It’s always hard to stand out during the holiday sale season. However, innovative technology is providing new opportunities for entrepreneurial businesses to connect with their customers. How can you use this technology to pull customers into your orbit and get them to spend their dollars with you this holiday season?
Geo-Targeting
Geo-targeting refers to people using GPS-enabled smartphones in your immediate vicinity who are searching for your type of business online. It’s a proven method to increase conversions, both on and offline. People who didn’t know you even existed now know you’re there. People who do know you exist are reminded of that fact. Especially if you have a brick-and-mortar retail operation, you need to be geo-targeting—at no time of year is this truer than the holidays.
Audio Visual Displays
In many towns, people go to the city center [AS1] just to see the audio visual displays in the windows. Christmas is the time of year businesses have to bring their “A” game when it comes to visual marketing. When you’re competing against bigger businesses in town or big online retailers, you have to go above and beyond. For creative entrepreneurs, this can be your ace in the hole.
Audio visual displays lure customers into your store—and keep them there. Remember being a kid and going into a store that was all set up as a great place to be for Christmas? That’s the environment you want to create. The longer people linger in your store, the more money they’re likely to spend.
Offer Free Shipping
Free shipping is a simple marketing ploy that can pay surprising dividends. During the holiday season everyone rushes around trying to get things done, wondering if they’re going to have enough time to do everything. Free shipping helps you leverage that frantic pace, and could even be more powerful than sale prices in terms of creating customers. Once you’ve done customers a solid, they remember you as a business that made their holiday season easier. This sort of emotional connection means repeat customers long after the holidays.
Short-Term Sales
It’s one of the oldest tricks in the marketing book: offer sales, but only for a limited time. Limited-time sales induce a feeling of scarcity in customers, who want to get in on the lower price while there’s still time. A customer who was going to put off making a purchase until after the holidays—then totally forgot about shopping with you, is soon handing over their credit card to get the best price.
You can offer as many of these as you like. And if a customer wanders in who has missed a short-term sale, don’t be afraid to offer them the same price. Remember, a sale is just a tool to drive sales.
Order Extra Product
If you don’t have what your customers want, they’re going to buy it somewhere else. The last quarter will usually be your biggest, so have more on hand than you would at any other time of the year. If you’re left with extra stock, it’s inventory to have on hand for the future.
Use Remarketing
Have you ever been on a company’s website, then gone to another where you saw ads for the first website? This is known as remarketing. The holiday season is the perfect time for remarketing. Anyone who visits your company’s website is someone who potentially wants to do business with you. Remind them of that, often.
These six holiday sales tricks leverage the power of modern technology—and the power of psychology, to help ensure you make the most of the busiest time of the year