Archive for the ‘Easter’ Category

20 tips for Retailers for Easter

Friday, March 23rd, 2012

22 Tips for successful Easter retailingIs your shop ready for increased Easter holiday sales ?

When each holiday rolls around in the retail calendar we know that retail sales will increase both instore and online. Are you ready to take advantage of the sales opportunity that Easter brings?

I’m talking here about your expectations from this holiday period. The one thing that continually dominates the news is the recession. Speculation on what might happen over the next few months is really best left to the banking experts. But how it affects our businesses is for us to determine.

After the well known death and taxes, there are two more guarantees that you can bank - holidays will happen, and people will still spend money on gifts and food for the holiday season.

Every year Christmas is the dominant period of retail sales in the UK. But retail sales increase around all the major holiday periods. We also see increased sales for special events and days like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day. If you’re fortunate enough to have an online store attached to your bricks and mortar store, then here’s some good news – Worldwide, the trend for online shopping is increasing and is unlikely to slow.

This year more people will buy online,

• social networks will contribute widely to customers buying decisions.
• consumers will increasingly search for bargains, added value and special offers
• comparison shopping will increase

As we all know, buying for Christmas can start as early as September but the real peak happens in the first week of December. While Easter isn’t on the same scale as Christmas, it is a chance to shout about your business.

The key to successful holiday retailing is preparation. Last minute cobbling together of a display or an offer just isn’t going to bring you optimum results. Here are 22 key tips for maximising Easter sales:

1. Is your online store ready? It is no use waiting until April to set up the store as you just won’t make it in time.

2. Is your bricks and Mortar store ready? Do you have a theme, a window display, a colour theme, and an offer ?

3. Do you have the products to sell? Getting the stock can be tricky the closer you get to a popular holiday so you need to know what you will need now. Its one of the vagaries of business in the UK that a holiday means that suppliers just disappear – so be ready with your stock levels in advance – if you can’t afford to get all the stock in at once, book it in on a rotational basis so that different suppliers drop stock in each week – this has the added benefit of keeping your store looking fresh, but might affect the “wow” factor of a new display ?

4. For online sales - When is the delivery cut off date? You can’t sell to a customer expecting Easter delivery if you’re not going to get the product in time. It’s vital to tell your customers what they can expect if they buy later than a specific date.

5. Do you have a safe checkout process setup ? This will aid sales as it builds buyer confidence – as does adding an SSL certificate to your online store.

6. Think about promotions? You can setup special Google AdWords Campaigns just for key holidays and help drive traffic to your store.

7. Use the Price Comparison portals to promote your products and special offers and drive qualified traffic to your webstore. This doesn’t work quite so well for “aesthetic purchases” as it does for branded goods, but if price comparison is your bag, go ahead and do it well.

8. Are you offering holiday specials? You can put up products that have special pre-Easter offers such as free delivery. This can aid conversions.

9. Add special holiday keywords? Make sure that you add the keywords to your Meta-keywords with plenty of time to get crawled by the search engines long before the holiday date. Also make sure that you add Special Holiday Gift category names and description text to match up with your keywords.

10. Price points can be all important , so don’t forget to stand back and look at your offering to make sure that you’ve catered for price ranges for all budgets.

11. Help them out – give your customers ideas. Take some of the strain out of shopping for them, set up special categories like “Gifts for him”, Gifts for Mum”, “Gifts for my favourite nan”, “Oooh she might like this gifts ” etc. Be inventive - you need to stand out in a crowd. I always think that if you make someone laugh then you’ve made them remember you ! Obviously this is to be used with care !

12. Don’t forget Google It might take weeks to crawl and index your new content so allow enough time for the googlebots to find your content and index it.

13. Gift wrapping and gift cards can be easily added in the shopping basket so you might want to think about offering free gift wrapping and free gift delivery.

14. Have your “Wall of desire” right next to your till. Whether it’s chocolate, key rings, pens, notebooks, nail varnish or whatever, make sure you have some fun fripperies right next to your till for impulse purchases.

