Top Five Technology Tips To Help You Maximize Holiday Sales
Research by eMarketer predicts global retail sales will exceed $22 trillion next year, with nearly 30 percent of transactions taking place during the 8-week holiday season ending January 1. Whether you are in retail, B2C, or B2B, don’t forget these tips to maximize the sales opportunities that only come along during this time each year.
Today, more than ever before, your business success depends on your awareness and ability to manage the information technology required to satisfy the demands of your business units and customers. You need to build, buy, or lease the products and services that drive the infrastructure that, in turn, keeps all systems moving along. With up to one-third of annual sales (National Retail Federation) compressed to the two-month holiday season, now is not the time to experience delays or a system outage.
‘Tis the season for applying these top five simple tips almost any business can afford to adopt, and, in the coming years, likely cannot afford to overlook:
#5: Offer Flexible Point-of-Sale and E-Sale Options
Starting our countdown at number five, allow customers to order online and provide them with above-and-beyond convenience. If they want it drop-shipped to a different recipient or address, make it so. A particular shipping method based on delivery time, gift wrapping, in-store pickup, yes, yes, and yes. If you have multiple stores, your inventory system needs to advise them which store might have what they want. Customers often drive 10 or 20 miles or more to purchase a special item and no longer worry about when it will arrive.
Work with your IT partners to boost supply chain dynamics so you can advise customers with confidence when the next shipment will arrive from the warehouse. Conversely, if shelves are selling out faster than you can restock, customers are demanding lay-a-way, or your online orders are on backorder, you need IT supply chain and inventory management technology that can re-route procurement activity to close on those sales.
If you haven’t already done it, test and re-test your online shopping carts and use the very same iOS and Android tablets and smartphones your customers are using. Budget time and space during the Summer and early Fall to try new promotions, technology, and marketing. Gauge customer response before the holiday sales cycle so you know which ideas and practices to repeat.
#4: Track Referrals and Promotions
Touchscreen retail POS and B2B sales systems today can easily display a screen of referral or promo buttons. Associates can track each sales transaction with just a tap. Examine what your competition is doing, what you did last year, or try something new. The following ideas can help you get started with coding your referrals and offering winning sales promotions:
- Offer a Percentage Discount
- Offer a Fixed Dollar Discount
- Buy One, Get One (BOGO)
- Buy Two, Get One (BTGO)
- Offer In-Store Credit
- Offer an Online Only Discount
- Offer an In-Store Only Discount
- Offer a Friends & Family Program Discount
- Offer a Rewards Club
- Offer a Frequency or Loyalty Discount
- Offer a Coupon Discount
- Offer an Online Marketing Discount by Code
- Offer an Employee Discount
- Offer a Facebook, AARP, or Network Affiliate Discount
- Offer a Discount for Damaged Items
#3: Build Resilience into Your Infrastructure
While the sales and marketing teams and retail associates are engaged in product promotions and social media campaigns, you need to concentrate on the basics. I’m referring to your core IT systems. Coming in at number three in our list, these are the basic building blocks of your IT foundation. You want to go to sleep every night knowing that your systems are delivering all of the following basic value-drivers.
Repeat after me, “My IT infrastructure is providing our entire business with…”
- “Redundant backup and cloud storage?”
- “High availability and uptime?”
- “Failover to swiftly handle unpredictable system downtime or power outages?”
- “Disaster recovery and business continuity?”
- “Data warehouse, data mining, reporting, and analytics?”
- “Database concurrency and integrity (mom and daughter can place orders from the same account at the same time; real-time inventory and shipping; one source of truth about customer profiles and orders;)
- “Integrated lead-gen, promotion, marketing, and feedback?”
- “Performance?”
Performance is critical, especially during high-traffic sales or peak rush periods. Low promotional sale prices extended only to the next 200 network TV shopping channel customers (“who order in the next 30 minutes”) could backfire if your systems can’t keep up. In a similar manner, a successful marketing campaign would end on a sour note if your order fulfillment system slowed to a crawl after 5,000 orders with another 495,000 suspended in queue.
Online systems have to deliver pricing options, specs, video tours, and dynamic shopping carts. Traditional brick and mortar stores must perform in an almost equal fashion, with POS displays, price tags, brand differentiators, and available checkout counters. Loss leaders and free samples always help. Enthusiastic associates can guide consumers to the right products or explain the promotions. Your IT and POS systems should not be a source of frustration among staff or customers. If they require extensive training or delay customers from processing returns, gift exchanges, or promotional deals, it’s time for new IT systems with welcome new features.
#2: Insist on Strong Security (But Don’t Overdo It)
Protect customer information such as credit cards, email, addresses, and phones. If selling healthcare, medical, or adult products, the need to protect personal data increases to avoid possible legal liability for a data breach. If a customer does not feel safe traveling to your physical store location, you very likely lost their business. This sense of trust extends to the virtual domain as well. Customers want to feel that your company takes its security obligations seriously.
But don’t overdo it. If you ask for a CAPTCHA code that Sherlock Holmes couldn’t begin to decipher, customers may place their order elsewhere. Instead of asking for the same address, phone, and e-mail information, if you can securely store it in a user’s profile, it will help. Users want safety but they will understand the tradeoff of a little security for convenience when your systems are mature and have earned their trust.
As a retailer, in addition to your compliance with the old PCI DSS standards, you are already aware of what the shift to Europay, MasterCard and Visa (EMV) credit card chip technology means for your business. You and your employees and your merchant account processing agent could be liable for point-of-sale fraud, especially if a customer presents an EMV chip card and you haven’t installed the new chip-reader terminals. Similar to prescribing a round of IT performance and assessment health checks, your operation may need to schedule a security audit to verify your compliance and readiness.
#1: Slice and Dice the Analytics Data
And the number one technology tip for a healthy selling season… dig a little deeper into your analytics data.
You’ve been collecting and tracking sales all year. Your systems know who bought what, when, how many, in response to which motivational sales strategies, and where the majority of sales occurred. Consider the following scenarios:
- Physical Stores: Your sales data captures when the sale was made, what referral or promotional codes were applied, the dollar amount, the products, the payment method, and even which register or associate within the department. Try to duplicate the data conditions that you can identify as recurring success strategies. For example, schedule your best people to work on specific days and times directly after announcing or mailing details about an upcoming promotional offer to a list of target consumers.
- Online Stores: Your sales data can tell you which e-mail marketing campaigns received the most clicks and which websites pulled the customers in before they decided to add a product or service to their shopping carts.
The data is all there, collected in transaction logs, click-thru session tables, and piles of columnar lists you can view in a browser or export to Excel. Your IT partners or in-house analytics team can apply meaningful filters and views to this data and layer over other information to understand customer behavior and perhaps provide even better offers in the future.
For example, if website, demographic, credit card, mailing list, device type, and even GPS location data reveal that 75% of all sales over the last month were from female customers age 24 to 36 in the Midwest who saw the same YouTube ad with a limited time promotion code, your marketing and IT teams need to sync up to repeat the campaign or enhance it. (We suspect it was one of the many talented slightly cross-eyed cats out there who can drink from the toilet and then paw-out some jazzy blues number on the piano.)
In addition to customer history and behavior on the demand side, your analytics team can also process the supply logistics to determine where and how to source the pipeline of product needed to satisfy order forecasts. Timing, shipping, and sourcing along the supply chain often yield greater profit margins and speed market transactions.
With each passing holiday season, retail sales and the online portion of those B2C and B2B sales, continue to reach new highs. Your ability to sustain sales, compete, and grow at the front-end is derived directly from your recognition to invest in the essential parts of your IT infrastructure on the back-end.