10 Tips To Maximize Holiday Sales

In its countdown to the holidays, SmartReply, a retail marketing firm, offered 10 strategies to implement to maximize sales. The tips are designed to improve retailers' knowledge of their customers' media habits to create integrated marketing campaigns that speak their language.

1. Prep your program and build your database. As you prepare to launch a holiday campaign, start cleansing your data, reactivating inactive customers and soliciting opt-ins. Be sure that your customer data is up to date, error free and complete.

2. Speak your customers' language. Get a handle on how your customers use new media (i.e., email, mobile device, TV, etc.), which channels they interact with daily, how and when they use them. Keep your brand theme consistent across all channels, and customize the message to match the channel's capabilities to ensure relevance and increase customer's convenience. Keep registration or opt-in easy, requiring only one or two clicks to reach the designated page.

3. Create an integrated marketing campaign. Design a marketing campaign that engages customers through the channels of their choice at times when it is most relevant for them. Send emails during what your data shows are peak times when they open their messages. Understand your customers' attitudes, lifestyles and behaviors, and maximize their needs in your message and in the channels you use.

4. Permission granted, don't wait. When a customer opts in to receive communications from you, don't wait. Set up business rules to generate an immediate or near immediate response through the same channel they opted in to. Engage them more readily by using a soft introduction rather than a hard sale. For example, thank them for opting in, remind them what they opted in for, and then summarize in a couple sentences the great merchandise they can buy in your store or on your website.

5. Engage them. Today's customer likes to be engaged and involved. They want to feel that they are an important part of the relationship and the product choices they make.

6. Help them manage their lives. Customers want to interact with brands that help organize their lives. Offer to remind them about your sales. Let them know when you receive a new shipment of their favorite merchandise or brand and give them advance notice before the public is informed. Alert them when a coupon is about to expire and ask if they'd like an extended deadline.

7. Customize, localize, revitalize. To avoid media fragmentation, make your message stand out enough to capture your customers' undivided attention. Use everything at your disposal to create ultimate relevance -- media channel, geography, demographics, behavior, even local, regional or national news headlines. Target your customers' emotional hot buttons; aim to solve a problem they're struggling with; or fulfill a need.

8. Encourage them to share. Encourage and incentivize your customers to share your message and promotion with their friends and family. Coupons, surveys, blogs, games, even photos of the hottest products -- if it's important to them, they'll share it. It costs you nothing and you have everything to gain.

9. Come full circle. Customers active via multiple channels result in longer brand engagement, deeper interaction, higher spending and higher customer lifetime value. For instance, encourage customers to sign up for email alerts on your website. Hang a sign in your storefront window or at the cash/wrap counter displaying an offer message with your web URL and a text opt-in short code. The deeper the relationship, the more likely your customers will be engaged for the long haul.

10. Keep it going. Even when the holidays are over, the valuable relationships you have with your customers needs to be nurtured to keep going. Since your brand is fresh in their mind, continue to keep them engaged. Search your campaign results for nuggets of information you can continue to act on. Once you have a good understanding of your customers' holiday behavior, take the next step and continue to build your relationships all year long.