Christmas H
The for a profitable recipe
By Andrew Wilson
The ingredients to help perfect your yuletide marketing programme
aving a great Christmas in business is pretty much dependent on the same things as having a great Christmas at home—figuring out who is going to turn up, finding out what they want, preparing properly and having a
contingency plan if it all goes horribly wrong. The thing that you don’t have to face at home, though, is having Christmas move. Christmas is on 25th December year in, year out. In commerce, however, Christmas is a movable feast. People who have been in the business a while have noticed that the Christmas peak is steadily getting later. Believe it or not, in the 1980s the Christmas peak was at the end of September—it seems to have been shifting back at about two days a year ever since. We only have ourselves to blame, of course. We have
moved from a delivery promise of 28 days to the option of next-day delivery. In addition, we have thrown in the web, which gives an illusion of instant gratification that catalogues have never done. You can see the product of this as traffic shifts from phones to web the nearer we get to Christmas, our customers seeming to have the belief that if the order is placed online they will get it faster. We have compounded this by acting on the trend
for later orders by sending out later and later mailings. Companies are now seeing huge differences even between the responses to October and November mailings, which bears out the wisdom of mailing late but is making the Christmas season more and more compressed. With a compressed season meaning that a year’s
profitability can be defined by three weeks of November and December trading, it is imperative that your Christmas programme must be as near perfect as you can manage. So let’s tick off our list of Christmas preparations one by one.
Who’s going to turn up? Hopefully large chunks of your housefile. This is the time
of year when almost everyone is likely to buy; unless, of course, you made a horrific error in customer relations last year. If you did let your customers down with a popular product being out of stock or some fulfilment disaster, now is the time to fess up. So extract the segments of the affected customers and mail them specially with an apology, an outline of how you have corrected whatever was wrong and some inducement for them to order this year. Sticking your fingers in your ears and going “la la la” won’t work in this instance. When it comes to having their Christmases spoilt, customers have very long memories and ignoring your sins of last year will not make your customers forget your transgressions. There are many companies—one extraordinarily famous one comes to mind—who have cocked things up in the past and dealt with their problems honestly and openly and survived. On the other hand there was one rather spectacular failure where the vendor’s solution to customer
Getting set for Christmas
pages 11-13 The recipe for a profitable
Christmas
Ingredients to help perfect your yuletide marketing
pages 14-15 Christmas stocking
An operational Christmas checklist pages 16-17
Creating a Christmas catalogue that really sells
Making your festive catalogue extra- special.
page 19
Give a gift centre for Christmas Six tips to making the online gift-buying experience better for customers
page 21
A content strategy is not just for Christmas Creating new content should be a year-round priority for online retailers
Plus...
pages 22-23 Strictly business
The case for benefit-driven photography
page 24
Customer acquisition and retention Going beyond the last-click- wins model
News
Tactics Views
Tactics
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