15 Last Minute Sales Ideas

Retailers: you can still have a big and positive impact on your holiday sales. Here are 15 ideas to do just that!

My Conundrum

With less than 2 weeks to go before Christmas, I hope all of you are experiencing robust, high margin sales! While the feedback I hear is a bit mixed, it absolutely skews towards the positive, in many cases very positive.

Remember there is still time to impact your results (“every minute of every day counts“), and this issue includes a bunch of last minute tips to snag some extra sales.

But first, I need your help, in the form of critical feedback.

When I launched All Things Retail, it satisfied a few needs for me:

1. It allowed me to use my experience to provide (hopefully) valuable advice for retailers of all sizes. I saw it as a form of unofficial, ongoing consulting.

2. Coming out of Covid in particular, I wanted to help businesses find ways to thrive and not just survive.

3. It helped me personally remain fresh and focused after 2020, where a bunch of consulting business simply stopped. I wanted to ensure I used 2021 to not only get back to pre-Covid levels professionally but surpass them.

The results have been great on all levels. We have nearly 8,000 readers, our weekly open rates continue to grow, and the anecdotal feedback has been positive.

So here is the issue. I have been fortunate that my core consulting business has come back with a vengeance. In 2022 we expect to be busier than ever, possibly by a wide margin. While I staff up to support specific client projects, I am also committed to be personally involved to some degree with every engagement. So my time is valuable and finite.

A few months back, I launched the premium (paid) version of All Things Retail. The hope was to secure enough paid subscribers to be able to continue to carve out time every week for researching and writing the newsletter (which is about an 8-hour effort per issue). Otherwise the opportunity cost of walking away from 8 hours of consulting a week would make no sense.

While the support of free subscriptions has been superb, the conversion from free to paid subs has been lower than expected. Unless I can ramp up the sign-on rate for paid subscriptions, I will need to consider if continuing to publish All Things Retail makes financial sense.

Here is where I need your help. I absolutely want to continue writing and sharing All Things Retail every week, but I need to crack the “paid subscription” code. So I am asking you to tell me, what am I missing? Is the newsletter nice but not worth paying for? Are the issues too long or too short? Is there content you would prefer to see (or not see)? Would you prefer 2 shorter issues per week rather than one long one? In short, what would entice you, or anyone, to become a paid subscriber (if anything)? I am open to any and all ideas, and they will all be appreciated.

My hope is to continue publishing All Things Retail for a long time to come, so thank you in advance for your feedback (and if you are open to subscribing to the premium edition, just click below):

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15 Last Minute Sales Ideas

It ain’t over until it’s over! That’s exactly how you should think about the holiday selling season.

Business good? You can still bank more dollars and go from good to great!

Business soft? Relaunch a sales effort for the last 10 days and maybe, just maybe, your results will go from soft to good!

Here are 15 ways you can have a positive impact on your sales. Many of these ideas revolve around the theory that as Christmas gets closer, shoppers become more desperate and therefore may be more influenced to make purchase decisions by both display and selling techniques than they normally would be. And they often will spend more than they planned to.

So use these aggressively beginning today. If you are already employing these tactics, can you put an extra push behind them? In the next 10 days, you will see more shopper traffic than you will see for another year, so take advantage!

Display Ideas:

• Stocking Stuffers: set up and sign a section with small-sized, lower price (I like $10 or less) stocking stuffers. Offer a good selection and encourage multiple unit purchases by using specific pricing tactics (2/$10; Buy 2 Get the 3rd 50% Off; or similar).

  

• Grab & Go Gifts: make it easy for customers to choose the gifts they purchase from you. Select items that you have sufficient inventory of and are at a “gifting” price point, pre-wrap some (don’t forget to add a small label identifying what the item is in case it gets moved around), and display with an unwrapped sample in a “gifts to go” section. If you want to take it a step further, segment these offerings by retail price (“Gifts Under $20”, Gifts Under $50”).

  

• Major Gift Card Push: in the end, gift cards may be both the simplest sale for you and the easiest purchase for your guest. Display gift cards around the store so customers won’t miss that you offer them. Teach your team members to suggest with every single sale they make (if a guest can’t find the right item, sell a gift card instead. If a guest does find the right item, sell a gift card as a stocking stuffer).

  

Marketing Ideas: