Seasonal Sales, an Effective Digital Marketing Concept

Retail outlets all over the world look forward to seasonal sales as it offers them a great opportunity to catch-in on the large shopping crowd that usually shop for items in readiness for the festive seasons. Research has shown that more sales are made during holiday seasons than sales made in the rest of the year. As seasons come and go, each appearance increases the propensity of many retail merchant outlets to boost sales and become even stronger and viable. Seasonal sales provide extra-ordinary opportunity for online merchant stores and retailing outlets to offer their customers incentives to buy more for lesser price.

Seasonal sales, which comes at different times of the year, often goes along with incentives in form of promotional sales to attract the public and encourage them to spend more on shopping due to the attractive discounts offered by these retail outlets. Seasonal sales have become parts and parcel of many major holidays, especially, Christmas, Easter, New Year, Muslim festivals and other special seasons such as Halloween, Black Friday, cyber Monday and several others.

Shoppers worldwide look forward to these holidays and special seasons. Many shoppers plan and save year long, waiting for the seasonal sales promo offers to begin. While retail outlets are stocking and planning ways to increase sales, smaller retail outlets are equally preparing to take full advantage of this wonderful opportunity to make as much purchase as their budget allows them during this period when prices are low, to equally stock their stores for a year-long sales window. 

The various holiday seasons provide ample time for merchant stores and retail outlets to plan to make bulk purchase ahead of time. It takes careful planning and availability of capital to execute a seasonal sales campaign. In planning for seasonal sales, careful considerations must be giving to the following:

1. Products Sourcing

Ensuring that the right product is available is one of the most important aspect of implementing a seasonal sales campaign. While these special seasons allow store management to promote both new and existing products, store operators must take caution not to introduce products that have not received adequate public acceptance.

Expectedly, because, customers would hesitate to purchase products that are not popular, regardless of whether they have low prices points. Promoting entirely new products during seasonal sales campaign presents higher risk. Seasonal sales are more effective if discount offers are on products, which are already popular.

2. Capital

The backbone of seasonal sales campaign is the availability of funds. The ability to make bulk purchases from manufacturers is the key to low pricing and to make bulk purchase, such a retail outlet or merchant sore must be a registered wholesaler or distributor, which normally involves enormous capital outlay.

3. Advertising/Promotions

The success of any seasonal sales campaign depend largely, on how extensive and robust the advertising budget is for that sales effort. A sound marketing and communications strategy is required to execute such a campaign of such global magnitude. It involves both traditional media and digital marketing channels, which requires consistent presence on all the channels prior to the targeted sales period. Due to the importance of advertising and promotion in implementing a seasonal sales campaign, it is necessary absolutely, to engage the services of a reputable digital marketing and adverting company. 

4. Timing

Another important aspect of a seasonal sales campaign is in the timing. Taking a decision on which of the holiday seasons in a year will be most beneficial to run such a campaign, is a key factor of success. Retail store operators must take care to focus on only a few most effective seasonal sales promotion in the year. Indulging on multiple sales campaign will place immense pressure on the finances and there may not be adequate time to run a back-to-back campaign.

5. Loyal Customers

Holiday seasons are a good period for online store operators to reward their loyal customers, and many of these customers actually look forward to periods like this to make purchases of items that are hitherto beyond their budget. This period is also one whereby merchant stores and retail outlets appreciate their loyal customers, not only by price reduction, but also by sending special messages to thank them for their loyalty over the years.

Such special messages often come with product codes offering special discounts, while sometimes; customers receive discount vouchers or loyalty cards that entitles them to enjoy bonuses and special rates for purchases. 

Conclusion

Digital marketing has revolutionized the concept of seasonal sales and promotions. Ads campaigns on both mobile devices and desktop computers target billions of users across the globe and are helping to generate enormous amount of traffic, which leads substantially, to conversion. Many factors including those mentioned above play tremendous role in ensuring the success or failure of a seasonal sales promotion.

Seasonal sales campaigns have helped many large merchant stores and retail outlets to increase sales to up to 80 percent of their annual gross in just a single seasonal sales campaign. The year-in year-out windfall has contributed substantially to the rapid growth of many of such merchant retail stores, which include industry leaders such as Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, Jumia and several others.

The large Internet penetration rate and increase use of mobile devices globally, has presented online stores an enormous market place that has well over 4.5 billion surfers, who are potential customers. Taking advantage of seasonal sales is the right approach to boost sales, especially for businesses that have heavy online presence and the capital to fund bulk purchases.