Lessons Your Business Can Learn from Christmas
Christmas is the season of goodwill, and shoppers flock to the high street or online to buy their presents, food and decorations for the festivities. With Christmas providing an inevitable boost in sales, businesses must find a way to maintain the momentum into the next year.
So, what lessons can your business take from Christmas into 2017?
- Listen to Your Customers
Christmas is an ideal time to figure out what promotions and deals your customers respond well to. For those that don’t quite work, tweak them to suit what your customers want, so you can improve your business strategies, ready for the next year.
Follow lead from The Furniture Market, who conducted a survey on what items customers were buying around Christmas-time. They found that families were using over 4 million “emergency” chairs for their festive gatherings, clearly revealing the area for them to focus their efforts.
- Always be Prepared
Businesses must be fully-prepared for the Christmas rush of shoppers. Make sure you’re on top of your stock levels, that you have adequate numbers of staff and that your opening hours and premises are tailored towards festive shoppers.
Big retailers start their Christmas preparation as early as August, and it should be no different for an SME. The term “Christmas” is the most popular search item on the John Lewis website from early September, showing that consumers begin to think about their festive shopping a while before they start making purchases.
- Marketing Techniques
Customers respond positively to the Christmas advertising campaigns released by big businesses each year. In 2016, Burberry released an advert resembling a glossy film trailer, documenting the journey taken by its founder, Thomas Burberry. The power of story-telling in business is clear, with Burberry eager to put a face to their huge brand.
As a small business, you can take advantage of the fact you will enjoy a closer relationship to your customers than any big company can manage. Use it to personalise a customer’s experience and create a loyalty that goes beyond the brand to a personal bond.
- Go Online
If you don’t already have an online presence, then now is the time to do so. British customers are increasingly turning to the internet for their shopping rather than going into an online store.
Research has shown that only 10% of customers in the UK did all of their Christmas shopping in-store in 2015. With many big businesses taking notice of this trend, putting out promotions and deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, your business should go online to stay competitive.
Although Christmas has been and gone for another year, your business can learn from consumer trends over the festive period and use these as lessons to be taken into the new year for a successful 2017.