The busiest time of the year for most retail businesses starts with the dawn of November. As you reflect on 2010′s holiday season, there’s never a better time to plan for next year.

Next year, when the official busy season rolls around again, you’ll be ready. There’s a lot you can do to boost your retail sales beyond playing Christmas music and hanging a few lights in the windows. While creating a festive atmosphere is always a smart move, creating holiday specials, which keep customers coming back, is an even smarter move. (For other holiday marketing ideas, check out these posts.)

Holiday specials are not a new idea. Local business owners have been creating seasonal menus, gift baskets, packages, and holding special sales and getting good results from these seasonal strategies. But incorporating a few new ideas into your holiday specials this year could help you boost your sales even in a slow economy. Remember that people are still going to be shopping for gifts; they’re just going to be a little choosier than usual with tighter budgets. That’s where your holiday specials come into the picture.

Strategy 1: Create Holiday Specials for Every Price Point

Marketing research is showing that shoppers enjoy having options. A lot of options. (Read Chris Anderson’s fascinating book at www.longtail.com, for a discussion of this research.) So give your shoppers plenty of options by creating not just one or two holiday specials or packages, but 5 or 6… or 10… or 12. If you’re a higher-end establishment, go ahead and offer a higher price point selection of holiday specials; but expand into a lower price point and offer options there as well.

Use the same principle if you tend to sell more items at a lower cost; offer several lower cost options, but offer some higher price point selections as well. Create multiple displays throughout your brick and mortar store. You want your customers to be seeing this amazing selection – and the great prices and products you’re offering – several times as they move through your retail space.

Strategy 2: Create Limited Availability Holiday Specials

Have you ever thought about why people love seasonal specials? Because they’re only here for a limited time. Think about candy corn; is it really that great? And if it were available all year ’round, would people ever get very excited about it? But people do, because it’s only around for a short time out of the year. That limited availability makes the product more desirable and more valuable.

Use that limited availability concept with your holiday specials. If you’re a retail establishment, you could create several custom, one-of-a-kind gift baskets; once each one is gone, it’s simply gone. Or offer a great deal on a special product, but only through the next week. Don’t feel like you have to extend your holiday specials all the way through the holiday season. Instead, create value by placing time limits or quantity limits on particular specials.

Strategy 3: Introduce New Specials Through the Holiday Season

This strategy works hand-in-hand with the concept of limited availability specials. As you phase out one holiday special, phase in another. Not only will the limited availability increase the perceived value of each special, but your customers will want to keep coming back to see what’s new this week. Remember: shoppers enjoy options. They also enjoy the feeling that they’re getting an “insider’s” special.

Strategy 4: Collect Customer Information with Each Holiday Sale

Let your customers be insiders by offering to keep them informed about new, exclusive holiday specials as they become available. Collect customer names and contact information with each sale, and make the offer as well to customers who aren’t yet making a purchase. They can still sign up to be on the list and find out about new specials.

If you’re planning to hold a special holiday event (such as an open house or one-day sale), then this list is your first step in the marketing for the event. Send out an exclusive invitation to those folks on your holiday list, inviting them in an hour or two before the general public. They get to enjoy a privileged shopping time, you get to interact and build relationships. It’s fun for everyone.

Strategy 5: Promote Holiday Specials via Website, Facebook, and Twitter

Whatever presence you have online should be part of your holiday marketing. Put up notices about your holiday specials, big and bold, on your website’s front page. Send out an email to all your online subscribers. Send out regular updates via your Facebook and/or Twitter accounts, letting your customers know about new holiday shipments, specials, coupons, events, deals, and so on.

Ask for feedback, too. What kind of holiday specials are your customers looking for? Ask specific questions (“What’s the best Christmas present you ever received?”) and interact with those who respond. Have an online contest or giveaway, with the prize being one of your holiday exclusive specials.

Remember that you have to give shopper a reason to choose your product, your store; over the other options they have available. Using some creativity with your holiday specials can create a powerful appeal, and offer value to both your customers and your business.

Image by Sister72.

Dear Traditional Advertising Agency:

Reference: See my previous post about the three key elements of a brand.

Leaving your client’s web site URL off of their print advertising does the following harm to your client and it wastes all of their money:

1. This mistake gives you nor your client any way to measure the value of the print advertising by tracking incoming traffic to the web site.

2. This mistake leaves the reader (and potential business prospect) with no real actionable place to go to learn more without making a phone call. (In 2010, we just need a URL. Period.)

3. Worst of all, this mistake leaves the impression that your client is behind the times and isn’t worth considering for important business.

Instead of allowing this sort of image torture to happen for your client, I would recommend that if you insist on pushing print advertising into your client’s budget that you at least implement the following strategies to give the ad spending the best shot at giving a return on investment:

1. Build a vanity URL (www.clientname.com/magazinename).

2. On this specific web page (within your main web site), put valuable, advertisement specific copy, images and links to a wealth of business information, testimonials, and include another call to action to the prospect into your sales funnel deeper. (How about asking them some information about them or providing them with a valuable tool for free to grow their loyalty towards your client’s business?)

3. Put a call to action in the print ad that answers the “What’s in it for me?” question for the prospect and lures them to the vanity URL you created earlier.

4. Collect the data about who visits the page including geography, what else they look at on the site, what information is working and not working and conversion to next step or other actions within your sales funnel.

5. Help your client make adjustments in their process based on this new business intelligence.

Sound simple? Well, it really is pretty simple. No matter how complex the business model, a simple strategy like this followed through to the end (with measurement and continuous improvement) will show your value to your customer as an advertising professional.

There are a million ways to kick that idea up another notch, but for now, let’s start with getting that URL onto the advertisement in the first place and having a web site that’s ready to accept traffic. That’s the first step to building credibility and brand legitimacy in 2010.

Thanks for listening.

Sincerely,
Marianna