October to December often gathers the highest sales totals for both online and brick-and-mortar businesses. Starting in the new year, though, these same businesses often see a drastic decrease in sales or worse, an increase in returns. It’s easy to feel uneasy about your business performance during these times, but there are many ways you can keep your sales high after the post-holiday season.
By putting the following five practices into place, you can expect to see an increase in your new year sales, as well as an increase in your overall customer engagement. After building and developing marketing plans for over 120,000 businesses in the last few years, we know the best ways to keep your customers satisfied and spending.
Keep Sales High by Connecting With Your Audience
With the right promotions, marketing strategies, and community engagement, your business really can be busy all year round.
According to Slickdeals, 64% of U.S. adults reported an increase in their impulse spending in 2022, with 73% of respondents noting most of their purchases were spontaneous. As you can see, consumers are still willing to spend money on the items or services they want.
These spontaneous purchases are often paired with an advertisement, a social media post, or any other brand asset. When customers see a reminder of that brand and feel a strong emotion, they are more willing to make a purchase.
Too often businesses create content or marketing assets without understanding why their audience will be viewing it in the first place, or even what they should get out of it. For example, we know the main type of reader viewing this blog article is going to be looking for ways to take that holiday momentum and continue it into the new year.
That reader may want to feel motivated or reassured that the ideas they learned in this article apply to their business and that they can see a return on their investment. By figuring out the type of emotions we want our audience to feel, we’re able to create a piece of content that reflects it.
Now that we know how to start, let’s get into the five tactics we have for increasing your post-holiday sales.
Collect Your Holiday Reviews for Your Marketing Efforts
Not only do shoppers have more choices these days, but they’re also less trusting of a brand's own advertising and marketing efforts.
Trust is one of the most important factors when it comes to engaging with your audience. If your customers don’t trust you, or the marketing materials they come in contact with, your sales are going to reflect that.
By utilizing the reviews you’ve gathered from your holiday marketing efforts, you can keep sales high by incorporating them into your new year's marketing plans. Here are a few places you can incorporate your customer testimonials to increase your post-holiday sales:
Landing pages: Using social proof in the first part of your landing page helps establish your company as trustworthy right off the bat.
Abandoned Cart Emails: Incorporating reviews into your abandoned cart emails can help increase your conversions by 16% when they’re sent 1-hour after abandonment.
Social Media: 33% of consumers use social media to discover new products or brands.
In your blog: Blogs continue to be one of the best ways for search engine traffic to discover a brand. If a visitor comes to your website in search of information, seeing a carefully integrated review can drive them down the marketing funnel.
Clear Out Poor Performing Inventory
Keeping hold of old inventory only hurts your future growth potential. In the new year, you’ll be able to best assess what items sold well last year and which didn’t. If you notice a few items that could be removed from your catalog, now is the best time to do it!
There are many different ways to clear out inventory to make room for newer or high-performing products. If remarketing or remerchandising your old inventory doesn’t fix the issue, here are a few more suggestions to try:
Hold a “clear-out” sale and discount all the inventory you’re trying to get rid of.
Bundle or package your low-selling inventory with better-selling inventory to incentivize purchases.
Offer them as “freebies”
Contact liquidation companies
Let your employees take some home as gifts
Donate them to your local charity
Release a New Product
To keep sales high during a time when most companies are removing old inventory (maybe yourself included!), introducing a new product or service can help your company stand out from the competition. As we discussed earlier, the majority of adults in the US spent more money, and shopped more impulsively last year, than they did the year previously. This data shows that consumers are willing to spend money regardless of the timing.
This suggestion requires a little more pre-planning than the rest. Launching a new product can take months of planning, marketing, and development to go right. But it’s one of the best ways to ensure your audience stays engaged after the post-holiday sales season is over.
If you need help creating a marketing strategy for your new product or service, we have a blog that will be able to point you in the right direction.
Engage Your Email List
People pay a little more attention to their inboxes during the holiday season, whether they’re waiting for holiday ecards or checking shipping information on items they’ve ordered themselves. After the holidays, though, people tend to check their inboxes a little less frequently.
To prepare for this, we recommend scaling down your emails slightly and sending more personalized, segmented emails to your list.
During a time when sales are crucial, sending personalized emails could help you receive up to six times higher transaction rates. That’s because the more relevant your email is to someone, the more likely they will engage with it.
Organizing your email subscribers based on certain factors lets you create targeted emails for your holiday marketing campaigns. Here are some examples of holiday email segmentation strategies:
Location: Segmenting your list by location allows you to suggest products or services based on weather, news, and other location-based factors.
Purchase history: Users can be sent emails of similar or complimentary products, referral information, and discount codes.
Email metrics: If subscribers have stopped opening your emails, you can segment and target them with a re-engagement campaign by offering exclusive discounts or offers.
Utilize User-Generate Content in Your Marketing Efforts
Less than 10% of people trust a company’s marketing efforts, meaning brands have to work harder to reach and engage with their audience.
User-generated content (UGC) is any content—text, videos, images, reviews, etc.—created by your customers, rather than your brand. If you’ve posted something online about a new outfit, a great restaurant, or anything else belonging to someone’s brand, you’ve created UGC.
This type of content has become an important part of content marketing strategies in the last few years. Influencers, affiliate marketers, or just regular consumers, can be a part of their favorite brand's marketing material. When other users and pre-buyers can see real people using your products and enjoying them enough to brag about them, it instantly gives your credibility a boost.
With the increased sales and customers after the holiday season, your brand can keep sales high by reaching out and asking for UGC, researching on social media, or gathering images from your online reviews. These images, videos, quotes, etc. can then be used in your marketing efforts at locations where your future customers are in the beginning stages of their buyer’s journey.
Key Takeaways
Keeping your post-holiday sales alive after the new year isn’t impossible, but it does require a little bit of elbow grease. After all, the end of the holidays doesn’t have to mean the end of your sales. When you pair your offer with the right marketing strategy, you can keep your audience engaged enough to make purchases all year round.
If you’re ready to capture new sales and improve your website capabilities then Zoek is the company for you. We have custom website templates available, eCommerce packages built to create easy check-out processes, and experts trained in managing your website growth and maintenance.
Give us a call to learn how to improve your sales with Zoek.