Start Christmas promos now.
Christmas is coming and the goose may be getting fat, but we’re not looking like getting out of lockdown anytime soon! There’s been enormous strain on the mail delivery system these past few months as more and more of us shift to buying online. That doesn’t bode well for Christmas deliveries, so the advice is to start advertising now.
What I learned
- Ecommerce is great – but not for Australia Post
- Why you should start promoting Xmas now
- Give giving will have new meaning this year
- AHave gift options for your products
Transcript
Hey, welcome back, Rankers. How’re you going? Still in isolation in Melbourne, longest city in the world. That’s us. Yeah. So, you know, it’s been fun. Not. Want to talk today about Christmas and the gift giving season. We did a webinar a few weeks ago, oh a month ago actually. Did a webinar a month ago about preparing, sprinkling, getting ready. Hopefully you’ve done a lot of those things if you attended the webinar that we talked about, and some of the things you can be doing right now, that we don’t tend to do as much on websites. Some retailers do because you know they’re propeller heads and they’re so far down the track ahead of most of us that they’ve already done it, but this is something that another bricks and mortar retail technique of start talking about Christmas.
Christmas is coming
I know everyone says, “Oh bloody Christmas decorations in the shops in October, it’s bloody ridiculous. We’ve got three months till Christmas.” Well, this year it’s going to be a bit tighter because in Australia anyway, our mail delivery system is under a lot of strain. To give you an idea I ordered something from a retailer the other day in metropolitan Melbourne. Australia Post had that physical item the following day. And then they sent me an email telling me it was going to take another 10 days to travel from 25, 30 Ks, something like that. So that’s not good if you’ve got long lead times or it takes you a while to get stock in because what’s going to happen this year is we’re going to have, like I said back in March and April, May, said we’d have the biggest online Mother’s Day in history in Australia.
And we did, probably worldwide depending on when your Mother’s Days are. And I said back in March and April, the big thing that’s spiking is gift delivery, okay? It’s gift delivery season again. So it’s going to spike again. So start thinking about Christmas decorations on your website. Because if you go into a retail store at Christmas in other towns outside of Melbourne you will hear them playing Christmas carols. Why? Because when you play Christmas carols in the supermarket, they don’t just do it to feel jolly. They do it because you buy more. Why? Because it’s Christmas. That’s why. So I’ve noticed some retail sprucing up the website, putting up Christmas decorations.
Don’t play Christmas carols on your website. That’s all I’m suggesting. Please don’t do that. That would be horrible, but start getting the messaging in there, in your EDMs, in your ads if you like. Oh, we haven’t done anybody’s ads yet, but if you’re not doing product ads and those sorts of things, if you’re doing sort of generic search stuff, then start thinking about those sorts of things. Because the lead times this year are going to be pretty … or delivery times this year are going to be pretty horrendous. And some of the recommendations from Australia Post that maybe you want to start having some of those sales early. So start thinking about those things and start prompting the customers now that, hey, Christmas this year, no one can travel interstate at the moment anyway. In Melbourne we can’t travel 5kms.
Start pushing Christmas
So people are going to want to send things because they can’t catch up with their loved ones, unfortunately. Right? So this is a great time to start thinking about that now. And I’ve been telling all my clients I’ve been speaking with this week, that start thinking about it now. Start putting in your messaging. Start doing your PSs and your EDMs to say, “Don’t forget Christmas. Have you bought that gift?” And if you are able to do gift wrapping, it might be something that you may want to offer now. Kerry, if you’re watching, don’t get angry. She got angry at me last time. Kerry is in the gift delivery business, and she’s right when she says, “Not everyone can take the time to speak to the client about what they want the gift for, and the love and the care that’s taken to tailor a product for a client,” whatever.
But if you’re not in the gift delivery business this year, it might be time to start looking at your range and working out how can you incorporate that. Booktopia, for instance, big shout out. Hi Booktopia. They ask you, “Is this a gift for someone?” So start thinking about those sorts of things at the checkout. What can you do? We’ve seen some clients that did it for Mother’s Day, it went well. So, but this year you want to start getting those sales happening early and just start letting customers know that if you want this by Christmas, we’ve been told by Australia Post, I’m not sure what other couriers are saying, but certainly Australia Post is saying, “You better get those sales out early this year.” So make sure you do that.
Hopefully that’s helpful. We won’t be out of lockdown next time I see you. We don’t even know if we’re going to be out of lockdown by Christmas, but hang in there, Melbourne. Hit me up if you’re struggling because there’s a few people struggling. So hit me up, LinkedIn, Twitter, wherever else, if you’re not having a good time and you can always bend my ear. Hopefully that’s helpful. See you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
