During the summer, most online stores experience a drop in sales.
Consumer priorities are shifting to holidays, travel and opportunities to go out, to festivals etc. etc. This year, the piggy banks are all the more deflated, given the inflation rate and macro environment conditions.
What have you been buying lately?
For most of us, the answer boils down to shopping for products we need. Except for trigger events that condition us to buy… like birthdays.
Well, because you don’t want to go through this period like a wolf through a wolverine, but you want a steady stream of sales, maybe even bigger, if that’s possible, for today we’ve prepared some interesting material.
We’ve been talking at length about of your business during the summer and get ideas that will bring you results, even considering the conditions mentioned above.
Contents Plan to organize your business in summer time
- Consult the annual calendar and detail your activities for the coming months
- Prepare thematic campaigns
- Adjust the approach for small budgets
- Focus on creating content for fall-winter
- Diversify the sources from which you get leads
1. Consult the annual calendar and detail your activities for the following months
A clever entrepreneur makes his chariot in winter, and his sleigh in summer (wow, looks like it’s proverbial week).
That means that at the beginning of the year you took the time to organize your next 365 days from a marketing and business point of view.
You’ve written down the main events to look out for when organising campaigns and planned when to launch, when to discount, when to restock and so on.
This plan gives you an overview of the coming year and plenty of time for preparation.
But, of course, it doesn’t have to be set in stone.
Well, now – right now – is the perfect time to review and refine your plan for the summer months, keeping in mind:
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- The latest trends – identified with Google Trends, from customer requests, from market research.
- Macro environment conditions – if you don’t have an omnichannel strategy yet, you can start with multichannel. For example, you can open a popup store or attend trade fairs and events relevant to your industry, even if only at this time.
- Your customers’ consumption habits – may be waiting for you to launch a seasonal product.
- Your business budget and the evolution of marketing costs
Once you have this data at hand, it’s time to reorganize and specify as clearly as possible, with start and stop dates:
- Summer product launches
- Dead period trade campaigns
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- The holiday period and the type of campaign to announce it (don’t close your shop while you are on holiday, but let the orders flow. BUT you announce that delivery will be late!)
- Social media contests
- Back-To-School Campaign
- Loyalty campaigns
What do you do next?
Read also: How to prepare your unosoft store for the holidays [Video]
2. Prepare themed campaigns
All of the above campaigns take time to prepare. You can’t just activate them in the store and expect people to come in boisterously. They don’t know about them.
So you’re going to go through a preparation phase and a summer marketing campaign phase:
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- Preparation of techniques and visuals – i.e. set discount rules, landing page, price lists, create banners or Promo Content sections, update transactional emails and SMS, schedule hellobar and popups etc.
- Start teasing to increase interest in what you are about to announce.
- Offer a preview and early access to campaigns to loyal customers – notify them by email or on your community group, if you have one.
- You make a preroll with access to the rest of your community – newsletter subscribers, social media followers – all of whom you have access to without paying, at this stage, for ads.
- You start the campaign normally for everyone, including paid media.
- Shortly before the end or when stocks run low, you start to do the rush. with timers and repetitive FOMO text messages.
- Follow up after the campaign with thank you messages, review request, cross-sell and upsell proposals, including to announce the next campaign, if necessary.
Run every summer marketing campaign through this framework. Even if you don’t have the same impact every time, you still won’t be sitting on your hands.
Results come to those who do something proactive… including winning the lottery is conditional on placing a ticket.
Read also: How to get sales from traffic sources
3. Adjust your approach for low budgets
In summer, it’s more important to spend money on travel, trips, outings, festivals, weddings. And that’s perfectly normal.
As an entrepreneur, it’s easy to understand this, though probably not as easy to accept it.
In the summer, pay maximum attention to your star products and try to bring out the products you see are catching on best with your audience.
I can’t necessarily say it will be the lowest priced products in your catalogue. For example, if you sell ball gowns, your customers will definitely want something that looks rich and stunning at a glance.
But you can adjust your cross-sell recommendation strategy and push accessories to the front, instead of waiting until post-order, where you upsell to another dress.
In other situations, it will be the cheap products in your store.
Add these to product packages, and around them create a strong recommendation strategy on the website, so as to attract attention to more expensive products.
Or look, you can give gifts according to price thresholds.
I would just recommend not to raise this threshold too much (keep in mind the average price in the store), but rather apply multiple thresholds, starting from an easily attainable amount.
4. Focus on creating content for autumn-winter
The truth-truth is, without serious budgets, you don’t have much control over how your potential customers buy.
It’s important to differentiate yourself, but to do that, you need to exist in your market = visibility.
What can help you achieve visibility, over time?
Contents.
Relevant and useful content that you continually provide to people who reach out to you.
So, if you find yourself with more free time on your hands this summer, focus your energy on preparing content for fall/winter:
- Blog posts announcing campaigns planned by the end of the year
- Text snippets for campaign landing pages
- Slogans and titles for banners
- Content snippets for hellobar, banners and popups
- Text and visuals for social media posts
- Newsletter pieces for Christmas, BTS, Black Friday campaign,
- Texts for the Instagram carts
- Promotional posts
Of course not all of these texts will remain exactly as you think of them now. You’ll probably change some of them drastically, depending on the changes that occur between now and the end of the year.
But you’ll have a base to start from, for which you’ll thank me when your season starts and you’re too busy to deal with them.
Tip!
Use Chat GPT, Jarvis, Writesonic, Canva, Icons8 etc. All of these are AI tools that can give you inspiration or ideas to start from. Because it’s not always ok to use text generated directly in the shop.
You optimize them in your own style and give them authenticity.
They shorten the start-up time and simplify the creative process.
5. Diversify the sources from which you get leads
Does your business still not get people to open their wallets in the summer?
Don’t be discouraged. Don’t stop trying to get sales. But introduce an intermediate step between brand awareness and sales.
Concentrate on getting leads for when your season starts. That way, for example, you might even steal a head start on competitors in your industry.
How can you get new leads?
- Running contests and giveaways from social media with registration on the website.
- High-figure discount offered in advance via email, only to those who sign up through your form.
- Premiere access + bonus for the new collection that you plan to bring to the store at the beginning of the season.
- Free consultation + discounted service for those who register in the form.
- Partnerships with various companies selling related products.
- Premium contentclosed access (e.g. a mega guide, a market study, a collection of information from experts, etc.).
Read more: How to adjust your marketing plan for the next 6 months
Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today to get sales from your summer campaigns.
Because if you don’t try to do at least one thing in this direction, I’ll guarantee you one thing. Nothing will happen 🙂 .
But neither will the results come by themselves.
Very importantly, if you plan to go on holiday, prepare your ad campaign in advance and offer your customers a discount code as an “excuse” for late deliveries.
By the time you get back, you’ll just have to prepare the parcels… and it’s certainly a much more profitable outcome, than if you closed your shop and didn’t receive any orders.
Good luck and have a profitable summer!
PS. Don’t forget to make full use of the unosoft platform features.
And if you’re not selling with us yet, now’s the time to start. Test the platform for free for 15 days and take advantage of our super summer offer!
See details on the pricing page!
Passionate about entrepreneurship and eCommerce, I started my online activity in 2000.
Together with my team I have helped over 3,000 companies grow their business on the unosoft platform.
