WTN Blog

Action Plan to Boost Late-Season Sales and Order Flow.

All orders need to be in to WTN Services by close of business Friday to ensure holiday delivery if shipping ground in CA and NY. If shipping expedieted or 2 day all order must be to WTN Services by close of business Monday Dec. 21st in order to process for delivery prior to Christmas.

Tips and trending…

1. The trend of late ordering will continue this season. In fact, if it’s at all like holiday 2008, the third and fourth weeks of Dec will dictate the success of your entire season and year. Therefore, be ready to take orders up to the final hour! Christmas falls on a Friday this year, so you can heavily promote “there’s still time to order” on your homepage and emails up to Wed, Dec 23.

2. Review your historical ROAS (return on advertising spend) and rank each program’s December results from best to worst. Are there any opportunities to shift funds from a lower ROAS program to a higher one? For example, if an additional $5K or $10K spent on paid search marketing will generate a higher return than a late-season mailing you have planned, you may be better off to cancel the mailing, and shift the money to your paid search program. Even if the mailing is printed, you may be better off not mailing it, saving the postage money, and redeploying the funds to another channel. Run the numbers to see.

3. If you have extra staff in your call center, use them for an outbound calling program.

   1. Pull a list of all buyers who had purchased by this time last holiday season but have yet to order this season. Sort them by the dollar volume of their holiday 2008 purchases. Start calling from the top of the list and work your way down. Let the customer know you are here to help them take care of their gifting needs. Have their prior year gift list handy and offer to email or fax it to them. Alert them to your best specials and discounts. Create a few exclusive offers just for this group of customers.

   2. Pull a list of your top buyers and call them with exclusive offers and specials.

   3. Call all new buyers one week after they place their first order. Thank them for their business, ask if they were satisfied with the service and give them a great deal to place a second order.

4. Extend employee discounts to family and friends.

5. Customers will be looking for lower-priced gifts this year. Create a page on your website of gifts under $X. Send an email featuring X gifts for under $X (the amount will vary depending on your product line and price points). Offer these items as add-on’s or up-sells for phone orders. Test “gourmet gifts under $X” as one of your paid search ad groups.

6. Review your inventory position. If you based inventory levels on your original sales plan, you may be sitting on more stock than you will need. It’s far easier to sell off inventory in the season than afterward.

   1. Get aggressive now with markdowns and use the web-specials section of your site to promote them.

   2. Use highly targeted promotional emails to lower inventory. Don’t send all emails to all customers. You will have much better success generating additional sales, lowering overstocks and not being branded as a spammer if you target your emails to specific groups of customers. For example, if you are overstocked on olive oil, send an email to past olive oil buyers with a great deal on olive oil.

   3. Offer extra discounts on overstocks to your top customers and position it as an “exclusive best-customer sale.”

   4. If you have any self-purchasers who are ordering at this time of year, insert clearance flyers inside their boxes. Note: do not put sale flyers or clearance inserts inside gift-recipients’ boxes!

   5. If you purchased finished goods from a manufacturer, see if you can return any unsold items. Even if they hit you with a 10% to 20% restocking fee, it will probably be better for you to return the goods than to sit on them until next holiday season.

7. If you wholesale to other retailers, get creative to help them sell more of your products—offer extended payment terms (if you have sufficient capital and they are creditworthy), pay all or part of the freight, give them case-pack or volume discounts on smaller orders.

8. Use the revised bookings forecast we discussed earlier to rerun pro forma income statements and cash-flow projections for the season and for the year. Take a hard look at your projected cash position. Will you have enough cash on hand and from other sources to make it through the spring-summer 2010 seasons? If not, start working now to line up additional financing.

Remember to keep pitching, promoting, mailing, emailing and marketing. Consumers will be ordering later this season than ever. Be in their mailbox, inbox and on their search engine results page when they are ready to buy.

Tip Assistance Courtesy of the The 5th Food Group and Catalog Solutions, LLC

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 19th, 2009 at 9:15 am and is filed under Sales & Service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.