EPISODE 85 OF THE MARKETING SOLUTIONS PODCAST: MAXIMISING YOUR SALES THIS CHRISTMAS

Sonya:
If you're a local or small business owner, things are looking good for you this year. Not only are around 79% of all Australians planning to spend as much, if not more, than they did on Christmas presents last year, but 43% of shoppers have declared that shopping from small and independent retailers is a priority for them this Christmas. So how do you make the most of the early season as a small business owner and what are some of the things you can do to cut through the noise. I take you through my top tips and strategies we'll be implementing for our clients.

Sonya:
Welcome to the Boom Your Biz podcast, a podcast for the movers, the shakers, and even bigger action takers in business. I'm your host, Sonya McIntyre-Reed, and each week I'll be exploring the question of what really makes businesses and organizations thrive. I'm on a mission to educate, empower, and inspire business owners and myself along the way. [Music 00:00:55]

Sonya:
Hello everyone. I apologize for being M.I.A. We have been busy, busy bees at our agency, Linchpin Digital. Black Friday, Cyber Monday have been huge already, but it's that time of year again, when you're truly shocked that another year is almost over, have no idea what to get anyone, and if you don't already have that Mariah Carey song on repeat in your head, you soon will. Yep. It's Christmas. Again. Already. Last year, I introduced you to the concept of running a 12 days of Christmas promotion. For many small businesses, this is a great way to participate in the festive season and spread a bit of Christmas cheer. Particularly if you're in an industry where people aren't really likely to buy when what you're selling is a gift for a loved one. I'm thinking about real estate, building, trades or the automotive industry. A giveaway or a series of giveaways is a great way to build your database and your brand recognition so that when people are getting into the swing of things in the new year, you'll be top of mind.

Sonya:
Giveaways are also a great way to team up with other local businesses to create one really juicy prize without having to bear the entire cost yourself. Simply team up with a few local businesses, I'd say no more than six, and make it a condition of entry that people need to follow all contributing businesses to enter. You want to showcase other local businesses that complement rather than compete with your business. For the real estate industry, you could team up with a local winery, a home ware store, a florist, or a garden center, a local platter business, and a cake shop to create a prize that is impressive enough to get plenty of entries.

Sonya:
Competitions do really well in regional areas where people want to support local businesses and feel they have more of a chance of winning. Annoyingly though, we are seeing the rise of spam accounts that target competition entrance with the private messages from a dummy account. So make sure that when you publish your competition, you mention that you only have one account and will not be sending special offers or requests of any form via direct message. Also, stress that you will not be asking them for payment at any point in time as well.

Sonya:
Another great Christmas activity we see is a 12 days of discount promotion. This does take a little bit of work front to set up, but it can be a really effective technique, particularly for businesses that are either exclusively eCommerce based or have an eCommerce component with brick and mortar store.

Sonya:
Let's say you're a beauty business with an eCommerce side to your business. You're likely to be maxed out with clients in the lead up to Christmas anyway, so discounting your services is probably not the smartest move at this point. But what if you ran daily discounts from the first to the 12th of December on your products, instead? This would work really well for other eCommerce businesses that sell a variety of products, such as clothing brands or supplement retailers. Each day, you have a discount on a different brand or type of product, you promote it heavily on your social media and viral daily newsletter to your list, so each promo only lasts for 24 hours to give that element of scarcity.

Sonya:
This is the part where I remind you that you don't own your audience or any social media platform. And it's important that you are capturing customer and follower details so that if Facebook and Instagram go down, like they did earlier this year, or if the algorithms keep dropping and you can no longer rely on organic reach or add/spend goes through the roof, add prices I mean go through the roof, you're still going to have a way to contact your people. If you're not communicating with your list regularly via email, now is the time to start. Just get set up on a free tool, such as MailChimp, that will do the trick for now. And if you want to execute on the 12 days of Christmas ideas, I recommend checking episode 52 of this podcast, it's called how to do a 12 days of Christmas promo. There's also an accompanying freebie to this episode, which will walk you through all of the promotions that I'm talking about.

