17 Ways To Increase Retail Holiday Sales During The Pandemic Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and unlock uncertainties have resulted in the transitional change in the buying and selling behaviors of the buyers and sellers respectively. It became more crucial for the retailers to increase retail holiday sales to attract customers breaking through their behavioral shopping patterns. 

The coronavirus has obstructed the lives of each person in every possible way – how they work, how they spend their free time, and how they shop. Not limited to this, the mandatory lockdown has affected sales of almost all the retail businesses in some way or the other. 

Although every business has witnessed a drastic downfall, some essential businesses have also witnessed the scarcity of supply due to the panic buying behavior of the consumers. 

Let’s See, What Data Says?

The stats show a clear increase in the buying of necessity commodities than luxury goods. The percentage change in all the department store sales today is more inclined and targeted than fun-shopping behavior of the customers.

The weekly analysis by Statista on monthly retail sales in the United States shows the increase in retail holiday sales by 0.6%. The hoarding behavior was also witnessed among the customers during the initial weeks of the pandemic. The data below shows the weekly spending behavior of the customers in the US retail sector.

Moreover, the impact of coronavirus on consumer spending as of February 2021 showcases the highest spending on groceries/foods and household supplies while the minimum or no spend on jewelry and accessories. 

The changing retail landscape implicated how businesses have been pivoting to an eCommerce-only or omnichannel strategy. The shift to online retail stores also brings in the demands for easy and helpful strategies, tricks, or ways to increase retail holiday sales faster. 

Amidst this pandemic situation, if you’re also aiming to increase retail holiday sales & boost back your business post lockdown scenarios, then you are at the right place. Further, in this blog, we have listed a few practical ways that will surely help you jump back and gain better sales along with the new engaging customers.

Let’s proceed!

1. Choose Holidays Precisely for your Sales

When it comes to boosting sales, nothing works better than running a profitable holiday sales season. According to stats mentioned over websitesetup.org– ‘Holiday retail sales revenue crossed the trillion mark in 2020’. An estimate of 40% of holiday digital revenue received during Cyber Monday. While Boxing Day sales went up by 32%. 

Not all festivals are your target sales drivers. Therefore, you must choose the festivals that your customers prefer to shop on and the products you deal with before you plan your retail holiday sales campaign. 

2. Track & Analyze your Competitors & Local Trends

The study conducted by McKinsey.com confirms that retail sales saw a substantial increase in online sales during the pandemic. 

This shift has, of course, brought the retailers in a position to track down the competitors and grab new trends to promote their retail sales amidst high competition with online markets. 

Keeping an eye on your competitor’s strategies, doing competitive analysis, creating competitive reports, etc. helps you identify their positive and negative points for defeating them. For example, you must look closely at their marketing strategies, offers, and discount ranges and understand how these offers would help them in building up their profits. 

Moreover,  you must also be aware of the prevailing trends in the local markets to grab in your opportunities to increase retail sales. For example, most of the food joints and restaurants have adopted the “Order Online and Pick-up at Store” service to fulfill their customers’ needs. 

3. Set your Goals

Determining the goals of your business after tracking and analyzing your competitors. Do you know, the companies that don’t set their business goals are less likely to produce sales and revenue for their company. By setting goals, the retailers are capable of measuring the difference between the result obtained from the objective. By creating goals, you have a clear idea about your progress and future goals.

The Retail Business has the following goals to accomplish – 

• Improve customer service
• Meet the target sale
• Track and analyze competitors strategy
• To use a different social platform to increase customer engagement
• To convert the visitors into sales-ready customers
• Use different marketing strategies to meet the sale target

4. Prepare your Inventory

If you are having a store and want to run retail holiday sales, then it can be your favorite point. Every year buyers go out store-to-store purchasing things and crossing out the names from their holiday shopping list. But, you need to prepare your eCommerce store to increase retail holiday sales by stocking up with inventory. Have you heard about the last-hour sales? Your extended retail sales should be well-fitting for this situation as well. So, don’t wait for any minute. Just secure your eCommerce site during the holiday season.

5. Check your Prices

One important point all retailers need to keep in mind is that their product prices should be accurate and acceptable. The retailers need to examine their pricing strategy with the competitors. You need to have a product or service price strategy, which is competitive but at the same time, it should be profitable. The product or service prices must be acceptable to the customers. The customer will not come back to your store if he/she is not happy with the product and service prices of your store. So, it’s mandatory to focus on the pricing strategy if you want to increase the percentage of customer retention.

