Christmas and new year’s eve is over, you need to do what you can to keep your sales going after the holidays have ended. While shoppers love all of the deals that come with the holiday season and are willing to spend more, those days will eventually come to an end. Subsequently, sales will decrease, making it important to find ways to get through that post-holiday sales slump.
Mobile apps often struggle with post-holiday sales, conversions, engagement, and other activities as users stop using eCommerce apps and others. However, there is a way to overcome this challenge and make sure you continue to generate profits and positive ROI.
What is Post-Holiday Sales Slump?
Post-holiday sales slump refers to a period of decreased sales or business activity that occurs after the holiday season, typically in January and February.
This can be due to a variety of factors, including a decrease in consumer spending, the end of seasonal promotions, and the return to normal work and school schedules.
Ways to Overcome Post-Holiday Sales Slump
To help you rise above the post-holiday slump in 2023, consider the following tips:
- Acknowledge the Sales Slump
- Analyze the Situation
- Reevaluate Your Sales Strategy
- Invest in Training and Development
- Enhance Your Sales Process
- Motivate and Incentivize Your Team
- Focus on Customer Relationships
- Encourage New Customers to Return
- Increase Impulse Purchases
- Deploy a Multi-Channel Approach
- Amp Up Retargeting Efforts
- Maintain a Continuous Flow
- New Holiday, New Customers
Acknowledge the Sales Slump
The first step in getting out of a sales slump is to acknowledge it. Accept that you are experiencing a downturn and that it's important to address the issue head-on. Don't try to deny or ignore the problem; instead, embrace the challenge and commit to finding a solution.
Analyze the Situation
Take the time to thoroughly analyze the situation. This includes examining your sales data, talking to your sales team, and identifying any trends or changes that might be contributing to the slump. Look for patterns and potential root causes, such as a decline in customer interest, increased competition, or changes in your target market.
Reevaluate Your Sales Strategy
After analyzing the situation, reevaluate your sales strategy. Determine if your current approach is effective or if it needs to be modified. Consider whether your product or service is still appealing to your target audience, or if there are new markets you can explore. Adjust your strategy accordingly to better meet the needs of your customers and prospects.
Invest in Training and Development
Invest in training and development for your sales team. This can include workshops, seminars, online courses, or one-on-one coaching. By providing your team with the tools and resources they need to improve their skills, you can help them become more effective at selling and closing deals.
Enhance Your Sales Process
Review your current sales process and look for ways to streamline and enhance it. This might involve implementing new technology, reorganizing your sales funnel, or refining your lead generation techniques. Focus on making it as efficient and effective as possible to help your sales team close more deals.
Motivate and Incentivize Your Team
Motivate and incentivize your sales team to help them regain their momentum. This can involve setting goals, offering bonuses, or implementing a rewards system. By providing incentives, you can inspire your team to work harder, stay focused, and remain committed to achieving success.
Focus on Customer Relationships
Finally, focus on nurturing and maintaining strong relationships with your customers. This includes providing exceptional customer service, following up on leads, and staying in touch with your existing customers. By fostering strong customer relationships, you can help to ensure repeat business and generate referrals, both of which can help you get out of a sales slump.
Encourage New Customers to Return
Apps often see a peak in activity and engagement during the holidays, but those users won’t be actively engaged and buying for long. On the other hand, you can bring them back to your app by getting creative and proactive. Consider why people used your app and what made them stop using it. From there, you can better determine which steps you need to take to get them to return to you.
For example, you could offer post-holiday discounts in January, sending push notifications that advertise recommended purchases based on each audience segment. Additionally, you could use Storyly to develop personalized in-app stories that entice users to return. One way you can implement stories is to develop a year-end roundup that shows users how they’ve used your app. In an eCommerce app, for instance, you could provide a summary of top purchases and make recommendations based on those purchases. For a self-improvement app, you might use a story to summarize users’ achievements and encourage them to follow through any resolutions they’ve set for themselves.
All of these can get people to come back to your app long after the holidays have passed.
Increase Impulse Purchases
Impulse buying is far from slowing down. Today, 84% of all shoppers have made impulse purchases of some kind. In addition, nearly 40% of eCommerce purchases are impulsively made. Impulse buyers are also often willing to spend more, with the same report revealing that 54% of shoppers in the U.S. alone have spent $100 or more on impulse purchases.
If you can incorporate strategies to drive impulse buys, you’ll be able to dramatically increase your revenue after holiday sales stop. To boost impulse purchases, you can take steps such as:
- Adding upsells for inexpensive products during checkout
- Recommend similar products based on order history
- Offer periodic discounts and sales periods when appropriate
- Promote your app or specific products and services on social media
Deploy a Multi-Channel Approach
Another method of overcoming a holiday sales slump is to target audiences across multiple channels. The more touchpoints you give current and potential users and customers, the more you’ll build brand awareness and recognition, eventually leading to conversions and sales. You’ll also be able to consistently steal attention from competitors if you remain top-of-mind among audiences through a multi-channel approach.
