A holiday sale can make a huge boost to a company’s bottom line. People are actively looking to shop during these holiday season. But once the holiday season ends, how do you keep customers shopping?
First, it requires market research and providing exceptional customer service during the holiday season. Doing so, will instill the kind of customer loyalty all businesses want.
But in this article, we will specifically look at 12 ways to continue getting sales after the holidays are offer with these tips to keep people shopping.
1. Have A Post Holiday Special Sale or Discount
People love to have some kind of discount. You can look at bringing new and past customers with your Post Holiday Special Sale or Discount.
You can advertise your sale leveraging a free popup plugin to broadcast your message to visitors.
Leverage your whole store or a special product that people can get. By offering a special sale, you can bring attention to your whole store.
You could even offer a special discount just for customers who use a particular payment method or credit card. It’s great post-purchase experiences like this that brings in more sales and keep customers shopping.
2. Giveaway Special: Free Stuff to Bring In More Sales
Businesses have used giveaways as a marketing tactic to build their brand and get people into their stores. It can be a great way to build up an email list.
If you have something of value that you can give away, it can be a good way to draw people into your store. Look at upselling and cross-selling your different products and services.
Consider offering quality promotional items with your brand design on them. This strategy can serve as an ongoing marketing campaign.
Depending on your sales strategy, you can seek to get emails or more people to check out your store. Use the Free Giveaway to bring in more potential clients.
3. Build a Loyalty Program
A loyalty program will help your company make more sales. A lot of companies like Starbucks have tried to gamify the process.
Having a loyalty program can help your business become a brand. It can increase the number of followers that frequent your store.
It’s all about showing appreciation for the customers that follow your brand.
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Who should you develop a loyalty program?
A loyalty program works best for businesses that have repeat customers. If you have a product that people can purchase, look at building up that loyalty.
Essentially, you can get points for purchasing or the amount spent. Different companies will help you set up a strong loyalty program.
A loyalty program is a long-term plan to get sales after the holidays. It allows you to get sales regularly. Make sure you have had customers repeatedly buy your products and services.
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How do you build a loyalty program?
A successful loyalty program example is from a company called TapMango. Their software integrates with different payment processors.
They will help you create an interface for their system and your customers. Leverage what other companies have done to strengthen their brand and their customers.
You’ll need to think about what types of incentives you can offer to your customers. They can get something for free or a future discount.
Depending on your products and customers, you may want to consider different tiers. The more frequently someone purchases one of your products, the higher they go up in the tier.
4. Release a New Product
One of the best things you can do is have a new product that you can market. It gives your previous and new customers to check out your store.
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Expanding your products and services
Look at developing new products and services. Find reasons to reach out to your customer base. A new product is an excellent way to draw more sales.
One of the best ways to expand your products and services is by asking your customers. Once you have your ideas, they will be the customers that you reach out to first. You can offer a special promotion to these customers.
By involving your customers in the process, you can build your brand and a loyal following.
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Creating buzz about your product
Look at releasing a new product after the holidays to keep your sales going. You can generate a lot of buzz by focusing on your new products after the holidays.
You can look at pre-launching your products. It can be a good way for early birds to get a special deal. When it’s ready for launch, you have a pool of ready customers. You can market your new product over and over again.
5. Market To Your Emails - Different Promotions For More Sales
One of the best things you can do is market to your existing base of customers. Email is a good way to build up rapport and remind people that you are in business.
After the holidays, give your customers a reason for why they are being reached out to. Leverage new products, services, a discount, or giveaway to boost attention.
Look at getting upsells and cross-selling different products and services. Look at segmenting your lists wherever possible.
You don’t want to send emails to people that already bought your products and services.
6. Leverage Social Media Influencers
Social Media is an awesome way to bring attention to your brand. You can post different products and services that you have for sale.
Leverage your social media platforms by connecting with other influencers. Influencer marketing is a growing industry to reach more customers and businesses.
According to Influencer Marketing Hub, 2018, the return on investment, ROI, for influencer marketing is that for every 1 dollar spent the company will earn $18. This fact can have massive implications for your business.
The benefit of working with social media influencers is that it will support your other social media channels. If you have an influencer shouting out about your product, you will also get followers and subscribers to your channel.
You can connect with influencers directly, ask an agency to do recruiting or join an influencer group on Facebook. Look at offering something of value to people first.
You can leverage your other promotions or giveaways for influencers to promote.
7. Retargeting Tactics and Segmentation
Increasingly, it’s important to be able to know exactly who you should be reaching and what you should say to people.
Focus on your customers’ needs. If you know exactly what they want, you’ll be able to get more sales.
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Using surveys to segment your lists
Retargeting tactics and segmenting your lists are important. It connects people to the products and services that they are most interested in.
You can get people on social media, your website, or through email. Connect with people and see how you can start working smarter.
Look at using surveys to connect with your customers. It can be a good way to do market research and find out exactly your customers’ needs.
You can target specific customers on specific products and services using audience segmentation tools.
SurveyMonkey lets you create surveys for your customers and your own team. Look at finding people interested in specific products and services.
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Retarget potential customers
It’s all about getting leads for your business. It’s always easier to get a past customer than it is to get a new customer. Find ways to target the people that are already interested in your content, products, and services.
If you run paid traffic, a lot of the retargeting efforts can be tracked through your website. Facebook and Google have a tracking pixel that you can install on your website.
You can use their systems to find customers that have displayed interest in your products and services.
Make sure you have an optimal website. The more people visit your website, the more you can retarget potential customers.
Online advertising is one of the best ways to find new customers. Make sure that your costs are lower than the amount to acquire the customer.
Consider integrating the POWR Facebook Feed to your website to improve customer conversions leveraging images from your social media.
