In today’s edition of Tips from the Experts, we asked three business professionals to share their top tips to ensure businesses survive the festive rush.
Sales
Mark Pearson, Founder of www.myvouchercodes.co.uk
1. Get Ready for Spikes in Demand
Be prepared for demand to soar over Christmas. Start by identifying your best selling products and make sure you have adequate supplies. Be aware of consumer behaviour and the latest trends – keep an eye on the media, thought leaders and industry experts, industry reports and your competitors’ activity. This will help you identify the products your customers really want, allowing you to stock up on the sure fire winners. Monitor sales and reorder accordingly – find out how quickly your suppliers can deliver and strategically place your order so you won’t be left high and dry. Selling out unexpectedly will disappoint customers and you could lose them for good. If you do sell out, let your customers know when the items will be back in stock. In the meantime, offer comparable alternatives. Beforehand, you should train your staff to deal politely with this hike in demand – maintaining excellent customer service is key.
2. Make Sure There Will Always Be Someone On Hand To Help Customers
You need to ensure there will always be a member of staff on duty to help with any customer enquires – you will receive an extraordinary amount during this period. Customers deserve a quick response time from you – if they don’t get one, you’re likely to lose their loyalty. Adding a chat function to your website and updating the FAQs will help save time and free up resources. But you’ll need extra staff to help your business cope with demand. Temp staff need to be flexible to cover the important days, quick learners so you won’t waste time training them and focused on providing the very best customer care whilst under an inordinate amount of pressure. The last delivery day before Christmas is also important – find out from your courier when this is, work out the last viable order date to ensure pre-Christmas delivery and let your customers know when it is. Delivery after Christmas won’t cut it, so make sure you get it right.
3. Prepare Your Website
During this period expect inbound traffic to explode – the last thing you need is your website crashing. Get in touch with your server host right now and get your bandwidth increased to cope with the strain. Then streamline the customer journey; improve navigation by adding useful categories – if your customers have to dig down to find what they are looking for, they might just get tired and bounce. Make it easy for them by promoting seasonal categories and hot products via banners and sliders, then speed up the payment process with a one click pay system to decrease the drop-off rate. Adding alternative payment types that consumers trust, such as PayPal, will help you catch a few more sales. After that, create Christmassy banners, sales messages and visuals – there’s nothing like a bit of festive creativity to get your customers in the mood. Lastly, check the loading speed of all the pages – users won’t wait around for graphics to load; they’ll bounce off the page to a competitor’s website.
4. Get Social
Ready for Christmas? Tell the world about it. With social media you don’t need to shell out for expensive advertising – but you do need a strategy and some offers up your sleeves. You can take advantage of seasonality to get a bit of brand exposure and chalk up a few sales in the process. For example, one good idea would be to promote deals on trending products through social media – the post itself will generate likes, shares and comments which give you free exposure and will improve SEO for your website. Create a specific landing page for the product, placing related products and services on the page to help increase the order value. In the lead up to Christmas, run competitions e.g. giving away gift vouchers for major retailers. It is amazing how much a bit of Christmas cheer can boost your sales.
Recruitment
Anne Corder, Owner of Anne Corder Recruitment
1. Keep Your Whole Team Engaged
If you’re hiring one or 100 temporary workers this festive season, make sure you integrate them with your permanent team. Invest in recruiting temp staff who have the right soft skills for your business and the result will be a team that gels well together and produces fantastic results during the busy period. Plus your permanent team will feel valued as you provide an active solution to their increased workload.
2. Have an Effective and Ongoing Induction Plan in Place
Ensure you have an intensive induction day or two fully prepared for your temporary team members – before the busy period well and truly kicks off. Cover all the necessary training and keep it in line with your organisation’s values. Regardless of how long your temp staff are a part of your team, they will still be stakeholders in your business and you want them to be fully engaged.
3. Provide Support
It’s easy for HR departments to get caught up in the Christmas rush, with temp staff recruitment, navigating Christmas holidays and perhaps also making sure Christmas bonuses are all on track. However, make sure support is still provided to temp and permanent staff, whatever level they are at. Each team member needs to have a go-to for help and advice. Make sure they have a contact name and number.
4. Be Clear on Festive Time Off
This can often be a tricky one for employers: how much annual holiday can you let your staff have off over the festive period? Take a look at historic data and at this year’s forecast to provide an estimate for how much manpower you’re going to need. In all employee contracts be clear on the rules surrounding time off during the peak periods.
5. Don’t Waste The Opportunity to Find Permanent Employees
Although Christmas is really busy, it’s important that your business doesn’t miss the opportunity to employ permanent staff. It may be that the really efficient, enthusiastic temp worker you engaged for October to December would make a great addition to your team on a more permanent basis. Alternatively, if your temp staff feel valued within your business over Christmas you may also build up a database of temp workers suitable for future busy periods.
PPC
Peter Whitmarsh, Head Of PPC at Search Laboratory
Make the most of the festive season by ensuring your pay per click (PPC) adverts are fully optimised.
1. Target Your Audience
Depending on your products or services, change your ad text so it appeals to the Christmas audience. Focus on messages that convey services such as deliveries in time for Christmas and extended Christmas returns. This will help you to stand out against your competitors and improve your click-through rates and quality scores.
2. Prepare to Raise Your Budgets
Budgets will need to be accounted for at this busy time of year as more competition and increased demand will mean that average cost per click (CPC) will rise. However, conversion rates are also likely to rise so make sure you are calculating exactly what you can afford to pay to make your campaigns profitable.
3. Use The Right Keywords
Google always wants to return the best results that suit a user’s query, whether that’s through organic or paid search. Therefore you should make sure your campaign is targeting keywords that are actually being searched for during this period, otherwise all your careful budgeting will go out of the window and you won’t get the right traffic.
4. Themed Landing Pages
You’ve carefully thought about your audience, your budgets and your keywords – make sure your hard work pays off and that you have a themed landing page showing all your target products and your best Christmas offers. It’s important to think carefully about user experience as this increases the chances of the consumer staying on the website and making a purchase.
5. Plan Ahead
We all know that the festive period is busy, but don’t become complacent – January sales are just around the corner. If applicable to your business, target sales shoppers looking to find a bargain and use all the above tips to ensure that you repeat your Christmas successes.
Thanks to all our contributors for their valuable advice. Do you have any tips on how businesses can cope with the festive rush? Feel free to leave a comment in the section below.