With the holiday season 2024 fast approaching, as of the time of writing this article, it will soon be time for people to begin their shopping and spending spree by purchasing:
- Gifts for loved ones
- Holiday decorations for their homes
- Food and drink to celebrate the holidays
This makes the holiday season the biggest and best time for merchants and business owners to take advantage of people’s shopping activities, and increase their sales. However, holiday sales can be a tricky event to manage, especially for those who have no prior experience in holiday sales. Furthermore, even business owners who have experienced multiple holiday sales events can have room for more improvement.
In this article, we will be outlining 7 holiday sale strategies that you can use to help boost and manage sales in your physical and/or online store.
1: Start Planning Early
The holiday season can be a hectic season for both customers and business owners, there is so much to prepare, arrange and track, that it can be quite exhausting if not planned properly. Therefore, the best way to tackle the holiday season for business owners is to start planning early, the sooner the better.
The holiday season begins from late November to early January. Furthermore, people are often in the mindset to complete their holiday shopping early to avoid the crowds that occur in stores in the peak holiday season. Therefore, as a business owner, it is better to start by, for example, early September in :
- Planning your events
- Promoting your events
- Ordering stock
- Upgrading or updating your website
- Making sure your stores can handle large crowds
By starting early you, as a business owner, will be fully prepared to tackle the holiday season head-on. Moreover, by planning early you will also be better prepared for any short-falls that might occur during the holiday season, such as
- Running out of stock during a big sales event
- Being unable to smoothly checkout customers’ products
- Not having many customers coming to your store due to lack of promotion
2: Flash Sales
During the holiday season, almost every store will be having sales, discounts, and special offers. Furthermore, even if you are having a discounted sale, you will still need to give your customer another reason to visit your store and not your competitors.
One way you can stand out from the crowd of merchants is by having a flash sale. A flash sale is where you suddenly increase the discount percentage for a limited time. Moreover, it is this time limit that draws customers to your flash sale because they know that in a short time this special sale will be over. As a result, you will most likely see more customers coming to your store to avail the limited-time offer.
3: Promoting on Social Media
As mentioned above, flash sales are an excellent way to bring more customers to your store. However, a flash sale can only be successful if it is properly promoted to people, otherwise, no one would know that you are having a flash sale.
Promoting on social media platforms is one of the most effective ways to let people know about what kind of holiday sales, discounts, and special offers you are having at your store. This is because social media platforms are visited by thousands if not millions of people daily. Therefore, if you create an eye-catching post on a social media platform like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc. It is bound to get noticed by people. As a result, you will have more and more people aware of your holiday sales promotions, and they might even decide to pay your store a visit.
4: Analyse Data from Past Holiday Sales
If you are a veteran of holiday season sales, you can use your experience in previous holiday seasons to guess what this year’s holiday season will have in store.
If you keep track of previous holiday season sales data such as:
- Peak shopping times
- Low-activity shopping times
- Most popular product
- Most profitable product
- Maximum number of people at one point of time in your store
- Minimum number of people at one point of time in your store
You can use this data to your advantage.
Using this data, along with the “planning early method”, can help you manage your time and resources to make the most of the holiday season. Furthermore, by analyzing certain patterns from previous holiday seasons, you can make a pretty accurate estimate of how this year’s holiday sales activity will be like.
In case you don’t have the previous year’s data, you could always try borrowing this data from other stores or even search online for something useful.
5: Prioritize “Gift” and “Decoration” Items
During the holiday season, people mostly buy products that can be given as gifts to others, or products that are used for decoration. Therefore, to maximize your sales during the holiday season, it’s a good idea to put your “gift” and “decoration” items on the front line so that they can be sold more often. Moreover, it will also be a good idea to not focus too much on non-holiday-related products. For example, during the holiday sale, you should focus on selling more wristwatches rather than laundry detergent.
By prioritising and focusing on selling gift and decoration items you will be able to provide customers with items that are in the most demand. Moreover, it will be pretty embarrassing if a customer comes to your store and finds out that you will need to take his/her required product out of a storeroom. Furthermore, during the holiday season, you should keep common, high-selling products ready for immediate selling.
6: Prepare for Large Crowds
During the holiday season, you can be sure that there is a good chance your store might experience large crowds during your holiday sales. Therefore, it is very important to prepare for large crowds so that you can smoothly and efficiently serve all the customers that come to your store.
To prepare your store for huge crowds of people, you can take the following steps:
- Increase your staff for peak shopping times such as evenings and weekends
- Add more checkout counters such as self-checkout counters, pop-up checkout counters, and express checkout counters
- Make sure your store is properly and sufficiently stocked with products
- Crowd-control people at choke points such as the entrance, exit, and checkout counters
- Have a maximum occupancy sign on your store
With the above measures in place, you will more easily be able to manage large crowds that tend to occur during holiday season sales.
7: Update and Upgrade your Website
A store website can be the most vital source of providing awareness to your customers about your holiday season sales. Therefore, during the holiday season, it will be a good idea to:
- Upgrade your website to handle large traffic spikes
- Update your website to better promote your holiday sales
There are a number of ways to update your website for the holiday season. For example, you can:
- Add holiday themes and designs to your website
- Advertise your holiday sales on your website
- Put discounted products on the homepage
If you are a physical store owner, you will also need to ensure that your customer can easily locate your store if they decide to come to your store after browsing your website. After all, the last thing you need is for potential customers to get lost trying to get to your store. However, to prevent this issue from happening, there are product/store locator plugins, such as Agile Store Locator Plugin, that are specially designed to easily guide your customers to your store.
A product/store locator is a website plugin that guides customers to your store by adding a new page to your website that provides customers with accurate information such as directions, location, address, store timings, and a map. As a result, more of your online customers will be able to locate your physical store easily in case they want to make an in-person purchase. In addition, you can also use the product/store locator to display all your products on your website in neat and organised ways.
With a product/store locator plugin, such as WP Maps, installed on your website you will:
- Have more customers finding your stores easily
- Have more chances of making sales
- Be able to guide interested customers from your website to your physical store.
Final Thoughts
The holiday seasons are one of the best opportunities for store owners to sell large volumes of products and make a healthy revenue. However, if not properly planned for, holiday seasons can be one of the most difficult periods to manage, in the final words you can conduct a survey in order to get the user’s feedback and reviews, for the WordPress platform we would recommend WordPress survey plugin.
With the above-mentioned 7-holiday sales strategies, we are confident that you will be able to make 2024’s holiday season the most lucrative for your business.