With the Holiday season sneaking upon us, I thought that it was important to offer some advice on crafting an effective holiday campaign. Of course every business is different but one thing is for certain. Effective marketing needs to have a strategy and a plan that is carried through. When I talk to spa owners, they all know it’s coming but few tell me that they have a plan Hair spa.
Time quickly gets away from us during this time. You go through a steady October and then before you know it, you are carving the turkey and fielding hundreds and thousands of gift certificate phone calls each week. The good news is that we already know its coming and there is still time plan how to maximize the potential of what is sure to come. Those of you who know me know that I encourage systematic processes, scripted conversations for sales strategies and that I teach you to design for automatic success. The only way to fail is to not design for success. This is the time to shine and improve holiday sales. In this article, I will share data from 2010 holiday consumer reports and how to use it to craft an effective marketing campaign this holiday season. Then I will provide quick tips on how to effectively integrate each marketing channel to have one solid campaign.
Let us first outline what we know about the holiday season. In these next several paragraphs, we will take a look at pertinent information related to consumer spending trends during the most wonderful time of the year. It is marked as the top revenue opportunity of the year and is an optimal time to ramp up new business initiatives and engage with existing and previous clients. This is a time that consumers are willing to open their wallets to treat their loved ones. In this day and age, we have to make sure we employ a multi-channel media marketing strategy at the opportune time to ensure that we can reach all of our existing and potential clients.
This season, we have a fantastic opportunity to run effective campaigns given that we have 5 full weeks between Thanksgiving week and Christmas Day. Plus, Christmas is on a Sunday this year. According to Epsilon’s 2011 Holiday Trend Report, fourth quarter revenues in 2010 remained at a flat 6% increase over previous year through October, peeked to 8% in the second and third weeks on November and of course spiked to 14% the week of Thanksgiving where it remained steady until it dramatically dropping two weeks before Christmas back down to 8% and 5% respectively. If all things remain the same for 2011, this means that you have got to start marketing NOW as you have between week 48 (Thanksgiving) and the two weeks following to make your biggest sales.
As far as online marketing and sales is concerned, Cyber Monday (the Monday following Black Friday) of 2010 was the biggest online shopping day of the season and generated the highest revenues for retailers. So if you have not already, start selling your gift certificates online NOW! More than ever, consumers are buying whatever they can online and when they are looking to buy a spa gift certificate online and you do not or have not optimized your site for this, they WILL find a different spa who does, or worse, just buy a Spa Finder gift card. This is easy to do, call the folks at Spa Boom and they will set it up for you and if you are running Millennium, it makes it even easier!