Sonya:
So head to kissmarketing.com.au/musings/episode85, or, hey guys, just head the home page of my website. I'll get a popup or something on there for you, easy. I've also linked directly to that freebie in the show notes for you.

Sonya:
So before we go further, I feel the need to tell you here that your 12 days of discounts isn't the time to try and move old stock that hasn't been selling. You know that feeling when you see your favorite store is having a huge sale only to discover when you go through the sales rack, that it's all last season stock? We want to avoid that at all costs. The discounted products need to be products that people actually want to buy. I'm talking about your best sellers, products with a cult following, or new releases that your customers have been waiting for.

Sonya:
This is your chance to introduce customers to a new product that if they love it, they'll continue to purchase for years to come. It's also a great way to get new customers into your store or onto your online store. Yes, your bottom line may take a small hit, but the potential payoff is huge. You need to be thinking about the lifetime value of each new customer, and also, when someone lands on your website and they've already got their wallet out, ready to buy, chances are that their average auto value is going to increase quite significantly at this time of year.

Sonya:
Now, 12 days of discounts is not so something that you want to organize at the last minute or expect to be able to set up on the day in Shopify. You want to spend some time setting up and scheduling all your discounts, newsletters, and social media posts, so that they're ready to go. I recommend to my eCommerce clients that they create the discount in the backend of their online store to avoid hassles when people don't enter discount codes correctly, forget to enter codes, or try to get a discount on the promotion from the day before. So by having the discount clearly marked on the products that are discounted that date, you save a lot of hassle.

Sonya:
And just also on that note as well, if you are running any form of Google ads like Google shopping ads, and you have a discount code active, it's not going to pull that discounted price into the Google shopping ads. So instead I'd rather you directly change that price on the product, instead. Can't do 12 days? Why not do a couple of week-long promotions instead? This will give you more time to promote your special offer and generate interest.

Sonya:
A fun Christmas promotion we've seen popping up already is Christmas gift guides. They're a great way to reach a wider audience and showcase a lot of your products at once. We all have a relative who's hard to buy for and gift guides are a great way to show your customers and potential customers that you've got the solution to their problem. How you organize your gift guides will depend largely on your product. There's the usual mom, dad, baby categories, but you can also have a bit of fun with your categories too. For example, the wine snob, the gym junkie, the food fanatic. I'm willing to bet that these names would convert higher than generic category names. Make it a bit fun. It's really easy to use the templates they have in Canva to whip up some graphics for your social media and newsletter. Make sure that you are also promoting your gift guides regularly on stories where your followers are most likely to see them. And it could be a great opportunity to dive into some reels as well, showcasing the products that you think people will love for Christmas.

Sonya:
I know we're talking about Christmas, but I have to mention that every year for Father's Day, I get my dad a Darrell Lea Dad's Bag, partly for the fun name, partly for the value and mostly for the convenience. Which brings me to my next Christmas promo idea: bundles. Bundles are a great way to offer value and make Christmas gifting easier for your customers. If you want to see great examples of bundles in action, I suggest you visit the Mecca website and type gift sets into the search bar. Most of the brands featured on the site, which sells beauty products, skin care, and fragrances, for those not in the know, have limited edition holiday gift sets available. These gift sets are always much better in value than if you would purchase each individual product separately, and a lot of customers wait all year to buy them for themselves.

Sonya:
While it's perhaps too late to organize gorgeous packaging like you'll see those gift sets come in, it's not too late to organize a great value bundle for your customers. Pick three or four products that complement each other, decide upon a discount that you're comfortable with and set it up on your online store. You can always plan to create special packaging next year if they sell well this Christmas, but for now a box or a bag is just fine. What your customers want is the special offer and the convenience of being able to get an entire gift in one place. Oh, and by the way, if you are operating a Shopify website, why not consider having a little popup at the checkout, offering people a gift card as well to be included with the gift and a message that you can write on that?

Sonya:
So if you want to stay top of mind all year round, offering a subscription is a fantastic idea for customers who want to give something really special to someone they love. If you're a florist offering a monthly flower delivery option for six or 12 months is a great idea. One of our clients offers a subscription box of local craft beers all year round and I think this is such a fantastic gift idea for Christmas. This is not just an option for product based businesses. Massage therapists, I am looking at you and cleaners. If someone paid for me to have my house cleaned once a month for a year, I would be so thrilled. And I bet that someone in your family would be too.