15. Free shipping for all Holiday Purchases, or anytime, can be a great incentive to buy online. If you are selling a product online you can structure an average shipping price into your costs.

16. Time the shipping and delivery so that as you get closer to the holiday shipping is no longer free but perhaps at a premium to ensure delivery. (if you have the technological savvy to do this) For bricks and mortar stores, consider opening a little earlier, or staying open a little later if there are shoppers around.

17. Give your store a holiday theme. It is easy to setup a new style and change the colours and banners. You can even start doing that right now and make that the live style later in the year. Set up a count down - it can be as easy as a little added text to your home page. For your bricks and mortar store, go all out on the Theming – this will create interest and interest creates shoppers.

18. After the holiday is a great time for specials and people on holiday like to shop around for bargains. So don’t think everything stops on April 8th. The smart shops will be ready with the next campaign. (Spring, followed by the jubilee followed by the Olympics in case you were wondering)

19. Remember you don’t need thousands of products just a few of the products that sell. Focus on quality and for online provide good content (descriptions, images etc) for bricks and mortar stores make sure your seasonal display is self evident in your window (ie before entering ) and instore (upon entering)

20. How much product – It doesn’t have to be acres of product – just a representation or suggestion. On the subject of decoration, to my knowledge no-one has ever complained about too much Easter decoration !

So go crazy with the bunnies and the pastels ! If it makes people smile, feel nostalgic (even for a second) then it makes them feel good and you’re heading in the right direction.

Finally, don’t be limited by convention! Think outside the box and come up with other ways to increase Easter traffic and sales to your business. For instance, if the products you sell don’t really have an Easter holiday theme—so what?
Have a go, call it an Easter promotion, give mini eggs to your customers, ask them to guess the weight of the egg, anything you can think of, Come up with a cute Easter theme for email marketing newsletters and promotions. you’re only limited by your imaginations!

It isn’t too late to make the most of the increased sales from Easter!

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Retail sales worst for 15 years

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

banging-your-head-against-a-wallRetail sales fell in March by the biggest margin since records began, according to new figures from the British Retail Consortium (BRC).

The BRC said that total sales during the month were down around 1.9 per cent when compared with the same month last year. This represented the worst performance since 1996, when the survey was started. Factors such as the late Easter impact these figures but its not really easy to say how much?

Like for like sales were 3.5 per cent lower than the previous year which is the worst like for like performance since 2005. So nothing to celebrate there for retailers.

Meanwhile online sales remained quite resilient. They were up by 7.5 per cent, which in other fields would be a rocking increase, but this is still lower than the 10.4 per cent increase registered in February. So in real terms its not good news.

The late Easter is partly to blame for the figures according to the BRC, but this alone is not enough to explain the poor performance of retail.

Instead, analysts have suggested that rising prices, the coalition’s VAT increase, and real-terms wage cuts for many workers are likely to be the cause. Basically knocking consumer confidence if not into the ground, at least into a wooded area.

Stephen Robertson, Director General, British Retail Consortium, said:
“This is the worst drop in total sales since we first collected these figures in 1995. Non-food retailers were particularly hard-hit. This is strong evidence of the pressure customers and traders are under. This year’s later Easter is a factor but this fall goes way beyond anything that can be explained by that alone.

“Uncomfortably high inflation and low wage growth have produced the first year-on-year fall in disposable incomes for thirty years. Mounting fuel and utility costs, falling house prices, higher VAT and the prospect of more tax rises and job losses left people unwilling to spend unless they really had to. These pressures aren’t going away and the arrival of higher National Insurance is likely to compound them in the immediate future.

“The next interest rate decision is a difficult balancing act for the Bank of England but, for now, supporting our weak economy must be the priority. Inflation is coming mainly from temporary and external price shocks - VAT, world commodity prices and the weak pound - not wage or consumer-driven increases. Increasing interest rates would do more harm than good.”

