start Christmas promotions early, the week before Christmas is too late.