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The end of the year is so busy that planning and preparing your marketing/promotional events now is essential. Preparing for the retail holiday season in advance will help you avoid any last-minute problems and will allow you to manage your schedule and succeed in your sales!
Prepare yourself for promotions.
Each holiday has its own lexicon, customs, and color palettes. Take inspiration from them and make a splash by offering products specially curated for the holiday in question during this festive season, in particular, because this will give your products an aspect of exclusivity with real marketing power.
Indeed, a customer will be more inclined to take the plunge if the limited nature of the offer gives him/her/them a sense of urgency. If you don't have a seasonal design idea, you can remix your greatest hits to suit the holiday you're promoting: don't be ashamed to recycle – why waste a winning strategy?!
Also, think about offering customizable products: as we have seen in several previous articles, these are extremely trendy and make very popular gifts.
Determine a relevant selection of products that will be adapted to the sales of the season.
A catalog that is too extensive can be confusing for the consumer, so be sure to handpick your products to offer them only the cream of the crop.
- The T-shirt , for example, will always be a hit since it can be worn year-round, by itself, or under warmer garments.
- The mug , whether enamel or ceramic, is a natural favorite for the hot beverage season.
- Home decor items such as posters and cushions, during a time when people are enjoying their cocoon more than ever, are also real bestsellers.
If you wonder about the popularity of a certain product, don't hesitate to test the field with Google Trends by putting keywords of your choice to the test. Take a look at our example of using Google Trends for Photo Personalized Calendars to get a sense of what you can uncover by doing this exercise.
Fine-tuning your marketing for your customer base means wallets are ready to be drawn!
The retail holiday season is the perfect time to bring out the heavy artillery of marketing tools. Among the latter, we can utilize cross-selling, for example, thanks to which you can propose products in line with those your shoppers are already interested in or that they have already ordered in the past. Other marketing heavy-hitters are the famous gift boxes and guides, increasing your chances of making larger orders while facilitating the quest for perfect presents on the part of your customers. Consider re-targeting your big spenders and most loyal customers; send them a recap of their best purchases of the past year to remind them that they found their happiness with you last season. Targeted email campaigns like these generate a lot of traffic from returning customers!
Set up some of your promotional campaigns in coherence with the most frequent purchases of the past year by making them more trendy and up-to-date.
To do this, keep an eye on trends . Check on your competitors, on economic impacts on your consumers, on the latest fashions, and even on the trends projected for the new year. This will help you to use your promotional campaigns to position your brand as a market trailblazer, easily beating the competition!
Open a blog, or update your existing one regularly to improve your SEO/online presence.
Show up in searches where consumers often look to get gift ideas. Prepare your blog posts by digging up the latest gift idea trends for 2022, and sprinkle the internet with your content regularly. This is what your consumers are looking for: gift ideas, plans, recipes, and decoration concepts...chew them up, and they will be delighted!
Time is of the essence.
By preparing for the holidays before the end of this month creeps up on you (a little Halloween pun for you 😉), and staying atop the morphing nature of online shopping, you'll not only be prepared for this retail holiday season but will also be in a great position to pivot your well-laid plans to match anything the market can throw at you. After all, if the past two holiday seasons have taught us anything it's to have your plans and to know how to transform them at the drop of a hat.
So go ahead...make your promotional plans, identify your targets, identify new trends and get ready to lead during the retail holiday season.
That's it... now it's time to stop reading and start acting!