Monday 30 November 2015

CHRISTMAS COUNTDOWN 4 - INSPIRE YOUR CUSTOMERS


Christmas is less than four weeks away and last weekend Christmas shoppers were out in force, helped along by Black Friday of course. It was noticeable how many Christmas shoppers, myself included, were out and about looking for ideas, what to buy and, for whom. 

If you shop online and you’ll see lots of direct communication with gift suggestions but there’s much less of approach when you shop in a physical store, which I think is missing a trick..

As we enter December this is a great week for indie retailers to inspire Christmas shoppers with gift ideas. Don’t leave this to chance, make it easy for your customers to shop your Christmas offer. Here’s a simple suggestion which will help increase your sales over the next few weeks.

  • Picture your (imaginary/real) extended family including close friends. If you have time collect images form magazines to represent each one. Better still, get your customers involved and photograph them, with their permission of course.
  • Look at your product range and decide which products are most suitable for each family member. 
  • Make these products stand out in your product displays and make some signage to go with them.
  • The signage needs to be written to the person the gift/product is intended for. Try to make it as personal as possible. You can do this with pictures and a few words or, hand written tags (large ones) or, simple chalkboards.
  • If you have lots of options for each family member change the product displays on a regular basis in the run up to Christmas.
  • Think about the less obvious ways of buying/giving, the ones whereby people buy gifts for someone else to give, for instance, the gift dad buys for his young son Jack to give to his mum and vice versa.
  • If you can, offer lots of price points around each gift suggestion and include everything you can do to add value like, free gift wrapping, special carrier bags to create simple gift packs etc.
  • And remember, without being sexist, most Christmas shopping is done by the females in the household so think how you convey the message.
The beginning of December is the best time to inspire your customers with gift ideas and, with just over three weeks to go, many customers looking for ideas will browse first, go away and then come back to buy...

Next week, promote, promote, promote...

All the best

Peter
#retail   -consultant  -designer  -communicator  -mentor
tel      07907 691711

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