Are you prepared for the Summer Holidays?

The last thing you want to think about is things like the summer break while you are still trying to get ready for Christmas. This where you are very much mistaken. The change in people’s spending habits during that month that straddles New Year’s Day can dramatically affect your bottom line. So you need to have a plan in place

to eather get the extra work rolling in before you have to shut down to cover the holiday period, or to get people spending money with you when they are in holiday mode. We are going to cover a few marketing ideas to help you with that without it being too big or expensive to manage.

The first thing to think about is how the summer break will affect how you operate your business. If you are a ‘retail’ style of business, then apart from the public holidays, you are going to be trading anyway. But what if you are second level business, supplying products to other businesses, or a trades person where work will dry up as people really don’t want you at their home while they are on holiday unless something desperately needs to be fixed. In this sort of situation you find that your business will go quiet between the middle of December and on as late as the start of February. So how do you keep the work, and the income, coming in during that ‘dead time.’

The first step is to try and increase the workload / sales before the dead month to build up your reserves. Offer specials or bonus incentives to get people to spend up a bit more than normal. If you sell products then a good angle is to push the buy extra now the customer doesn’t get caught short of vital supplies while you have to be closed. Alternatively, try the three for two or other volume based specials under the excuse of needing to empty the warehouse for the supplies coming in the new year. If you are in the trades or service industries, then look at the ‘get your home/property ready for the visiting family ’ as a sales point, since a lot of people do still want to put their homes in the best light for guest. Another angle is the ‘preventive check ’ where you promote the idea that by having something checked now to ensure that it won’t cause a disaster while they are on holiday or trades people are, is a smart investment; especially if you factor in holiday charge rates.

The second step is to offer holiday time incentives. Just as I mentioned in the previous paragraph, a lot of business will charge higher than normal rates over the holiday period. Make yourself stand out even more by offering not to charge holiday rates if the customer pays a deposit in advance. You could even promote during the run up as a pre-holiday-booking special so that way you can get work happening the first few weeks after the holidays when everyone is still getting back up to speed and things are still quiet. Alternatively you could offer to wave ‘after hours/holiday’ rates if the customer makes the booking during the holiday but with sufficient lead time for you to be organized without rushing.

The last step is to drive sales for when do return to work. From our own experience that while most businesses are back up and running by the middle of January, they often don’t do as much work as they are still getting into the swing of things. This can bleed into even the first couple of weeks of February with children going back to school, so a lot of people are caught up in the cost of time and money for that. Pre-booking before Christmas incentive comes into play again, giving customers a chance to get things organized while the are still in ‘work mode’ Giving some form of extra inducement to make a deposit or prepay in full also helps move people to put their money down, such as a discount or some free service or item.

Naturally this only a few ideas of how to keep demand for your business up during the Christmas-summer lull. Why not give us a call at Copy Express and we can help you explore even more solutions and ideas.