8. Upsell to Higher Prices
Bring people into your store with discounts, specials, and giveaways. Look at some point having some kind of upsell.
An upsell will give your business a boost. Use your discount, promotion, and giveaway to draw in customers.
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Increasing AOV (Average Order Value)
Look at having some kind of upsell to be profitable. It’s important that your business stays profitable. An upsell will help you get higher prices.
An upsell increases your overall cart value. If a customer gets a discount or giveaway, you can increase the dollar amount spent by having some kind of upsell.
9. Expand to International Markets
Consider looking at different international markets. Focusing on other markets can be a great way to include sales and introduce people to your brand.
Consider the places where it makes sense to start marketing.
Make sure you have the infrastructure in place to be able to ship your products if you are dealing with physical items. You’ll want to make sure you have a system in place for delivering overseas.
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A Guide on Expanding into International Markets
A business should not rush into international markets. There are different competitors and market conditions.
If you plan on being in these markets for the long term, it can drastically increase your bottom line after the holiday sales.
- Business Plan - Identify Opportunities to get distribution, sales, labeling, and compliance
- Products and Services - Find out the products or services you will be promoting
- Market Research - This is part of your business plan, but find out if people will be interested in your products or services. You can use surveys and see what competitors are doing.
- International PEO - A company that will deal will contracts, risk mitigation, compliance, and payroll while you maintain control of your employees
- Infrastructure - Once you have revenue coming in from a foreign location, you may want to have some kind of branch in that area.
Expanding to international markets can greatly increase your reach. It can provide sales for after the holidays, but also later increase your bottom line when the next holiday comes up.
10. Website Usability - Increase Your Online Presence
Find ways to strengthen and optimize your website with better web design.
The more you can get a stronger website set up, the more leads you can get for your online business. You can focus on getting higher search results and retaining clients.
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Speed Up Your Website - Lower Bounce Rates and Improve SEO
According to LoadStorm, Econsultancy, 1 in 4 people will leave a website if it takes 4 seconds or longer for a website to load. You should not be losing customers because of the speed of your website.
You want your website to be friendly to users. If your website is slow, you will lose customers. Your website should have easy to use navigational buttons.
Google looks at your speed and can improve your SERP, search engine results page. This means you can get more customers simply by improving your website performance.
These at these couple fixes to improve your website speed:
- Enable Compressions - look at using Gzip or similar software to reduce the size
- Minify CSS, Javascript, and HTML - optimize your codes
- Reduce Redirects - Have customers go directly to the webpage instead of being redirected
- Browser Caching - Don’t have to wait for the whole page to load
- Use CDNs - delivers content quicker to different geographic locations
- Improve Server Response Times - check with your host or change your hosting
- Optimize Images - Resize and look at minimizing your images
If you are running promotions to your website, you need to make sure that your website is performing optimally. You don’t want a situation where your website crashes.
Having a strong website, allows you to get more customers and retain the customers that are checking out your website.
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Have A Good Shopping Cart - Get Paid When Customers Visit Your Website
Make sure that if you have people able to purchase products and services online that everything runs smoothly. Make sure the shopping cart works and it’s able to get payment.
Examples of Shopping Carts:
- Shopify - Easy to use shopping cart with good support
- Shopacchino - Integrated well with shipping
- Ecwid - Support for different languages
- Magento - Good for programmers or people with a team
- WooCommerce - Great for WordPress users with a lot of add-ons
- ThriveCart - Good for WordPress users and online marketers
Depending on what platform you have built your website, it may already come with a good shopping cart. Make sure it’s integrated with any of your needs.
Does it integrate well with shipping, taxes, and managing inventory? These are some of the questions you need to think about.
Make sure you have some kind of payment gateway like PayPal or Stripe. Make sure that everything is operational and you can receive payments.
11. Customer Service: Online Chat Feature
One of the easiest things you can do is add an online chat feature. Some people will find your website’s navigation a little bit hard. An online chat feature helps navigate people to the things they are looking for.
According to EMarketer, 35% of consumers will make a purchase online after using live chat. People want extra help in finding solutions to their problems.
Leverage the POWR chat plugin to easily integrate this feature to your website.
A customer can be looking for something specific and look directly for a contact page. An online chat feature can be a good way to help someone with a problem.
It can reduce refunds and help customers find a specific product or service.
12. Work With Your Local Market
Find a way to integrate your products and services with the local market. If you can find a good way to connect with your local market, they can be a good distributor of your product or service.
Finding Retailers to Work With:
- Connect with independent storekeepers - Find the mom-and-pop stores that you can connect with. You can ask for the owner on the phone.
- Find distributors - Distributors have connections with retailers. They can get your product in a lot of different stores because of their pre-existing relationships.
- Get in front of gatekeepers - Bigger retailers have gatekeepers. You will need to give them a solid pitch and find ways to get past them.
Find a way that it benefits both your local retailer or business. It can boost your sales. The larger the partners, the more you can both benefit and increase your reach.
Have a plan in place to work with the people around you. You can look at using unique strategies to connect with local businesses.
You can find trade shows and business meetings to connect with other businesses. These relationships can bring your product in front of people.
Conclusion
Focus on one or two tactics. Some of these ideas are short term gains. While some of these ideas will take time to build up.
You will be able to find sales over time if you keep at it. It requires perseverance to build up a business. Choose the tactics that make sense for your business.
Author Bio
Wesley Cherisien is a speaker, trainer, entrepreneur and tech investor who has penned hundreds of articles, books and training guides for organizations in the Fortune 500, consultants and authors spanning across multiple industries.
Chief Editor of wesleycherisien.com, Wesley is a creative and highly innovative thinker with 10+ years of experience writing for online publications.
