With holiday shopping beginning in earnest this week, it’s not too late to launch some last-minute sales and marketing plans of your own.
Start by making a list and checking it twice. If you don’t have a customer list in a spreadsheet, database or CRM system, start going through invoices and other records and compiling customer names, contact information and other important data. Jeff Crouse, vice president and general manager of small and medium businesses at Pitney Bowes, notes that “your best resource is customers that have already purchased your product.”
Then get a few coupons and offers together and start emailing (or snail-mailing) them. And get started now; direct mail should go out by December 1 at the latest. Send some special offers to your social media followers too.
Mobile consumers are more important than ever, so be sure to target them with mobile ad campaigns and a mobile-friendly website.
And measure how well your efforts perform. Study web analytics to see if people leave your site quickly (and how and why they got there); it could tell you something if people aren’t finding what they came for. If you have a shopping cart, add metrics to study shopping cart abandonment to see if you can find a pattern there.
Adapted from 5 Tips for Luring Customers This Holiday Season at Small Business Computing.