You can use a wide variety of channels to reach audiences and offer various points of contact. For instance, you can start by spending more on ads to overcome a slump, which may encourage people to use your app. Ads could include a combination of online image and video ads, along with TV commercials that reach linear TV viewers. To supplement these ads, you can use email marketing to reach out to people on your contact lists, including prospective and existing customers. These emails would further encourage them to take action.
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter offer additional chances to engage with audiences, whether through social media ads, posts, or private messaging as an extension of customer service. Also, don’t neglect to engage in social listening and monitor social media channels to see what people are saying about you. Social listening can help you determine whether people are happy or dissatisfied with your brand and app experience, which can inform future marketing, app redesigns, and other efforts.
The more channels you use that your audiences use, the stronger your connection will be. To get the most from your efforts, find out which channels your audience spends their time on and target those, which can help avoid any wasted ad spend or marketing dollars.
Amp Up Retargeting Efforts
You likely saw a large number of mobile app users during the holidays, but you need to keep people coming back to you after holiday sales have slowed. One of the best ways to make sure people don’t forget about you and leave you behind is to run retargeting ads on multiple channels. After initially seeing ads or interacting with your brand, retargeting ads will follow audiences across the web with highly targeted messaging and visuals that speak to them. People will then see these ads on other websites, social media platforms, or other apps.
The fact is that retargeting is critical for increasing conversions and sales. By gradually luring people back to your app with strategic ads, they’ll be more likely to use it and make purchases. According to data from Spiralytics, prospects are 70% more likely to convert if they see retargeting ads across the web. In fact, the click-through rate (CTR) of retargeted ads is 10 times higher than the CTR of traditional display ads.
In short, if you want to maximize conversions and recover from a sales slump, you need to launch effective retargeting campaigns.
Maintain a Continuous Flow
Following the holiday season, both you and your customers might be exhausted. However, customers will still listen to you and may wish to come back to you not long after the holidays end. This is why you must take steps to ensure that business resumes and you don’t lose the momentum you gained the previous year.
To keep up the flow, brainstorm with your marketing and creative teams to figure out ways to keep customers active. This could include a combination of retargeting ads, brand new ad campaigns to reach prospects, launching social media campaigns, promoting specific products or services, and much more. There’s no shortage of ways to keep your audiences aware of your brand and entice them to make a purchase or engage with your app. The key is remaining innovative in your approach and regularly connecting with your audiences through well-optimized content.
Storyly offers you the chance to maximize engagement and conversions with the help of in-app stories. Personalized stories can ensure that existing users don’t stray from you. There are many ways to go about using interactive stories to connect with audiences. As an example, you could create stories that make custom-tailored product recommendations based on both previous purchases and general interests. In addition, shoppable videos can feature influencers promoting a particular product, which the user can then click on to take them immediately to the checkout, increasing the chance of an impulse purchase.
Using in-app stories and many other strategies, you’ll never need to worry about losing people’s attention after holiday sales have passed. Regardless of your approach, make sure your efforts stay within your budget and maximize ROI. You can also learn what worked and what didn’t from year to year to progressively optimize your campaigns. Over time, you’ll figure out the best means of keeping people invested in your app year-round.
New Holiday, New Customers
People want to make certain changes every year, which could entail a complete transformation. As mentioned, many set post-holiday resolutions for themselves to achieve. You can use this opportunity to connect with these audiences and gain new customers. Encourage people to continue pursuing the desired change and progress, and detail how they can do it using your app.
Taking advantage of the holidays is particularly crucial for mobile apps that aim to help people improve themselves in any way. For instance, you might have a language-learning app that makes learning any language fun and exciting. To keep users returning to it, you could put together a personalized in-app story that shows the progress a user made during the previous holidays, including how many words they learned and the time they spent learning one or more languages. Users can then set goals for the year ahead based on what they already achieved and what they want to achieve.
Ultimately, if you can think of ways to appeal to people’s desire for self-progress, jump on those opportunities to promote your app.
Boost Post-Holiday Sales Using the Right Strategies
By taking all of these tips into consideration, you can begin developing an effective post-holiday strategy to increase conversions and sales. The right strategies and approaches will help make sure your business doesn’t fade into the background and that people continue to use your app. You’ll also connect with both existing and potential customers.
With enough diligence and invested time, effort, and money, you can maintain profitability throughout the year and stay ahead of the competition.
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