Tag Archives: Holiday Season Presents For Retailers

The Key Holiday Season Presents For Retailers in Australia and New Zealand & How To Maximise Revenue

Posted on by
Reply

Don’t miss these critical opportunities to connect directly with festive shoppers and boost your sales leading up to the Christmas period ahead.

Christmas is the biggest annual revenue driver, contributing more than 45.3percent to the total annual retail sector. In the lead up there are various events throughout November and December — such as Click Frenzy, Black Friday, Cyber Monday — offering opportunities for retailers to showcase who they are and what they do, to drive sales and engage with new and present customers.

Here’s the list of Important dates to Create plans around:

  • Melbourne Cup — November 5th — In categories like fashion, 70 percent of individuals purchase with an occasion in mind. Fashion retailers are well-acquainted using the purchase-driving power of the Melbourne Cup.
  • Click Frenzy — November 12th — A effort fusing Australia’s main sales into a centralised online shopping experience — and definitely worth getting involved .
  • Black Friday — November 29th — Originally in the U.S, Black Friday has become a growing initiative here in Australia.
  • Small Business Saturday — November 30th — Initially started by American Express, encouraging clients to’shop little’ and support local companies.
  • Cyber Monday — December 2nd — Cyber Monday follows on from Black Friday, with a focus on online shopping.
  • Free Shipping Day — December 14th — The previous day that customers can shop online with guaranteed free delivery prior to Christmas.
  • Super Saturday — December 21st — The last Saturday before Christmas (enough said).
  • Boxing Day — December 26th — One word: earnings, sales, sales.

If retailers can adopt these events successfully, it increases their likelihood of bringing keen seasonal shoppers — and turning them into returning, long-time clients.

According to our experience working with leading Australian & New Zealand retailers, here is the three most critical areas to get right.

1. Optimise Your In-Store and Internet Experience So They Are Efficient & Engaging

Australian and New Zealand shoppers reveal a clear preference towards retailers offering an integrated bricks and clicks existence. This provides them with maximum convenience and efficiency to finish their buying journey by using both electronic and in-store touch-points.

Regardless of the growth of online shopping, Australians still favor completing part of the purchasing journey in-store — particularly for the big occasions. However, they are mixing that with online research to guide which store(s) they see. Nowadays, two out of five shoppers leave a sale due to a lack of cross-channel alternatives to make a purchase.

Given that the festive season is the period of greatest spend and complexity (with many present choices to make) for many customers, providing such efficacy is vital.

This requires retailers to optimise their in-store experience to increase the odds of winning the sale and building loyal relationships when shoppers see. Ensuring your shop, staff and systems are geared up to effectively engage clients, fast provide recommendations and increase termed earnings / loyalty sign ups it is crucial to increase sales and minimise abandonment. With a great number of casual employees in operation throughout the festive period, retailers will need to provide them with intuitive, intelligent systems and technologies to help bridge the knowledge gap.

In addition, you need to ensure you’re providing a unified online shopping experience that maximises in-store visits and eCommerce revenue. 1 survey by Deloitte proves that digitally affected in-store buys made up over five times that of pure eCommerce purchases. To put it differently, it’s now commonplace for in-store shoppers to research a new or product online . Research demonstrates that 67 percent of people will see a merchant’s site first, before going into physical shops .

 

Offering Click & Collect and In-Store Stock Assess based on real-time stock is one big way to drive these in-store visits. Australians shoppers love Click & Collect for the motives of ‘preventing house delivery charges’(45 percent of shoppers) and because‘it is much more suitable than home delivery’(37 percent of shoppers). For online-sales driven events such as Click Frenzy, Black Friday and Cyber Monday there’s still chance for retailers to turn them into in-store visit chances.

For both online and in-store, ensuring that you have the ideal fulfilment choices and that meet / exceed delivery rate timelines is critical during the holiday season. Fail to provide confidence that customers will receive their products in time and see that your conversion rates plummet.

2. Make sure Inventory / Product Availability

During the festive period, with a long list of presents to purchase and a brief length of time, shoppers tend to be even less forgiving when it comes to retailers not having available inventory.

So, having the ideal product choice available and appropriate inventory levels in all your stores and stations is an obvious issue to get right. But it is still among the most frequent failures we see from Australian and New Zealand retail. Understocking and overstocking contributes to a drastic amount of lost sales. The typical merchant loses 4 percent of potential revenue because of 31 percent of consumers purchasing products from other retailers when things aren’t immediately available for purchase(2).

Those retailers that can exceed customer expectations and give the fastest and easiest access to a range of their best products to meet their needs, can secure a highly effective source of sustainable competitive edge in their own category. The financial effect of greater eCommerce and in-store earnings can be deep. Retail Express customers see an average of $120,000 increased yearly profit per store by allowing such plans.

Retailers pursuing an Endless Aisles business model where all their shops and stations can leverage all inventory across their entire supply chain have the ability to maximise product availability and choice, and optimise the fulfilment experience for clients.

3. Maximise Profiling and Targeted Marketing Before & After The Season

Now’s the time for retailers to receive their targeted marketing so as to drive online and in-store visits and maximise brand awareness. This needs to include digital advertisements, social media and email campaigns together with in-store signage & visual merchandising. By utilizing customer profile data, each these campaigns can be personalised to account for a selection of different demographics and product preferences.

Maximising the capture of profiles and names of all visitors and clients that hit your shops (physical and online) during the festive season is vital for continuing personalisation, loyalty programs and promotion to induce repeat shop visits and maximum lifetime value to the new year.

You will find a wealth of current customer growth and loyalty programs you can participate in if essential details are recorded. However, many stores still let shoppers walk away unidentified and don’t turn them into repeat customers.

In Retail Express, maximising termed earnings is a leading item on the agenda of the growth-focused retailers we associate with. In general store and invididual staff KPIs and incentives are designed with this front of thoughts. Having advanced CRM capability inside your in-store Point of Sale system is critical to progressively profiling clients.

Sources