Get Ready For Christmas 2020

It might seem ages away, and with everything going on in the world, Christmas might seem a little bit trivial at the moment. Still, if we have learned anything from past hard times, it is always good to be prepared.

Over the coming months, businesses up and down the country will be in heated competition for your hard-earned cash. Christmas is one of the busiest times of the year, especially for the retails and hospitality industries, but combined with the recent crisis, every single sale will mean that much more.

Every year the team at Hush put together some top tips the festive season. Still, as we have 140 plus days until the big day, we wanted to get our list out sooner rather than later so you can really take advantage of the festive period.

Online Booking

If you operate in the hospitality industry, you’ll know from past years that the 6 weeks leading up to Christmas is full of parties and festivities. In most cases bookings will be made over the phone, eating into your staffs time. Why not make the decision to launch your own bespoke online booking system?

Users can log in, see availability and book an appropriate date. You’ll get all the booking data in a safe to read format with no margin for error. You won’t accidentally end up booking the same table twice!

We don’t know what the rules might look like come December, if we have some sort of social distancing in place, you’ll want to make sure that you can space out your tables and also maximise the room you have. You’ll be able to set how many bookings you have, set staggered arrival times and even get customers to pay their deposits online. These elements will help reduce unrequired interaction with the public, assist with efficiency and help reduce the risk of infection.

Even better, if your guests allow you to use their data, you can start to build up a helpful little database to use in the New Year.

If you currently have a website and don’t think you want to redesign the entire site just for a booking system, don’t worry, you can still have a booking system built and added as a bolt-on or on its own sub-domain.

Moving To E-Commerce

We’ve seen it loads over the past few months, especially with independent retailers, the eventual move to e-commerce. If you’ve got a popular high street store or boutique, you’ll have needed to adapt to the government restrictions around opening your store.

Some of you will have made the jump to e-commerce with some tiny steps. Maybe you set an eBay store up or were able to sell via your Facebook page. Either way, you’ve made that leap to selling your products online. Now could be the time to take the next step and introduce an e-commerce platform on your website. If you already have the infrastructure behind the scenes set and ready, the leap from selling via eBay and the like shouldn’t be too daunting.

Similar to how we would set up an online booking system, you might not need to redevelop your entire website to make the leap. Depending on your current website, it might be open to a few tweaks and developments from the HushBots and hey presto, you’re now fully e-commerce ready!

Promo, Promo, Promo

Now more than ever, every single sale means more than the last. Your competitors will be biting at your heels for your customers and quite rightly so. You might find that this Christmas will be like no other before and no other after. Everyone will be fighting for a little bit of the pie.

With increased competition comes an increased need to promote yourself in as many different ways possible. What you’ve done so far has got you to where you are today, but things have changed. With this change comes new opportunities, and to act on these opportunities, you need to have a robust digital presence and strategy in place.

Doing what you did this time last year won’t cut it. It’s time to get creative and do things differently.

Timing Is Key

You might find that Christmas starts a little bit early this year. People might need an extra month or two to purchase all their presents, and you need to make sure you are ready for the rush! If you would start your Christmas marketing in October, you might want to pull things forward to September. The next four months could be a big moneymaker for your business, so making sure that you’re ready is more important than ever.

A few things you might also want to consider:

• Offer a complimentary wrapping service.
• Bring in Christmas vouchers for people who are stuck for ideas – these can also be issued online.
• Google Ads and Facebook Ads
• Give your website a full “MOT”, make sure that everything is shipshape and won’t lose you a customer.
• Offer FREE shipping on orders over a specific value – a perfect opportunity to get customers to buy a few more items just to qualify for free shipping.
• Upsell – make sure customers are given clear upsell opportunities. If they have purchased a particular product, hit them with an email campaign including associated products.

This Christmas will be different, just as 2020 was different from last year and next year (hopefully). Make sure you get the maximum return from the festive season, contact the HushBots today and see how we can help you get the most out of your digital presence this year.