6. Provide Training to your Employees

A trained employee is more beneficial for the business than a non-trained employee. A trained employee knows how to talk to their clients and how to convince them to purchase. They help in making the customer base strong.

They can create an environment for customer retention. The trained employee will help the business in generating a loyal customer and to build up a relationship. A trained employee can make the customers happier, and a happy and satisfied customer is likely to purchase more and after a certain point of time, they become your promoters. Therefore by providing the training to the staff, the retailers can increase their ROI.

Your customers don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. -Damon Richards

7. Focus on your Customer Retention Strategy

Customer retention is defined as the ability of the companies to retain a customer. You must be wondering why retailers need to increase customer retention.

If a customer comes back to your store for more purchases, it means they are happy with your products and services. And do you know an existing customer spends 67% more than a new customer? Even to acquire a new customer, costs a business about 5-25x more than an existing customer.

The benefit of customer retention, not over here. If the percentage of customer retention increases, it will encourage and motivate you and your staff towards the efforts and work you have made. If a customer comes back it means they are your loyal customers and after a certain point they can become your promoters. That’s why by increasing customer retention, the retailers can boost their sales. Brick and mortar can increase the percentage of customer retention by any of the following activities.

Loyalty Programs/Rewards

Do you know the companies that use social media loyalty programs are 88% more profitable than the companies that don’t use them?

By creating loyalty programs and rewards for the customers, retailers can increase retail sales & the percentage of customer retention. Retailers can enhance the loyalty, engagement, trust, and relationship of customers through rewards and loyalty programs.

You can promote your loyalty program through social media strategy, email marketing campaigns, or content marketing strategy. The retailers can make an email list of customers to whom they want to offer rewards and discounts. Don’t forget, if you create loyalty programs and rewards you have a great opportunity to attract customers to your store. 

If you want to know the conversion rate of a loyalty program and the ways to increase the social media loyalty program then refer to our blog, How Social Media Can Enhance Loyalty Programs.

8. Interact with Customers

The more you talk to your customers, the more you will increase the chances to drive the sale.

First, of all, you and your staff need to understand the desires, wants, and needs of your customers. Once you understand what they want you can show them the right product or service. And then you can educate them towards the product or services they desire. The more healthy the environment you and your staff create for your shoppers, the more they will visit your store. The more you talk to your customers, the more you will be able to understand them.

Today’s customers want to feel valued, not just as a sale or a transaction, but as an individual. – Retail Drive

9. Strategize your Content Marketing

Remember, your campaign ideas should include Content Marketing as the main gasoline for your preparation. Counting upon the major festivity, Black Friday and Cyber Monday play a big player in earning revenue. Here, you may include planning for social posts, ads, blogs, articles, and even guest blogs with their posting time.

As said by Jared Atchison of WPForms- You should plan your blog posts for festivals and holidays which may be used to target an audience on Facebook and other platforms.

You must always look for a profitable holiday sales season and segmentation of content marketing is a must as a pre-planning stage to boost sales.

10. Create Promotional & Social Ads

Whether it’s a bakery store or any other brick-and-mortar store, the retailers have started using social media channels for advertising their products and services. 

Promotional ads are a kind of tool used by marketers to attract customers and to encourage them towards more purchases. To create promotional ads, there are many social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. The companies can choose the platform according to their needs. In promotional ads, the marketers can include rewards, coupons, holiday gift cards, and discounts they want to offer the customers. If customers like promotional ads, they will retweet them and share them with their family and friends.

For example, Fragola Baby Toddler Food took to Facebook and Instagram to promote their free baby food giveaways campaign during the pandemic spread.

Even the retailers can create a sense of urgency in the mind of customers towards the products and services. Creating a sense of urgency among customers is a good idea that every retailer should use to boost their sales.  Therefore, promotional ads can also help retailers to increase the ROI of the business.

Through social media advertising, retailers can bring engagement, can attract customers, and can foster the audience towards their store. For social media advertising, there are various social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. The retailers can choose the platform according to their needs.

But for creating successful social media advertising, the content you use in it should be emphasizing and memorable. Therefore you need to make a content marketing strategy that meets the interest of your target audience.

