Statistics recently announced across the national press have shown just how disastrous both the coldest December in 100 years and the lingering atmosphere of the economic downturn has been for the UK retail sector.
In a depressing report the Office for National Statistics explains how retail sales volumes have overall dropped by 0.8% from November and how the regular December spike in spending basically didn’t happen this year. What’s more, there doesn’t seem to have been a rush by consumers to try and beat the VAT rise which many retailers had hoped would have filled a significant shortfall.
All sectors have been affected too including fuel, clothing, household goods and food so no matter what business you are in; the chances are you have not had a happy December. However, what traditionally happens after a big fall, is a big (or at least a significant) rise in sales, just because people tend to need stuff and will feel more inclined to spend their money when conditions change and retailers lower their prices to entice them back.
So what can you do to make the most of this situation?
Assuming you have a website already (if you don’t, stop reading now and go get one) there are a number of things you can do which will help you capture disaffected customers looking to spend without spending too much. Ensuring that your website has secure payment gateways provided by a respected payment service provider is also critical.
Improve PPC Budget
Pay per click (PPC) is a great way to target highly motivated customers in a place where you can appeal to their desires directly. Basically, paying for a link to appear at the top of search engine results pages for keyphrases which people will be typing in if they want your product cheaply will give you a greater chance of pulling in traffic than by many other means. By increasing your budget in this area you can make sure you are at the top. All you need to do is write an advert that appeals to tired consumers looking to start spending again and keep tweaking it until you get results.
Social Media
Social media is the modern day word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth is an important way of getting your products out to the right people. By developing a social media marketing portfolio, including Twitter, Facebook etc, and by offering incentives, you can open up a large network of potential customers in a short space of time. Timing your incentive offers just right will help you to ride the wave of consumers flocking back to their traditional spending levels.
In previous blog posts we have looked at how you can analyse site traffic tools such as Google Analytics to better tune your site for better conversions. Once you are confident on your sites ability to convert visitors into customers then you may start wondering how best to drive not only traffic to your site, but traffic that you actually want on your site. After all, 1000 potential customers is better than 1000000 casual visitors with no chance to convert.
Pay-per-click (which is often referred to simply as PPC) is a method of online advertising whereby the advertiser pays a certain amount of money each time someone clicks on one of their adverts and is taken to their website. A small number of sites will sell advertising space on this basis but the most common way to run a pay-per-click campaign is through a dedicated service which will supply adverts to a huge number of website owners (who in turn receive payment for each click that is generated on their website).
