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A Checklist To Ensure You’re Holiday Ready

It’s less than ten weeks away until the busiest time of year for retailers. Are you ready?

From creating impressionable window displays to offering festive gift wrap to planning for extra staff, the list is long. Let’s not forget stocking your store with this season’s must have gifts! Trusting your orders are already placed (we hope), here’s a look at some operational musts to ensure your holiday season is a success.

1. Create and start promoting extended hours to support the holiday season. If you are in a zoned area or shopping mall, these hours may already be determined for you. Either way, start marketing these hours so that your customers know you are there for them beyond your normal hours.

2. Plan for special marketing initiatives. These will vary based on your store and customer, but are likely to include (but not limited to) email marketing, a holiday open house, special shopping deals, customer appreciation days, a visit from Santa in your store, a shopping guide for customers, e-commerce only specials and more.

3. Identify your return and exchange policies on all receipts and near your cash wrap. If you are planning for altered policies specifically for the holiday season, make sure you also identify time frames they are specific to. It’s always a good idea to have customers initial receipts after you have explained your policy, as well.

4. Use social media as a marketing tool to post daily deals, special event details and more. If you aren’t already using social media, it’s not too late to get started. If you already are, you are a million steps ahead already! Identify how you can leverage your social media audience to not just hear you, but buy from you this holiday season.

5. Cross promote with like minded businesses. Create packages that overlap your products or services with other businesses in a “bundle package”, allowing you to gain new customers from their mailing list and customer outreach – and vice versa. Addiitonally, it’s a fun way to introduce new gifts to your local marketplace.

6. Get the media involved in your holiday plans. Radio stations, newspapers, local television stations, magazines and other local media outlets are crave great information to share with their readers. Let your store holiday plans be among what they share! Get on the ball now, though… The holidays are only ten weeks away.

7. Plan for additional staff. Possibly this means additional hours for current employees. Maybe this means holiday only help. Whatever works for you, it’s time to get it all identified so when the rush of customers keeps you busy, you won’t be stressing about extra help supporting you. Remember to train new hires, as well, on all your store policies!

8. Plan for Plan B. Extra help means extra people to worry about. If someone calls in sick, do you have a back up plan? Life happens – so you may as well have a plan of attack for when it does.

9. Have your holiday window and store displays ready to go. This means knowing what products and extra display accessories you need to support a dynamic display are ready to go for you to simply install. Don’t wait till the last minute to buy your own display extras at the store, either… Just like your store, they are likely busy and maybe sold out. Plus, you want your displays to be impactful and memorable, so don’t wait till the last minute to plan for them.

10. Offer above the top gift wrapping. Sure, everyone offers free gift wrapping this time of year. But does everyone offer beautifully wrapped presents that make a statement all on their own? While we can’t all get the same response a Tiffany blue box does, we can certainly try! The real challenge is to simply go above and beyond the expected.

Bonus Tip: Stay cheerful. The holidays are suppose to be a happy, beautiful time of year. Unfortunately, this isn’t only the case. If it happens to be stressful at home or in your store or both (hey, it happens to the best of us), try not to let your customers see this stress. By acting… dare we say… Christmas”y”, you help set the mood that then impacts your customers.

Finally, try to enjoy the season! From Cyber Monday to Black Friday to Christmas Eve, there is a lot to get ready… and to get excited… for. Have more tips to share? Let us know!

 

 

 

 


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