12 days of Christmas is another great way to give back to your customers and create additional traffic to your website resulting in sales. Here are some tips to get your business ready for the 12 Days of Christmas!

Website Audit - Technically this is before day 1 BUT a good website audit and health check is key before any sale period to ensure that all the pricing is up to date, the sale items are labelled correctly, returns and delivery details are updated and you have hidden out of stock items. You might want to create a new section for your 12 day offering

Adopt the advent calendar concept – this works fantastic with customers. Daily offers on products and give aways but do plan it out what you are going to be offering so you can create the right promotional support

Think of additional promotions you can offer at this time to boost sales, maybe free delivery or add value to an order (ie Free Box of Chocolates with every order) is another way to incentivise customers to go ahead with their online purchase.

Keep it simple – There are so many things that you can be doing for your customer over the festive season but try and have a couple of really good deals and offers and have clear communication to support your offering. Remember customers are overwhelmed at Christmas too so anything you can do to make their lives easier to shop on your store the better.

SEO – To make it easier for your site to be found, review your pages and ensure that you have them tagged, including the titles, descriptions and key words

Paid for Campaigns – if you have budget it’s a great time to run a promotional campaign. Using Pay Per Click (PPC) will enable you to target the right audience, boost  traffic to your website, increase sales and ensures that you will only pay for what is clicked on so it can be good value for money. If you have never run one before you need to ensure that you keep an eye on the campaign and that the cost per click is worth the investment, if it is not pull the campaign.

Social Campaigns – if you don’t have a budget its not a problem. Leverage your social channels to communicate with your customers what your offers are going to be. Excite them with a teaser campaign, use email marketing or your social platforms to give loyal customers VIP offerings or early access to the sale items.

Partnerships – Partnerships expose your brand to a new audience and are a great way to gain new customers. Any partnerships need to be aligned and complement your own brand.

Engage your Employees – perhaps one of the team has a great idea that could work? Having a brainstorming session with the team is a great way to get everyone involved and excited about the festive period.  Maybe there could be incentives for the best ideas?

The customer – We will always come back to the customer, as if you loose sight of the customer you simply wont have any sales. Ensure that the customers needs are being met, especially during busy times.

Final Focus – in the last few days of the 12 days of Christmas see how the sales are going? If they aren’t where you had hoped what else can you do? Do you need to consider further reduction, especially on seasonal stock? If you are smashing your targets pull the paid for campaign

Review – spend time after your 12 days reviewing what worked, what didn’t work, were mistakes made, how could you avoid them next time? Did your competitors do anything that you could consider for next year or even next sale period?