Christmas markets are often unpredictable in their pacing. After Thanksgiving and the Black Friday sales, people are often worn out financially and are saving for the winter festivities. You may not be prepared for the boom that comes, and if handled poorly this can rob you of precious sales and revenue, at a time where you should be experiencing the best sales numbers of the year.
Here we have collated an important list of business advice to help you sell big and empty your excess inventory. This will help you enjoy the new annual year fresh-faced and filled with pride due to your business performance during the holidays:
Prepare Your Website
More and more people are using websites to fill all their shopping needs. From groceries to clothing to entertainment, it’s now the default place people look to learn about and find new products. It’s also the place people visit to learn about deals or any promotions you have on offer. For this reason, you must be prepared for a large volume of traffic. If you run your website and domain in-house, this could mean hiring 24/7 maintenance services to manage any downtime, or even transferring your entire server hosting offsite to an outsourced firm more able to keep you stable.
It’s always nice to graphically theme your website around the winter holidays, with snow falling and maybe a few snowmen smiling, greeting every visitor to the landing page. This not only looks novel and appealing, but it lets consumers know that you are taking part in a Christmas sale, or that special stock limited to this season only is worth a look right now. Preparing for this online demand will help you plan for the large volume of stock you’re likely to sell depending on the promotions you have. It can also help automatically limit consumers from buying stock that no longer exists.
Promotions
Promotions are the bread and butter of Christmas profit. Competition is fierce, and almost every consumer expects some great deals. Depending on your output, the stock you need to lose, as well as reading the current trends of the society, this well-calibrated promotion can net your business plenty of extra Christmas sales. It’s important you use the right platform. Exposure to your promotion is essential. You might consider hiring a video marketing agency to design an advertisement for radio, television, online or social media marketing.
You must also plan staff availability around the predetermined times of your promotional campaign. You might find that offering staff incentivized overtime payment influences many of them to help you out during the long nights of managing customer accounts and delivery, and the cost could truly be worth it. Communicate clearly with staff and listen to their priorities and concerns.
Promotions aren’t only limited to selling products at cheap rates, either. You can bundle like products together to help ship those that aren’t currently selling well, or to launch a flagship innovative and new product into the selling stratosphere. Be sure you keep a comprehensive ecommerce acquisition and distribution channel for optimized selling. Assess your goals, assess your selling capacities, and go forward with gusto and passion.
Staff
Staff are often overworked during Christmas periods, or at least they feel that way. This is especially true of highly-seasonal businesses, such as hospitality venues, restaurants and certain retail stores to name a few. You might find that handling the added pressure requires more bodies on your metaphorical shop floor.
Consider developing close links with temping agencies before the massive boom of pre and post Christmas sales in case any staff members drop out. Incentivize overtime, and never be afraid to outsource tasks to new businesses during this period. It might be that you’re simply stretched too thin, or you mistakenly underestimated how popular a select product or service might be.
Having these agencies on hand will help you set the proportional labor resourcing to the tasks at hand. If you grossly misjudge your selling figures, calling all the temp staff in could get very costly, so predict your selling trends wisely. Investing in an agency with a strong reputation can get you out of some major payroll jams. It will also be a very wise investment indeed.
Staff must also be taken care of at this time. Be sure to offer healthy refreshments, competent breaks (sometimes more than one or two,) Christmas bonuses to those who make a difference, and note who really tries hard to present a stellar working performance. It might be that these people who can knuckle down during crunch time are worthy of a promotion, or at least a look at further responsibility.
With these tips, you’ll find your business is well prepared and nicely oiled for the Christmas boom.
I hope you enjoyed this article about how to prepare your business staff and retail or ecommerce stores for the holiday rush.
Interested in more articles about business management?
Read My Blog Posts:
- Expand Your Brand For Sales Growth
- How To Better Monitor Your Finances
Published by Michael J Schiemer
Owner of the Bootstrap Business Blog
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