Christmas and New Year holidays are the best time to boost sales and end the year on a high. Christmas sales can be more profitable than Black Friday sales as they last for days (and even weeks). However, you should start planning for Christmas well in advance. Don’t wait until the last minute to run promotions or ads. Reach out to the audience when they are still planning their holiday purchases and budget.
Another vital factor you need to consider is the sales and profit ratio. While sales are important, profit is what keeps your business running. You need to earn an overall profit even when offering discounts and free deals. This requires planning and research. Track market trends, invest in marketing strategies that deliver higher ROI, and capitalize on the holiday shopping frenzy.
Here are five ways to boost your sales and profits during the Christmas season.
● Optimize Website & Social Media Content
Use seasonal keywords, themes, and multimedia to attract users to your business. Create a landing page for Christmas sales and use it for social media promotions. Tweak the web pages to make them appear ready for Christmas celebrations. Share tips and tricks for Christmas purchases, saving, gifting, and more. You can subtly promote your business while providing useful information to the audience.
See that the website is optimized for search engines and shows up on the SERPs (search engine results page). Hire an SEO expert to fine-tune the optimization strategy. Your website has to be multi-device friendly and optimized for mobile phones and voice search to generate more traffic.
● Send Text Messages
Text Message Marketing has been one of the best and most affordable ways to promote your business. Use text messages to inform the customers about upcoming Christmas sales and deals. Include shortened URL of the landing page to provide more information to customers. You can offer early bird deals or VVIP discounts to selected loyal customers by sending them text messages with exclusive codes or purchase links.
Don’t limit text message marketing to promotions. Send wishes, greetings, Christmas quotes, cute images, gifs, easy tips, etc., to strengthen the communication channel between you and customers. You can even plan a series of Christmas tips where you send one message per day along with a little harmless joke.
● Gift Cards, Combos, & Bundles
Now is the time to work on the actual deals and offers to increase the conversion rate and bring more orders. You can attract customers by creating different types of Christmas sales. Provide gift cards for minimum purchases. Combine two or more products as bundles. Create gift hampers and offer personalization of hampers.
There are many ways to maximize sales and clear the stock in your inventory. However, you need to balance the discounts and prices to ensure you get enough profit at the end of the sale. Furthermore, you can continue the high of Christmas sales into the New Year by offering gift cards that can be redeemed during the next purchase.
● Drive Urgency with Limited Period Deals
Nothing like a 24-hour or 12-hour deal to nudge people and increase sales instantly. Run one-day special deals during the ongoing Christmas sales. You can provide this only on specific items on the website/ store. Use social media, search engines, and text message marketing to promote the limited period deals.
The intention is to create excitement in the audience. They’ll start ordering the minute the deal is live. The ticking clock on the website will act as a reminder and increase urgency.
● Free Wrapping, Shipping, & More
Christmas is all about gifts and sharing. Make it easy on customers by wrapping the purchases for free and offering free delivery/ shipping. They will be relieved when you handle the logistics on their behalf.
It’s common for big stores and malls to hire temporary staff to wrap gifts for customers. If you would like, you can do the same and even include a teeny gift from your side as a token of appreciation.
Don’t forget that the first step is to manage your inventory. Stay up to date about the stock movement and accurately forecast the demand for the holiday season. Going out of stock halfway through Christmas sales will affect your profits. At the same time, you don’t want the excess leftover stock to sell next year. Use reliable data analytics and demand forecasting tools to estimate the inventory requirement and fill up the warehouse in advance.
TXTImpact was launched by Wiret2Air in 2006. We are now a leading business text message marketing platform and service provider in the US market. Our clients belong to real estate, government, religious, retail, eCommerce, hospitality, travel, entertainment, nonprofit, and other industries. We believe in offering affordable, customized, and business-friendly SMS marketing solutions to our clients.
