The holidays are approaching, and while this usually means a lot of fun and sales ahead, it’s still a stressful time for business owners. The likelihood is that you’re trying to outdo your performance from last year, even though the circumstances – your workforce, your budget, and the overall condition of the economy – may not be the same. How do you do gangbuster business over the next few months without wearing out your employees (and yourself)?
Fortunately, there’s a lot of small checks and considerations you can take into account in order to prepare your business for the holiday season, and we’re happy to share those secrets with you today. Whether you’re a small business owner wanting to make a big impact this Christmas, an e-commerce company hoping to maximize your Cyber Monday traffic, or a service provider that wants to improve its marketing campaign for the New Year, this article should prove equally beneficial. We’ve even separated them into ‘internal’ pointers – relating to your employees and everything behind the scenes – and ‘external’ pointers, to do with your customers and clientele.
So pull up your shop shutters, flick the ‘CLOSED’ sign to ‘OPEN,’ and start putting these tips into practice…
Internal Relationships
Decorate Your Office
Whether you own a customer-facing or internal-facing business, a few holiday decorations can’t go amiss. Create a vibrant, festive atmosphere with our striking holiday banners, tableware, and posters, and scatter them around meeting rooms or the shop floor. You could even encourage members of your team to bring in – or craft — their own décor, which you can then proudly display on their behalf. We’d also suggest allocating a specific day in November or December where the team sets about decorating the workspace: this will build camaraderie and get everyone psyched up for the busiest season. And for more information, check out our article on “Office Christmas Decorations”!
Organize a Staff Party
You might not be too enthused by the thought of a Christmas party if your employees have been asking about it since last January. Nonetheless, an office holiday party – even if it’s merely a table or two of finger food and a couple of games to play – will remind your employees that the holidays aren’t all about YOY percentages. If you plan to hold your party somewhere like a restaurant, bar, or hotel, then you’ll have to make a booking ASAP; however, if you’re rebuffed by your venue of choice, you could always postpone your party until January or February. Just remember to involve your employees with every aspect of the planning process, and again, if you need more advice, check out our “Tips for Planning a Company Holiday Party”!
Draw Up Your Roster
Before you finalize everyone’s shifts for the holiday season, take some time to analyze last year’s performance. Were there any unexpectedly busy periods you hadn’t prepared for? Did you find yourself short-staffed at any point? While it’s impossible to predict exactly how business will develop from year to year, looking at post-holiday reports from previous years may expose some areas that you’ve overlooked.
However, as important as it is to make sure you have adequate cover on your busiest days, it’s arguably even more important to give employees time off. You don’t need to send everyone on a two-month-long vacation, and it does depend on the industry, but try to accommodate their requests as much as possible – overworked employees, starved of the PTO they asked for, are unlikely to be very productive!
Reward Your Employees
Verbal acknowledgment of your employees’ successes is essential: if they feel that their hard work is going unnoticed, then they’re bound to lose motivation. To ensure that they perform to the best of their ability, then, you shouldn’t only thank them, but reward them. Both colleagues and clients could be gifted something from our “13 Corporate Holiday Gifts They Will Actually Like” article, but when it comes to your teammates, the best incentive is usually a holiday bonus. November and December are expensive months, after all, and if your employee is less stressed about their finances, then they’ll be better able to focus on their work.
Provide Training
Speaking of stress: nothing deflates employee morale quicker than a lack of training. Not only will they feel less informed about the products and services you provide, but customers and clients will notice their lack of confidence and be less eager to make a purchase. In particular, you need to ensure that your seasonal staff are given sufficient training, as they’ll be completely unfamiliar with your values and overall strategy. A refresher for your whole team, however, is still worthwhile, and renewed product knowledge will enhance their salesmanship skills and increase their overall level of contentment.
External Relationships
Check Your Inventory
There’s nothing worse than when a customer hurtles into your store, looking for the “hottest item that’s the latest craze,” and as they’re waving their credit card and a wad of cash about, you realize that said item is “OOS with no ETA.” If you supply any kind of retail goods, then making sure your inventory has been adequately replenished is the key to a successful holiday shopping season. You can’t always predict what will be popular from year to year, but reviewing any stock shortages you had last year could help you to pre-empt the same thing happening this year.
Order Holiday Cards
Holiday cards may have recently declined in popularity, but corporate holiday cards still play a subtle role in promoting your brand and boosting employee morale. Send cards to your staff, and you can extend your thanks for their hard work this year, wishing them and their families a happy holiday season. Send cards to your customers and clients, and you can strengthen the relationship between you both – and mark your company as an established, reliable enterprise, with experience in the industry and respect for old customs. Even the act of calling old prospects up and confirming their address can open the chain of communication again, paving the way for new correspondence in the future. To learn more about composing your message and adding your logo, view our article on “Corporate Holiday Card Ideas & Messages”!
Update Your Website and Social Media Pages
It’s a fact of life that most business is conducted online – and a lot of research, too. Before your potential customer steps foot in your store, it’s inevitable that they’ll have checked your website, browsed your social media accounts, and clicked into a few stellar (and less-than-stellar) reviews. To guarantee that their first impressions are positive, you should ensure that all information is up to date, that every image is of high quality, and that your social media feed is updated frequently, to maximize customer engagement. You might also want to consider how your pages are doing from a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective.
Schedule an Event
Nowadays – and particularly among the millennial generation – customers are craving experiences: they want something quirky and unusual that will catch their attention (and that they can blog about on TikTok or Instagram). With that in mind – and with your own social media page to update, as we mentioned earlier – it’s worth scheduling an event or planning some kind of unique shopping experience over the holiday season. Perhaps you could invite a guest speaker to launch a product or sign autographs, or you could host a demonstration or charity fundraiser. The latter of these is most in keeping with the spirit of the holidays, and we’ve shared some ideas in our “How Your Company Can Give Back This Holiday Season” article.
Merchandise Your Products
While the concept of ‘merchandising’ your products is quite familiar to brick-and-mortar businesses – through decorating store windows and displaying new POS signage – online stores and e-commerce companies also need to consider the layout and presentation of their wares. Some ways in which you can promote online sales and create a more involving user experience include decorating your website for the holidays, setting up special holiday landing pages, adding ‘Share’ buttons to products so that customers can link your website elsewhere, and drawing up pre-selected gift bundles (‘For Him,’ ‘For Her’ etc). All you need to do now is to sprinkle a few of your most generous discount codes around the homepage!
Most companies use their holiday sales to rate the success of their entire financial year, so the importance of an effective plan for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Cyber Monday, and Black Friday can’t be understated. However, with these tips in hand, we’re sure that you’ll attract new custom, build your brand, expand your network, and, crucially, maintain a high level of morale among your employees.
Do you have any holiday-related advice that you’d like to share with other business owners, whether it’s to do with reducing stress levels or designing the perfect holiday card? Let us know in the comments below, and good luck!
Eoin is a Content Specialist at Zazzle in Cork. He’s recently bought a house with his fiancée, and thus most of his time these days is spent trying to keep the walls from caving in and the wolves from the door. Still, he’s always open to book, game, and movie recommendations, so if you have some, let him know: he’ll add them to a very, very long list.
