When is it too late to contact your buyer and prospect files to maximize holiday sales? Thanks to the increased confidence consumers have in last-minute online shopping, you can go as close to Dec. 25 as you feel comfortable.
Here are a few things you should do after Thanksgiving weekend, even if you get off to a great start to the holiday season.
Send your most active buyers a final holiday remail. Pick your best buyers, as well as the customers who ordered last December.
Send relevant-content e-mails, and include a shipping offer. Free shipping is the strongest offer, and expedited shipping with two-day FedEx service also works well. Some mailers use the e-mail blast to tell their buyers the last day to order for ground shipping, for two-day, and for overnight delivery.
If you’ve got a strong product offering, send a postcard or mailer. The cost is less than the catalog, production time is short, and if the offer is driving response, you’ll be surprised at the effectiveness of a postcard.
And here are some other things to keep in mind as you hit December:
Every package needs to have a strong bounceback offer to pick up extra sales that come when your first package arrives. Bouncebacks can be simple in terms of creative design. Consider a second or third bounceback in your packages with an offer for overstock or sale merchandise.
A lot of customers buy right after Christmas to fill the gap with the presents they didn’t get, or because they received gift cards. So don’t ignore the week after Christmas – shoot your buyers an e-mail offer with sale offers then.
Jim Coogan is president of Santa Fe, NM-based consultancy Catalog Marketing Economics