Holiday Shopping 2014: How to Prepare Your Business

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While Americans are planning their Thanksgiving menus and making their holiday shopping lists, retailers across the country are girding for the biggest holiday sales weekend of the season. Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday are now household names among businesses and consumers, and while some people have already begun their holiday shopping, many will still use the post-Thanksgiving weekend to buy gifts for family and friends.

If your business is running holiday specials at the end of the month, you've likely already started promoting them to your customer base. But with so many other competing sales, the weeks leading up to the holiday shopping season are crucial for raising awareness and staying on your customers' radar.

Marketing and sales experts offered their best advice for small business owners to make 2014 their best holiday sales season yet.

What you should do

Market to loyal customers. Acquiring new customers always requires more time and money than getting repeat customers to come back, and this is especially true during the holiday season. Matt Winn, senior marketing communications manager at e-commerce platform provider Volusion, noted that offering highly personalized discounts and promotions to existing customers can be very effective at encouraging holiday purchases. He also recommended promoting any loyalty programs or newsletters during the holiday shopping weekend to keep customers coming back year-round.

Stay active on social media. Social media has become a great marketing equalizer for businesses of all sizes, and it's in your best interest to use it to your advantage during the busy holiday shopping season. Spreading the word about your holiday incentives on social media not only puts you in touch with consumers who may be searching for a business like yours, but it also gives you an opportunity to be interactive with prospective customers looking for holiday recommendations, said John Oechsle, president and CEO of Swiftpage, a provider of business technology solutions.

"Promote early and tailor scheduled communications to your audience," Oechsle told Business News Daily. "Personalize your communication and offer the type of customer experience — online and offline — that will turn a customer into a long-standing patron long after the holidays are over."

Offer in-store pickup. For brick-and-mortar retailers worried about online sales eclipsing their foot traffic this holiday season, a smart tactic (if you don't already do this) is offering an in-store pickup option for online purchases. Rodney Mason, chief marketing officer of parago, a customer engagement solutions provider, said that "buy online, pick up in-store" (BOPIS) promotions will create a better connection between the online and in-store customer experience.

"Getting foot traffic will be crucial to getting many retailers back in the black this holiday season," Mason said. "The BOPIS promotion should prove to be a helpful one this holiday season. This strategy is a win-win — shoppers get an attractive deal during the holiday season, and retailers gain more in-store foot traffic and increase the likelihood of incremental purchasing." 

Pay attention to your mobile presence. It's no secret that consumers' mobile expectations are rising. An intuitively designed mobile website or app that's information-rich and easy to use will show customers that you have their shopping preferences in mind. Matt Johnston, chief marketing and strategy officer at app analytics company Applause, noted that push notifications on branded mobile apps can be especially effective, but only if they're done right.

"A lot of retailers use [push notifications] like a blunt instrument, which does more harm than good," Johnston said. "Really understand your users and their pace [to] use them effectively."

Offer additional value. Small businesses often need to charge a bit more than larger retailers for the same items, but that doesn't mean you'll lose customers. Freebies that add value beyond the product itself can help sway a customer who's on the fence.

"Free gift wrapping or an extended warranty for certain items can help mitigate the impact of shoppers comparing the price tag of your products with those on another website," Winn said.

Mistakes to avoid

Arbitrary, storewide discounts. Large retailers can afford to offer across-the-board discounts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It can be tempting to slash prices on everything, but as a small business, taking this approach can quickly make profits plummet. Instead, Winn advised offering tiered discounts based on how much money your business can generate per-product or product category.

A tiered discount approach can also work for online sales, with more aggressive discounts for higher-priced items, said Ryan Urban, co-founder of the customer acquisition tool Bounce Exchange. This tactic has been proven to boost overall revenue by increasing the average order value, he said.

Online price-matching. Like storewide discounts, matching online prices can really kill a small brick-and-mortar store's profits. Offering to match a competitor's online price might get people in the door, but ultimately it won't be sustainable.

"A more effective way to compete with online prices is to offer a redemption-based price match, like a rebate," Mason said. "This allows retailers to offer price-matching one product at a time, one consumer at a time, and still offer the best price in market."

Only focusing on Black Friday through Cyber Monday on those days. The post-Thanksgiving holiday shopping weekend isn't a self-contained sales event. Holiday shopping happens before and after, so waiting until the last minute to advertise, or cutting off your discounts as soon as Cyber Monday ends will only hurt your business.

"Online searching for holiday shopping is already picking up prior to Halloween," Urban said. "Beating bigger retailers to shoppers' wallets means offering Black Friday deals a week early, and extending Cyber Monday [deals] through the beginning of December."

Trying new things for your business. It may seem obvious, but to really win the holiday shopping season, you need to devote most, if not all, of your attention to sales. To make sure you do this, Johnston suggested identifying a "lockdown" period in which you temporarily halt other aspects of business innovation and focus on putting your best foot forward.

"Mid-November is not the time to try a radical new design, performance tool, API, etc.," Johnston said. "For retailers, that's the time of year you make your money, [so] you want stability in your user experience, technology and apps."