Five Mind Blowing Ways To Boost Sales & Stand Out This Holiday Season

It's time for holiday sales, and you have lots of competition. Here are five powerful tips to exceed customer expectations and boost your holiday season revenue.

1.) Know your ideal clients' holiday preferences

In my home, the holidays begin on Halloween, while for others, it's Thanksgiving. Are you team Halloween or team Thanksgiving? Whichever you are, what matters most is knowing the team your ideal client chooses and choosing to cater to them based on their choice, which brings me to point number one. 

Get inside your ideal client's mind by asking yourself these questions

• Why would they buy my product for the holidays?
• What concerns do they have about spending money on my product?
• How will they feel after purchasing my product?
• How will they feel if they don't buy my product?
• What reassurances do they need before spending their holiday budget on my product?

2.) Make executive decisions early, then execute them promptly.

"If you fail to plan, you plan to fail" ~ Napoleon Hill

To maximize your opportunities to sell this holiday season, have a plan of action.

First, decide what items go on sale. Your holiday offers should center around your ideal client's wants and needs and not your needs. Choosing what products go on sale shouldn't be random but driven by your sales numbers, Instagram insights, and website analytics. Here are a few tips to help you with that decision.

• See what sells for competitors.
• Ask your audience what they like
• See what products get the most hashtag follows on Instagram
• Use Google Trends to see the number of searches for each item
• Use Ask Google to see what your ideal client is looking for
• Take a look at the Amazon best sellers list.

BONUS: Read the 15-step preplist that my clients and I use to optimize sales every holiday season

Second, decide when you will start your holiday sales. Here are some tips to help beat the competition and get in front of your audience first.

• Research when your competitors start showing up.
• Decide how to differentiate your brand as soon as you begin.
• Create a strategy that makes your brand and product promotions memorable.
• Create brand messaging for the holidays that speaks directly to your ideal client and shows vulnerability. Authentic vulnerability helps your ideal clients feel connected to your brand.
• Decide which holidays you will promote. 
• Document your plan for holiday sales pricing, pre-sells, and promotions (coupons, etc.) How much can you lower your price and still make a profit? Is there enough of a margin? Would you benefit from increased sales even at a lower price point?  

3.) Create an easily navigated and memorable holiday message and shopping or opt-in experience

“Crafting a well-executed customer experience strategy will not only help your business retain customers, it will also help to endear new buyers and skyrocket your revenue over time.” (Forbes)

Creating a memorable holiday shopping experience might require stepping outside your comfort zone. Maybe it's understanding and including content that shows your knowledge of your ideal clients' sense of humor or displaying your brand's generosity with information that adds ease or value to your customer's life.

Businesses that focus on developing deeper connections with customers generate more holiday sales and create brand evangelists. This approach, in turn, generates recurring purchases and exponential customer growth. Here are ways to make your ideal client's holiday shopping experience memorable.

• Include relevant humor — make your ideal client laugh. The holidays can be a stressful time of year.
• Tell relatable emotionally-impactful holiday-specific stories and experiences about you and other clients similar to your ideal client.
• Include your ideal client. Ask them to submit their stories or share their thoughts and opinions as they navigate your digital spaces.
• Share even more behind the scenes that you typically do throughout the year — show up for panned and unexpected live social media sessions — keep your discussions light but relevant.

Consider additional ways to humanize the shopping process as your potential and repeat customers navigate your brick-and-mortar or digital storefronts. 

"Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later." ~ Og Mandino

4.) Have a holiday-specific sales funnel that offers the products your ideal client loves most

Fish where they congregate.

Instead of shooting in the dark or inadvertently fishing in an empty pond, you can elevate your holiday sales this holiday season using your website (or Instagram) and outsell your competition. Here are a few tips to help you use your website and Instagram.

• Ensure you've added your holiday sales promotions to your website home page (where an average of 30% of web traffic enters) and your most popular pages (looking at your website analytics). These are your web pages that already attract and guarantee web traffic.
• Review your Instagram insights data over the past year, specifically for the preceding holiday season. What posts and product mentions got the most love, saves, and shares? These are vast indications of the direction you should take with your holiday sales.

Make your funnel easy to navigate.

There should be consistency in the language (web copy) and visuals (graphics/photos) so that your ideal client sees themself in your marketing, recognizes your offer as something that appeals to them, and can follow your funnel visually from image to image (even if they aren't reading your web copy).

Make purchasing a breeze.

Perhaps you make getting help with purchases (in-store or online) easier than usual (live pop-up chat, for example), or you make their shopping experience feel familiar by allowing your audience to share savings and products as they navigate your sales funnel. 

5.) Be present and create a safe space where your customers do their Christmas shopping.

There's no better time than the holidays to show up everywhere. Okay, maybe not everywhere, but it's best to be present in the places your ideal client finds appealing and willingly spends cash. Whether your ideal client tends to shop from Instagram, respond to marketing emails, or prefers the familiarity of your website, be there and have an offer specific to that platform.

More and more consumers buy online but are genuinely concerned about scams and spam. You can help by cleaning up your website to appear premium and professionally represent your brand. You aim to show customers they can safely navigate your digital assets, input their credit card information, and complete transactions. 

• Will you use these recommendations?
• Is there a recommendation you would add to this list?
• Did you see the 15-step preplist that clients and I use to optimize sales every holiday season?