The 2020 holiday season is shaping up to be the most innovative with people getting together in smaller groups, zooming their gift exchanges and shopping online more than ever. Here are 4 ways to delight and serve your customers during the holidays.
During the shutdown many independent retailers built shoppable websites and increased their social media activity. With all that in place, how can you best delight and serve your customers this holiday season? What problems can you solve for her? How can you add value to her daily experience?
Who can she cross off her list at your shop? Your marketing (read email and social media) should be filled with gift inspiration for the people on her list. Tell her why you’re suggesting these items as ideal gifts in your social media captions and email copy. How about creating videos or doing live shopping events featuring gift ideas by recipient like mom, girlfriends, or secret Santa. Or by interests like wellness, gardening, travel or beauty.
What services do you offer that would make her life easier? How about gift wrapping or shipping? Promote these services in every email, in your social bios and sprinkle them into your social media content. If you don’t tell them how will they know? Take some beautiful photos everytime you gift wrap an item. Or when the UPS person picks up the gifts you’re shipping. Or when someone picks up their purchases curbside. Then promote, promote, promote!
Direct customers to your website from your weekly emails and social posts where they can safely shop from the comfort of their homes. Offer gift wrapping, curbside pick-up or shipping online too. Share items from your website directly to your social media channels. Make sure your website URL is in the correct place in your About section on Facebook and in your Instagram Bio so the links are live.
Don’t worry about seeming repetitive when it comes to sharing your services or gift ideas. Not everyone will see your posts at the same time. People take in so much information each day they sometimes don’t remember what they saw where.
I’ll bet you’ve heard some great stories about how your customers or people you know will be creatively celebrating. We’re all looking for inspiration so share those stories too. For example, my family is doing a virtual secret Santa. We’re using a program called Elfster that will draw the names for us (no need to meet in person) and notify each person of their gift recipient. Each participant can create a wishlist saving each of us a lot of time trying to figure out what someone might appreciate. You could share this story and mention to your customers to hop onto your website to copy and paste the links of their favorite items into their Elfster (or whichever program or app they’re using) wishlist.
Comment below the ways you’re serving your customers this holiday season.