Sonya:
Finally, why not run a promotion that you don't actually promote? Hear me out on this one. One of the core principles of customer satisfaction is the surprise and delight factor. Why not identify your top tier clients and give them a small gift, say thank you for their loyalty throughout the year? We have a beauty client that does this really, really well. They get samples from all their suppliers and create goody bags for their clients. Plus, they include a gift voucher for a dollar amount off a facial treatment. Not only are the clients thrilled to receive a gift, but it's a clever promotion for a number of reasons.

Sonya:
Firstly, the goody bag is filled with products that our client sells in their clinic and online. If the client likes the product, guess where they're going to buy it. At your store. Secondly, the vouchers for a facial. If you're familiar with the beauty industry, you'll know that most popular treatments in many clinics are hair removal and tanning. Facials are a real treat yourself activity for many women and often something that they don't think of buying for themselves, but once you've had a really great facial, let's just say it will not be your last.

Sonya:
And finally, the voucher is for use in January only, which is traditionally a quiet time for the clinic. These vouchers, which don't cover the entire cost of the facial, just a good chunk of it, make sure that the clinic starts off the new year with a full book of happy clients.

Sonya:
Those are some of the bigger promotional ideas you can utilize for Christmas, but there are a ton of smaller things you can do to spread some festive cheer too. Strap yourself in, it's time for the lightning round.

Sonya:
Here are 16 things you can do to maximize your sales this Christmas. Team up with a charity and donate a percentage of your sales. Offer free gift wrapping. Deliver personally to your local area, because we all know how well Australia post is doing this year. Add a sort by price filter to your website so people can stay within their budget. Add a little treat to every order. Add a Christmas theme landing page to your website, so customers can find what they're looking for faster. Promote your gift vouchers and have physical vouchers available for last minute purchases. Re-target anyone who purchased or browsed your online store during Black Friday and Cyber Monday with a Christmas special offer. You could do this with ads and email. Create a Christmas pay per click campaign. That target searches for gifts, gift ideas and Christmas. Add a competition homepage to your websites. Customers can spin the wheel to potentially win a discount and you get their email address in return.

Sonya:
Update your website and social media imagery to get into the spirit. Make sure your best sellers are well stocked. There's nothing worse than selling out with a few weeks to go before Christmas. Do some old school PR work, contact local publications and social media accounts promoting local businesses. Bonus points if you can send them images and a bit of a bio about your business.

Sonya:
Make sure your product descriptions are complete and up to date. Check out your checkout process. Is it easy to for customers to buy from you? One of the biggest barriers to purchasing that we see is a difficult or lengthy checkout process. If you currently require customers to create an account in order to purchase from you, you may want to reconsider this. Promote your stocking fillers, secret Santa gifts, online and strategically placed at the counter, if you have a brick and mortar store.

Sonya:
Wow, what a lightning round. Don't worry, guys. This will be included in the freebie for you, so you don't have to take notes frantically. I just want to stress that with all of these promotions, it's important that you have them all lined up on all of your channels.

Sonya:
What I mean by this is your website banners are updated, there are easy links on your site to access the promotions, you're promoting it on your social media, in your brick and mortar store, if you have one, and via emails. Don't go to all of the effort of putting together promotions and then not actually promoting them properly. Even established businesses we consult with miss this step nine times out of 10.

Sonya:
Australian consumers are on track to break all kinds of online shopping records in 2021. My advice: get organized. Make sure you're well stocked and able to fulfill the orders that are coming your way. I know I've thrown a lot at you in this episode, so to make it easier for you, I'm going to stress again that we've created a free ebook that covers everything I've discussed here and gives you a handy checklist to make sure you haven't missed anything in your Christmas promo planning. There are also examples of some brands that are doing a really great job at this to give you some ideas and inspiration. To get your ebook, click the link in the show notes or visit the free resources section at kissmarketing.com.au. Happy Christmas promo-ing.