The time for holiday shopping and Black Friday sales is coming up! Now is the time to start thinking about what products you want to feature or which sales you’ll have going on to promote new products. The important thing to remember within these next couple of hectic months is that the real goal for the holidays is to create loyal shoppers and make sure they keep coming back. We’ve got some tips to help increase your revenue and create a more personalized customer shopping experience to keep them coming back after the holidays.
Go Mobile.
The first step to having a successful holiday season is by establishing and keeping up with a mobile website for your customers to shop from. Amanda Naso, the Senior Manager at Mobify, said that all of the traffic growth for a typical retailer in 2017 came from mobile sales. Mobify is a platform for adapting your retail website onto mobile phones, tablets, and other smaller devices.
“We found that if you look at the trajectory from the UK to the U.S., we are two years behind the UK,” Naso says. “The UK has more revenue coming in from mobile.”
Jaybe Allanson, who also works at Mobify, says to think about performance design when making your mobile platform work for customers. Shoppers want to get in and out of the store as fast as possible, and the same applies for mobile transactions. They don’t want to spend minutes upon minutes finding something they like and checking out. Creating a super fast experience for them is key to keeping them happy and wanting to come back for more later.
“According to a Google study, if a mobile site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, the majority of visits are abandoned,” Naso says. Consumers, especially millennials, like things fast. Not keeping up with your mobile site can lead to lost revenue.
Stand Out.
The second step of having a successful holiday season is by making your store stand out, especially on Black Friday. Jon Humphrey, a strategy consultant for Qubit Technologies, says that most Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales are the same. There’s always a certain percentage off your purchase, so it’s hard to distinguish your store from other retail giants with sales alone. Be creative with your brand; tell your story and how you got started in the retail business. Give customers a reason to shop there over other stores.
“Sales are always the same, but your brand has come a long way from when it started, so let customers know what makes your products different from the others,” Humphrey says.
Consider the Customer.
It’s also important to not to forget about your customers during Black Friday sales. Some one-time customers are unavoidable with Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday all happening the same weekend, but when you’re having those sales it’s important to keep track of what your customers buy and to also get their information. Humphrey says the more information you can collect from customers, the easier it will be to provide them with product recommendations down the road.
The holidays are wonderful, but can also be stressful when it comes to competing to other retail giants. You obviously want good store traffic, but you also want to create long-lasting customers who will continue coming back. Independent retailers have that charm and welcoming atmosphere that bigger retailers can’t compete with. Use that to your advantage, along with these other tips, to ensure you have a successful holiday season and continued growth after.