The festive season is traditionally one of the busiest times of the year for businesses around the world. Consumers from around the world will be scrambling around to stock up on everything they need to have a special Christmas with family.
The holiday season accounts for around 16.7% of the year’s total sales, so there’s a huge opportunity to capitalise on this surge in demand.
(Source: Statista)
One of the best ways to do this is to leverage your POS (point of sale) data, which can inform your marketing and sales strategies at this busy time of year.
In this blog post, you’ll learn how to use your POS data to make the most of the busy festive period in your business.
Identify Top-Selling Products
If you want to sell more during the busiest time of the year, you need to know which products to push.
With POS data, you can use historical sales data to interpret purchase patterns and learn more about which of your products are your best sellers. What’s more, you can see which types of products sell better at different times of the year.
Armed with this information, you can mitigate the risk of running out of stock on what are likely to be your top-selling products during the festive period. You can also promote these products to customers that land on your online store, or with personalised emails - especially if they’ve looked at or bought these types of products before.
Optimise Your Pricing Strategies
Many consumers are looking for the best deal when they get around to their Christmas shopping. Since Christmas can be such an expensive period for many families, it makes sense that you can attract more customers and get more sales if you’re able to run promotions on certain products and offer discounts.
You can also use your POS data to group products together that customers typically buy together, and package them up in a Christmas bundle offering a special price.
POS data can also be helpful for implementing dynamic pricing whereby your prices are adjusted in real-time to reflect the fluctuations in demand, so you can continue to outsell your competitors.
Streamline Inventory Management
One of the biggest problems you can run into during this busy time of year is stockouts.
Not only because supply chain issues aren’t uncommon, but also because the general surge in demand might mean you sell more of some products than you typically would - leaving you short.
Use your POS data to get real-time insights into your inventory and empower a proactive approach whereby you predict future demand so you can stay stocked up on popular products.
Personalise Marketing Campaigns
With Christmas sales in the UK set to hit £88.29 billion in 2024, there’s usually a lot of money sloshing around during this time of year.
(Source: Statista)
Unfortunately, though, during the Christmas period, you’ll have a harder time than normal fighting for consumer attention.
With every brand running marketing campaigns and attempting to capitalise on the surge in demand, you might miss out on sales if you don’t plan accordingly.
Fortunately, with POS data, you can create tailored and personalised marketing campaigns to send to your consumers via email or SMS messages. Use historic purchase information, and festive trends to segment your emails and target different groups with highly relevant deals and promotions.
Incentivise Purchases with Customer Loyalty Programmes
64% of consumers involved in loyalty programmes are more likely to purchase more frequently, so it pays to build trust with your customer base.
A loyalty programme can be a great way to reward loyal customers and encourage new customers to stay in the loop and make repeat purchases in your store.
With POS data, you can analyse customers’ purchasing patterns and offer special rewards and discounts to your most loyal customers. By finding out what their average spend is, you can determine which products they’re most likely to be interested in and show them similar products with personalised recommendations.
Track Sales Performance in Real-Time
As such a chaotic time of year for retailers, it can be difficult to stay on track of the numbers during the Christmas period.
With the right POS system, you can start analysing POS data to get a firm grasp of sales performance in real-time, so you can make quick adjustments if necessary and adjust your strategy accordingly. If some products are selling faster than you anticipated, you can react in real-time and keep your stock topped up.
Make More of the Christmas Period with POS Data
Christmas has the potential to be a lucrative time of year for your business, provided you can capitalise on consumer trends and tap into what they’re looking for.
By interpreting your POS data, you can come up with tailored solutions for different groups of consumers and make sure that you make the most of this busy period.
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