Helen Dickinson, Head of Retail, KPMG, said:
“The food sector suffered in the month due to Easter purchasing falling into March last year, thus impacting the overall results. However, beyond this the trend continues in a marked downward direction: non-food continues to struggle, with big-ticket and home-related sectors again being the hardest hit. We have seen an emergence of new, lower spending patterns since the middle of January, which are currently continuing to trend downwards. Many retailers will not be able to sustain this ongoing weakness in demand beyond the short term and are hoping for some good news around the extended bank holiday period and a feel-good factor driven by the royal wedding.”

where, I hear you ask, is the good news ? The short answer is that there isn’t any - apart from three bank holidays that may get shoppers back onto the high street, but even these three days aren’t magical days that can make up for the lack of confidence and disposable income, so while we have sunshine, daffodils and longer evenings, all of which are long overdue, we don’t sadly have any good news for retailers… yet !

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Happy Easter Egg-xess

Monday, April 13th, 2009

Happy Easter chuck !

Happy Easter chuck !

Let’s be honest its kind of a strange holiday and a difficult sell, unless you’ve bought up all the Woollies Easter Eggs…!

When you delve into the background of this Christian festival, there’s a few surprises…. “Eastre” was actually a pagan figure, celebrated as the Goddess of Spring. A festival called Eastre was apparently held during the spring equinox by Pagan people to honour her. The goddess Eastre’s earthly symbol was the rabbit, which was also known as a symbol of fertility. So now I get the bunny connection, but how did we get from there to chocolate eggs?

Well, most ancient races around the world had similar spring festivals to celebrate the birth of the year, The Egg, as a symbol of fertility and re-birth, has been associated with these rites from the earliest times.

So when the Pagans arrived here in about the 5th century AD, the festival came with them along with their rituals. When the Saxons converted to Christianity and started to celebrate the death and the resurrection of Christ, it coincided with Eostre, so that’s what the early church in Britain called the celebration, Eostre or Easter in modern English. So that’s the history, here comes the sales… or do they?

The media is full of stories about Easter being a huge turning point in retailers calendars… Really? Its news to me. OK, maybe if you sell Sofas I can see its huge, but for the rest of us, its not mega….. It’s nice to celebrate the advent of Spring and to put some bright cheerful props around the shop, but talk about focusing on the positive. There’s some problems with creating a sales phenomenon around Easter….

Easter has rabbits and eggs – not an easy sell…! Rabbits are normally portrayed as either a bit dumb, or sex crazy…. Bugs Bunny doesn’t wear any trousers – I rest my case !

Everything that’s celebrated around Easter happens in the morning and we all know that nothing good for commerce happens before noon !

There’s no Easter songs? So you can’t really ramp up the marketing…. Christmas has reams of songs, we all know them by heart. Easter has…..?

Finally, the focus is on a corpse coming back to life…. Not cute! – Amazing, yes. Cute – No !

So I think we can agree Easter is a tough sell, pretty, but tough. But if it increases footfall then who’s complaining?

One of the things i’ve noticed about Easter this year is the choice on offer, you can get vegan eggs, protein free eggs, fairly traded eggs, green eggs, diabetic eggs, to name just a few. I’m old enough to remember when there were three choices and one of them was Smarties! So maybe the lesson here is how to differentiate your offering and how the market is evolving…. oh and offering choice?

So that’s the cynic in me satiated, but in the spirit of Easter, which is above all a story of hope, with the promise of new beginnings, lets not dwell on the bad stuff and instead lets think about Spring arriving and what we can create for this new season….

And if that all seems too sweet to be true, here’s my Easter gift to you: A get-out-of-jail-free carbohydrate card.

Apparently there’s a range of benefits and nutritious surprises found in chocolate. The key is learning to choose the right type and eating the right amount (and 50 grams is pretty decent) so now you can feel virtuous devouring it.

Now for another bite of that pair of ears on my dark chocolate Lindt bunny.

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