11. Extended Sales Hours with Prime Week Sale

Every festive sale opportunity has some prime time hours when the traffic is at peak, be it in retail stores or online shops. Therefore, the chances of sales increases during the prime hours. 

Additionally, organizing sales for extended hours like “Late Night Sales” or “Prime Day Sale” gives your customers a mixed feeling of more time to avail discounts along with the FOMO (fear of missing out). Hence, you’ll have more traffic in that prime-time period than other hours of the day or week of your sales campaign. 

For example, Amazon organizes Prime Day Sales every year and gives extended sales hours for its prime members. In 2020, Amazon witnessed approximately a 25% increase in sales in the early few hours of the sales period.

12. Be Ready with Quick Server and Back-Up Plans

A successful holiday marketing campaign should include everything. Starting from a holiday sales calendar to an easy backup plan, ensure better performance of your site. The restoration plan should be all set with important data that amplifies retail holiday sales.

Program a session to make all your staff members aware of how to act at the time of emergency. Therefore, it’s better to advance this planning before facing any such situation in your holiday sales plan.

13. Create Effective Navigation

It is all about retail holiday sales, poor navigation will break the interest in buying stuff from your store. This is very important at the time of your holiday sale to make your navigation system easy & accessible. Follow these tips to ensure easy navigation and increase online sales during the 2021 holiday season –

• Highlight your search field to make it customer-friendly.
• Should be accessible on any device like Mobile, Laptops, etc.
• Attach a filter option to customize your searches.
• Add a history page to facilitate your customers to find out their previous searches.
• Also, include sorting options so that customers can search as per their choice by price or by relevance.

14. Enhance Checkout Process

The checkout process should be seamless enough for keeping the holiday season intact. It should contain just a simple click before purchasing. Your main motto for marketing should be to increase sales. Your retail holiday sales should be simple which will greet customer loyalty for better purchases. You can even encourage guest purchases for a profitable holiday sales season.

15. Easy Shipping & Return Policies

It is festive after all and you cannot leave your prospects hassled and annoyed. During this peak time, you just need to keep the checklist to prepare your store for easy shipping & delivery of the purchased products. In that, you surely need to take care of liberal return policies. Which will not hamper any client relations. For profitable retail holiday sales, you just need to erase strict return/refund policies and let the successful holiday marketing campaigns refresh your retail store.

16. The Reversing Roles of Retailers and Digital Markets

With the pandemic, shifts in buying behaviors of customers were witnessed all-round the globe. Therefore, in-store holiday shopping also got affected the most as the customers preferred shopping online for their loved ones, from the comfort of their homes. Therefore, to combat the situation, retailers are coming up with unique and creative ideas to increase retail holiday sales.

Most retailers are moving to hybrid solutions like “buy online pick up in-store (BOPUS)” & “order takeaways” etc. Such solutions redefine customers’ expectations, delivering convenience and satisfaction. While, on the other hand, online stores are optimizing their stores to deliver more in-store-like experiences to customers using high-tech solutions like AR-VR. 

17. Discovery Purchasing on Facebook and Instagram

Discovery purchasing is not a new concept. Online shoppers were anyway doing it, especially during the holiday season, through various discovery aides. However, with retail shops moving to social platforms like Facebook and Instagram, the way discovery shopping is done is also changing. Facebook and Instagram retail shops help the store owners to deliver more personalized and curated experiences for the customers. As per the survey report from Grand View Research, “the social commerce represented 11% of global retail eCommerce revenue in 2020, generating $474 billion revenue”. Therefore, we can conclude that more customers are preferring social apps for purchasing.

It’s Never too Late to Increase Retail Holiday Sales for Businesses with the Right Strategies in Hand…

Yes, the holiday season is just on the door & in this scenario of cut-throat competition, there is still much time left to scale up your sales for the upcoming list of holidays.

If you want to know ‘Whether Cyber Monday vs Black Friday’ is the perfect fit for your successful holiday marketing campaigns, then you first go through these 16 points listed above and prepare a draft!

Be it any festival- Halloweens, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or even New Year you can use retail holiday sales for better revenue generation. If you want your strategies for your holiday season by us, don’t hesitate to drop a message at once! And, who knows this strategy helps your retail store to earn money lavishly which it hasn’t in the past 5 years….