Preparing for the upcoming holiday is a full-time task, so it’s fair to say that focusing on a few every year is probably a good way to limit the stress and to keep you free to further develop your business. At least until you have enough staff to be able to handle the ever growing amount of holidays that are being thrown your way. It is easy enough to set up a few discounts or something along those lines for the smaller ones, but the few really big holidays will require your full attention and most of your time. Christmas is one of those big holidays, obviously, and it’s best to start the preparations early. Some would argue, that now is already a little late, but there is still a bit of time
Write a festive newsletter
The newsletter will keep your customers up to date with any offers that you are promoting during the Christmas period. It is the best way to get hold of as many of your past customers as possible without investing too much money. The good thing with newsletters is that you can theme them up for each holiday. A good looking newsletter is sure to get people through your doors.
Offering discounts on deliveries
The run-up to Christmas is a great way to get your customers to talk about you and to recommend you to their friends. If you can afford to offer free delivery. It’s one of the defining factors for customers to make a decision on whether to purchase from you or not and at a time where there are many shops competing for every customer they can get, this might well be the factor that might tip the scales in your favour.
Offer a Christmas promotional calendar
Something you can outline in your email campaign or on the front page of your online shop is that you are offering a discount on certain items for just one day or week and that this offer changes every day. That way you will have people coming back for more every day to see what the next offer might be! It’s a fun little way to promote some return custom.
A Christmas themed blog post
Writing a blog is also a nice way to engage with your customers. Outline your offers. write about great present ideas or maybe just talk about your business at Christmas time, if you think that is something that your customers will be interested in. Always bear in mind the promotions that you want to be promoting during the Christmas time and make sure that your blog posts are SEO optimised so that they will organically drive traffic to your site via search engines. If you haven’t started writing a blog yet, then this might be an ideal time to start.
Use social media
Social media is crucial when it comes to Christmas and will get you great results if done well. It’s one of the easiest ways to reach a significant audience and there are so many different options that you can explore here. Twitter is an easy way to keep your customers up-to-date on your latest offers, you could use Facebook to get the word out about a competition that you might be running at the moment in the run-up to Christmas. You can use Instagram to post pictures of Christmas present ideas that you might have for your customers and of your products set in a Christmas setting.
Consider a Christmas redesign
You could revamp your website for the Christmas period. A good looking Christmas design will be a great way to inspire shoppers to buy from you. It shows that you are offering something specifically for Christmas and it might be nice to change things up for a short while. The good thing is that you can use that design for the next few Christmas years to come, so it won’t feel like a big investment for just one use. It doesn’t even need to be a full redesign. Just changing your logo up a little bit and having a few Christmas specific banners and boxes might well be enough to really smarten up your online shop for the holidays.
Offer discounts. Offer a holiday sale, but remember that your sale doesn’t have to be exclusively on holiday items. Many shoppers will want to take advantage of the holiday season discounts not just for presents, but also for other items.
