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Playing Blackjack 
with the Holiday Sell

Advice to help spread a little holiday cheer in your location

September 2009 By Doug Fleener

Digital Marketing Helps Retailers Handle the Holiday Selling Season

In a world of fast-paced living and the “right now” generation, consumers place a high value on time and convenience. Retailers are improving speed and simplicity in their stores, but consumer expectations constantly threaten to outpace retail innovation. Having something shipped in three days isn’t acceptable anymore, people want it now.

Consumers’ “need for speed” accelerates during the holiday season, when time really flies. This is creating opportunities for imaging retailers, thanks to the new generation of in-store photo kiosk and lab systems, which are enabling consumers to easily and instantly create studio-quality prints and specialty photo creations.

Attracting consumers to imaging retail and engaging them with the new systems continues to be a retail challenge. The good news is that new point-of-sale marketing strategies that leverage digital communications are helping to engage, educate and entice consumers into pushing their creative boundaries.

New digital point-of-sale marketing platforms for imaging retailers, such as something called “digital attract loops” on photo kiosks, vivid displays on overhead LCD screens, and intelligent upselling systems are allowing retailers to easily design and execute creative, visual concepts that grab consumer attention and draw them into the instant photo-creation experience.

For the holiday season, retailers can use the new digital POS platforms with a thematic holiday overlay. Thanks to new centralized automated software management systems, holiday images, music, attract loops and themed promotions can be updated from a central point for any or all photo center locations, making a holiday refresh easier and more cost-effective. Because the content is digital multimedia, it can be kept fresh and timely to engage and inspire consumers continually anytime they visit the store.

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IN THIS STORY: The planning for the holiday selling season has begun and retail expert Doug Fleener has come up aces with his 21 tips to help you get the most out of this vitally important time of year.

Okay, it's only September and we certainly don't think your customers want to be hit with Christmas songs and nutcrackers when they walk in the front door of your stores, but planning for the holiday selling season has surely begun in earnest.

Retail analyst Lauren Sosik thinks the rough economic climate has consumers planning early as most are working on a much tighter budget in 2009.

"People are realizing they'll be spending less for Christmas this year and are planning early exactly what to purchase. Many of the statistics we're seeing tell us that about 40 percent of holiday shoppers will have made up their minds about big-ticket purchases by end of September," she said.

While the in-store planning process begins early, many retailers don't start pushing holiday shopping until early November, explained Ellen Davis, Vice President of the National Retail Federation. But now retailers are trying to avoid what happened last year when holiday sales declined for the first time since the NRF began tracking them in the early 1990s.

"Retailers had far more inventory than they needed, so they were forced to discount heavily and, in some cases, give items away with a purchase," Davis added.

Well then, with those thoughts in mind, it's time to play a little Blackjack, equipped with Fleener's "21 Tips to Brighten the Holiday Selling Season."

21 Holiday Selling Tips 
for Retailers:

1. Send all of your customers a personalized holiday card with either a picture of the store or the staff. You need to do this now!

2. Send your top customers a gift card or gift certificate wrapped in an attractive box. Give higher amounts to your best customers. If your staff is good, when your customers come in to spend their gift cards they will end up making purchases for far more than the face value of the gift.

3. E-mail your customers and tell them about the top 20 gifts available in your store this season. Include a printable wish list for them to use either as a shopping list for others or to give to someone else.

4. Put the same list into a press release and send it to the local paper, radio station, etc.

 

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