Friday 23 March 2012

22 tips for maximising Easter retail sales.

Is your shop ready for increased Easter holiday sales ?

When each holiday rolls around in the retail calendar we know that retail sales will increase both instore and online. Are you ready to take advantage of the sales opportunity that Easter brings?
Are you ready to sell Easter !

If that sounds like a misnomer I assure you that it’s not ! I’m talking here about your expectations from this holiday period. The one thing that continually dominates the news is the recession. Speculation on what might happen over the next few months is really best left to the banking experts. But how it affects our businesses is for us to determine.

After the well known death and taxes, there are two more guarantees that you can bank - holidays will happen, and people will still spend money on gifts and food for the holiday season.

Every year Christmas is the dominant period of retail sales in the UK. But retail sales increase around all the major holiday periods. We also see increased sales for special events and days like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day. If you’re fortunate enough to have an online store attached to your bricks and mortar store, then here’s some good news – Worldwide, the trend for online shopping is increasing and is unlikely to slow.

This year more people will buy online,

* Social networks will contribute widely to customers buying decisions.
* Consumers will increasingly search for bargains, added value and special offers
* Comparison shopping will increase

As we all know, buying for Christmas can start as early as September but the real peak happens in the first week of December. While Easter isn’t on the same scale as Christmas, it is a chance to shout about your business.

The key to successful holiday retailing is preparation. Last minute cobbling together of a display or an offer just isn’t going to bring you optimum results. Here are 22 key tips for maximising Easter sales:

1. Is your online store ready? It is no use waiting until April to set up the store as you just won't make it in time.

2. Is your bricks and Mortar store ready? Do you have a theme, a window display, a colour theme, and an offer ?

3. Do you have the products to sell? Getting the stock can be tricky the closer you get to a popular holiday so you need to know what you will need now. Its one of the vagaries of business in the UK that a holiday means that suppliers just disappear – so be ready with your stock levels in advance – if you can’t afford to get all the stock in at once, book it in on a rotational basis so that different suppliers drop stock in each week – this has the added benefit of keeping your store looking fresh, but might affect the “wow” factor of a new display ?

4. For online sales - When is the delivery cut off date? You can’t sell to a customer expecting 4. Easter delivery if you’re not going to get the product in time. It’s vital to tell your customers what they can expect if they buy later than a specific date.

5. Do you have a safe checkout process setup ? This will aid sales as it builds buyer confidence – as does adding an SSL certificate to your online store.

6. Think about promotions? You can setup special Google AdWords Campaigns just for key holidays and help drive traffic to your store.

7. Use the Price Comparison portals to promote your products and special offers and drive qualified traffic to your webstore. This doesn’t work quite so well for “aesthetic purchases” as it does for branded goods, but if price comparison is your bag, go ahead and do it well.

8. Are you offering holiday specials? You can put up products that have special pre-Easter offers such as free delivery. This can aid conversions.

9. Add special holiday keywords? Make sure that you add the keywords to your Meta-keywords with plenty of time to get crawled by the search engines long before the holiday date. Also make sure that you add Special Holiday Gift category names and description text to match up with your keywords.

10. Price points can be all important , so don’t forget to stand back and look at your offering to make sure that you’ve catered for price ranges for all budgets.

11. Help them out – give your customers ideas. Take some of the strain out of shopping for them, set up special categories like "Gifts for him", Gifts for Mum", "Gifts for my favourite nan", "Oooh she might like this gifts " etc. Be inventive - you need to stand out in a crowd. I always think that if you make someone laugh then you’ve made them remember you ! Obviously this is to be used with care !

12. Don't forget Google It might take weeks to crawl and index your new content so allow enough time for the googlebots to find your content and index it.

13. Gift wrapping and gift cards can be easily added in the shopping basket so you might want to think about offering free gift wrapping and free gift delivery.

14. Have your “Wall of desire” right next to your till. Whether it’s chocolate, key rings, pens, notebooks, nail varnish or whatever, make sure you have some fun fripperies right next to your till for impulse purchases.

15. Free shipping for all Holiday Purchases, or anytime, can be a great incentive to buy online. If you are selling a product online you can structure an average shipping price into your costs.

16. Time the shipping and delivery so that as you get closer to the holiday shipping is no longer free but perhaps at a premium to ensure delivery. (if you have the technological savvy to do this) For bricks and mortar stores, consider opening a little earlier, or staying open a little later if there are shoppers around.

17. Give your store a holiday theme. It is easy to setup a new style and change the colours and banners. You can even start doing that right now and make that the live style later in the year.

18. Set up a count down - it can be as easy as a little added text to your home page. For your bricks and mortar store, go all out on the Theming – this will create interest and interest creates shoppers.

19. After the holiday is a great time for specials and people on holiday like to shop around for bargains. So don't think everything stops on April 8th. The smart shops will be ready with the next campaign. (Spring, followed by the jubilee followed by the Olympics in case you were wondering)

20. Remember you don't need thousands of products just a few of the products that sell. Focus on quality and for online provide good content (descriptions, images etc) for bricks and mortar stores make sure your seasonal display is self evident in your window (ie before entering ) and instore (upon entering)

21. How much product – It doesn’t have to be acres of product – just a representation or suggestion. On the subject of decoration, to my knowledge no-one has ever complained about too much Easter decoration ! So go crazy with the bunnies and the pastels ! If it makes people smile, feel nostalgic (even for a second) then it makes them feel good and you’re heading in the right direction.

22. Finally, don’t be limited by convention! Think outside the box and come up with other ways to increase Easter traffic and sales to your business. For instance, if the products you sell don’t really have an Easter holiday theme---so what?

Have a go, call it an Easter promotion, give mini eggs to your customers, ask them to guess the weight of the egg, anything you can think of, Come up with a cute Easter theme for email marketing newsletters and promotions. You’re only limited by your imaginations!

It isn’t too late to make the most of the increased sales from Easter!

Friday 9 March 2012

International Women's Day

Happy International Women’s Day ladies!

This is a day where us girls get to celebrate our achievements, the power of our strength, our femininity and how far we’ve come since this national day originated over 100 years ago.

We thought long and hard about the perfect accessory to showcase today, one that needs no talking, that speaks for its pretty self, and that embodies the strong yet feminine creatures we are–and we think we've found it here in our sterling silver feather pendants.

They're beautiful and delicate with a strong core ! We like them because the shape of the feather seems as though its dancing - almost as if the movement of the strands of the feather has been captured for ever. best of all you can wear this at a fashionably long length, or it would look striking grouped together with another pendant or two to make a personal fashion statement.

Now, we understand not all of you are a silver jewellery loving laydeee because not all of us are the same, but we all share a common link (besides our love for jewellery), our strength and accomplishments.

Its not an easy feat to pull of in this modern age - being tough, yet caring, feminine yet strong, looking good while having no time to ourselves - so all in all for every woman who walks that thin line everyday - lets celebrate today !