Are you festive season ready? Use the tips below to help you gear up for the festive season.

Prep your sales strategy

• Identify demand for your festive sales promotions, by analysing your sales data and keeping abreast of customer trends. Your retail solution should prove crucial to interpreting your data. Run a sales report to affirm your most popular items, to ensure that you have adequate stock to meet customer demand, thus maximising sales. Make sure to have a contingency plan should some holiday mishaps occur, by having back-up plans for your upcoming sales.
• Keep an eye on competitor offerings, to stay ahead of the game with competitive pricing, value added offerings and unique promotions.

Set Your Plan in Action

• Test your Point of Sale system to ensure that it can handle the increase in demand over the festive season. Organise dry runs with employees that will be working over the festive season.
• Test and update your website. If you are a store that offers online purchases, be sure to test that the ordering and payment process runs smoothly. Update the website with your latest promotions and ensure that stock correlates to quantities available for online purchases. Confirm relationships with your shipping partner.
• Test payment processes at point of sale check-out to ensure that customers experience fast and efficient service.
• Extended trading hours need to be communicated with all employees, with a detailed roster of scheduled working hours for each employee.
• Prepare your team by communicating your expected levels of customer service and expectations for sales.

Let Your Customers Know

In order for any festive season to prove successful and profitable, you need to let customers know what you have to offer.

• Advertise promotions: run marketing campaigns that lead up to your promotions, driving excitement and demand. Get the word out on your social media platforms and make sure your customers know they can rely on you during the festive season to do those last-minute gift shopping trips.
• Ensure that customers are aware of extended trading hours during your festive trading period.
• It is always good to reward loyal customers. These customers may enjoy further discounts, additional points for loyalty, exclusive competitions and more.
• Give your customers peace of mind by letting them know that returns are hassle free.

The festive season proves to drive the highest sales during the course of the year but also provides retailers with seasonal customer buying trends. At the end of the festive season be sure to analyse stock and data information from your retail solution so that you can identify trends throughout the year and better plan for the next festive season.