How to get your business ready for Christmas

Business Advice 8th December 2022

It’s that time of the year again when the Christmas season is now upon us and the big day is getting closer and closer. Many businesses across the UK will have Christmas offers and promotions in full swing, but what else can you do to get your business ready for Christmas?

Don’t overload your customers

This is very important particularly if you are using platforms like Social Media as a way to engage and communicate with your customers. It’s very easy at this time of year when spending is high to go overboard with “sales” messages, but don’t. Stay strategic and think about bigger uses of engagement. Ask yourselves, what’s going on in your customers minds right now in the lead up to Christmas; what may they like to read about? Perhaps they would like something to actually take their minds of Christmas and present buying, could you use these ideas and resources for your Social Media posts?

Be reflective

Christmas is like many other special holidays where you want to make as much profit as possible and increase sales but take a moment to think about what works on other occasions. Did you have a really successful campaign at Easter or over the summer holidays that your customers loved? Could you use your ideas again in some way? If you have had successes utilise them and build on them. The key thing to remember is not everything has to be built from scratch.

Stop the drop outs

If you have an online store then start looking at the way your audience behaves. If you are seeing a high spike of people leaving their shopping baskets before checking out or even during check out then you should look at the payment part of the customer journey and see what ways you can make this process easier. “Check out as a Guest” is proving an increasingly popular way of reducing this rather than forcing people to create an account on your site. Customers doing Christmas shopping are looking for ways to get it done quickly and easily, hence why they are shopping online in the first place. If you over complicate the process you will lose sales.

Beware of fraud

Fraud is at its highest at Christmas so even though it is a busy period, do not lose sight of completing your fraud checks for payments. Pay Pal is very good at highlighting when there could be an issue with a customer, even down to different delivery addresses being used. If you use a payment system like Sage Pay, this is also highly valuable as it performs fraud checks and lets you know about your payments using a traffic light system.

Always be thinking ahead

Despite being in the throes of Christmas, start planning your New Year promotions, publications and offers now. Sit down and think about your planning for the year ahead, ideally plan at least the first four months to give your business plans enough scope especially before Tax Year End in April.

Building a successful business can be hard and keeping it a success even harder. This is why it is so important to really utilise the key trading months of the year and turn them into profit.

We wish you a very successful Christmas and an even better 2023.