Even though it is still shorts weather in many parts of the country, now is the time to craft your plan for maximizing your 2009 holiday sales. Are you aware that the holiday shopping season, which spans three months, kicks off at the beginning of October? That is coming up fast! To jumpstart your planning, we have compiled some ideas for boosting your holiday sales that are not only effective, but easy and affordable to implement.
1. Offer Limited Edition Holiday Items
Offering limited edition items during the holiday season can increase your sales two ways. First of all, offering any product as a “limited edition” item adds perceived value. By definition, limited edition items are only available for a short amount of time in finite quantities. Therefore, people who purchase limited edition items (or receive them as gifts) become part of an exclusive group. They have something that is not readily available to everyone.
Secondly, selling limited edition items speeds up the buying cycle. Shoppers don’t have the luxury of spending months comparison shopping for limited edition items. Instead, they think in terms of “now or never”—if they really want to buy that perfect gift for their loved ones, they better do it now ... because it might be sold out later.
Another great thing about this type of sales incentive is that you don’t have to create a line of brand new products in order to offer limited holiday edition items to your customers. Simply dress up a few of your best-selling products in holiday-themed packaging. This may be as simple as changing out the graphics and colors in your standard label designs, or as complex as creating label designs from scratch that are printed in eye-catching holiday themes. If you keep the size of these holiday-themed labels the same as your regular labels, then you can add them to a regular label order for very little extra cost.
There are several websites that offer professional quality holiday graphics at very reasonable prices, including istockphoto.com and shutterfly.com. If you have the time to do the digging, you can also find free holiday graphics with Creative Commons licensing using the advanced search feature available at both Flickr and Google Image Search.
2. Repackage Slow-Moving Inventory as Special Holiday Buy, Gift with Purchase
Everyone loves to get a deal. This holiday season, give your customers what they want. Consider repackaging products that are collecting dust on your inventory shelves as special holiday buys and update their look with beautiful holiday-themed labels. An even simpler alternative would be to have small labels printed that advertise your products as special holiday buys and affix them atop the original packaging.
The only thing shoppers like more than getting a great deal on a purchase is getting something for free. Why not also think about repurposing some of your slower moving products as a free gift with purchase? Using custom printed labels makes it simple and affordable to do this.
3. Leverage Variable Label Printing to Create Personalized Gifts
Digital label printing makes it affordable for you to offer your customers personalized gifts for their loved ones and business associates. With variable label printing, you can personalize practically any item you sell that has a product label on it with images, text, or both.
For instance, you could send a promotional email to your customers offering to personalize that product you sell that just happens to make “the perfect holiday gift” with the name of the intended gift recipient. As new orders come in for the personalized gift product, you could collect the personalized information in an Excel spreadsheet.
Offering gifts personalized with variable label printing is even easier to coordinate if you run a website with a shopping cart because it automates most of the ordering process. For inspiration, check out the website myJONES. For just $30 (plus shipping), you can upload your own photo to the website and order a 12-pack of Jones Soda bottles featuring your chosen image. Heinz Ketchup offers a similar service that lets you personalize a bottle of ketchup with three lines of text for $6 (plus shipping).
4. Give Away Free Labels
We all know that kids love labels and stickers. I am sure many of your customers would really appreciate having some super fun holiday stickers to give to the special kids in their lives. Why not consider having some of these stickers printed up to give to your customers? When your customers see their kids’ faces light up at the sight of the stickers you gave them, you can be sure they will make a mental note to call on your company the next time they need something you offer, including holiday gifts. The idea of free giveaways is to associate your company with goodwill and positive outcomes. And I can’t think of a more positive outcome than bringing joy to children during the holiday season.
Another idea for a free sticker giveaway is gift tag stickers. These simple To-From stickers not only make a great alternative to cumbersome tie-on gift tags, but make great giveaways as well. You could design To-From labels that discretely incorporate your company logo into the design.
You might also consider turning your most recognizable product (or your company mascot, if you have one) into a cartoon dressed in holiday garb. If you were the Hershey Company, for example, you could feature an illustration of a Chocolate Kiss dressed in a Santa Clause hat on your To-From labels.
5. Create a Branded Holiday Label
Even though we are almost a decade into the 21st twenty-first century, virtually all companies still mail envelopes and ship boxes on a daily basis. Yet we rarely think of these activities as marketing opportunities. The holiday season provides us with an opportunity to turn every outgoing package into a customer relationship-building tool. How? By using your own branded holiday label.
To illustrate how this would work, let’s say you have a company that sells coffee to both individual customers through your website and to coffee shop and retail site distributors via your sales force. You ship 50 to 100 boxes of coffee a day. After reading this article, you design a special holiday label featuring your logo and a special holiday message to your customers. You then stick this branded holiday label on all outgoing shipments during November and December.
After seeing how successful this marketing technique is, you then decide to put your branded holiday label on newsletters and holiday cards, too.
Like many of the ideas mentioned in this article, having your own branded holiday labels printed is an especially affordable way to celebrate the holidays with your customers. You just need to remember that your holiday labels must be the same size as one of the labels in your regular label order in order to gang them together in the same press run.
If you are unsure what impact this will have on your pricing, then please speak with one of our customer service representatives at 1-888-685-2235; they will be happy to provide you with a quote for your special holiday label order.
(Christy Correll)
