How to make more sales during your slow periods
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Every business has ups and downs. 2020 and 2021 threw many curveballs in our direction, deepening annual sales dips and occasionally toppling the peaks we expect to keep us afloat. 2022 has kept us on our toes for myriad other reasons.
Maybe your e-commerce store saw a boom in lockdown sales, then the sun came out, the pubs reopened, and you saw your web traffic take a gold medal in diving. Or perhaps you run an ice cream parlour that’s been chocka in the summer, but you’re worried winter will leave your sales as frozen as your stock.
All is not lost! I’ve written up some tips on escaping slow sales periods — maybe forever — and how to make the most of tentpole times of the year like national holidays and celebrations.
Grow your audience and generate leads (effectively)
Slow sales periods can be the perfect time to grow your audience for when your peak season arrives! Develop fresh products, services, and stories to attract new customers, and use offers to prompt email sign-ups. Discounts and ‘share with a friend to both get money off’ deals can be good entry points.
Think about how you can get into the hearts, minds, social feeds, and inboxes of untouched demographics. Then, when all systems are go at the outset of your busiest time of year, you’ll have far more eyeballs on your announcements!
It works in reverse, too; if you’re in a busy period now, use the heightened attention to grow your database, so you’ve got more engaged customers to reach out to when things slow down.
Housekeep your emails — audiences and automation
Make sure you have a solid email journey set-up. With platforms like Mailchimp, you can set up automation ‘triggers’ to send out certain emails every few days after a new subscriber signs up!
An example of this process might be:
A new customer subscribes to your emails
They receive a welcome email immediately — perhaps with details of or access to an offer they signed up for
Three days later, you send them another email — this could also be the stage at which you send them an offer, if your sign-up process doesn’t mention one
The offers in these follow-up emails could be ‘limited-time only’, to create a sense of urgency and drive more sales
Then you can set up further follow-up emails to remind customers about the offer five, three, and one day(s) before the offer expires
This email ‘journey’ can be triggered for every new subscriber after just a single set-up, and the more you maintain your email lists, the smoother it will run.
Depending on which email marketing platform you’re using, you’ll be able to create categories, tags, and buyer personas to keep track of different purchase behaviours and engagement habits.
You’ll also likely be able to add in ‘information tags’, e.g. ‘first name’ placements, so the name a customer signs up with appears in the email they receive, making it feel more personal.
Getting all of this in place during a slow season — or in preparation for one — will minimise the manual effort you need to put into email marketing when your mind should be elsewhere.
Partnerships — an ‘exchange of audiences’
When you collaborate with another brand or influencer, you’re essentially swapping customers! Done well, partnerships are a powerful two-way street of audience growth.
Here are some things to consider:
Does their audience match yours? Is there a good overlap of product:market fit?
Is the brand or influencer responsive and easy to work with? If you’re running a collaborative giveaway, for example, you don’t want to appear partially responsible if things go wrong on their part!
Is the partnership well-balanced? Are you and the brand/influencer getting a fair share of exposure and/or sales?
If the brand you want to work with has a larger following you, what can you offer them to make the collaboration more balanced, e.g. allocating some budget to run a paid promotion with them?
If you’re a locally-focused business, one of the most powerful things you can do is partner with other nearby businesses to turn your area into a ‘destination’ — a spot with a community spirit and a shared identity. It can transform a stretch of high street into a world-famous location.
If you’re more national or international, think of a brand whose audiences has some overlap with yours. This could be anything from a stationery company hiring revered artists to create covers for limited-edition notebooks to a vegan restaurant hosting a giveaway with several vegan influencers.
Consistent collaborations have the power to completely reshape your year-on-year sales patterns — they might even make your usual sales slump busier than your typical peak period!
A finger on the pulse of the market
In 2020, when the pandemic was still at its peak, all the research tools we use for our paid ads and SEO campaigns showed Christmas-related searches were higher than in the three years prior. Perhaps that’s simply indicative of more people shopping online. But if you dug a little deeper, you would start to see adjacent trends emerging; whilst keywords related to gift shopping did see a definite rise in 2020, queries about ‘COVID Christmas bubble’ information were a big contributor to festive search spikes.
In 2022, we’ve seen people wanting to spend more after the lifting of lockdown restrictions while also aiming to tighten their budgets to navigate the economic aftershocks of the pandemic. Search data tells the stories we need to be tapped into.
Traditional economic models and forecasts continue to be a rocky foundation for expectations. Most financial reports from January 2021 noted that retail sales were worse than predicted in the UK, so it’s not the worst idea to peek at the data and see what people are actually searching for in real-time. It could produce some strong campaign ideas, for Christmas and beyond!
Take your marketing strategy in a new direction
The social media landscape is an almost unrecognisable terrain from just a couple of years ago. Facebook’s dominance has been doused. Organic engagement on Instagram posts quietened with the rise of Reels. While we were all distracted figuring out what to do next, TikTok snuck in and took the throne.
A slow sales period could be the perfect window of opportunity for realigning your digital marketing strategy, especially if you’ve yet to kick off your TikTok presence. Take on TikTok in the right way and it might even be the platform that brings business back even stronger than what it was before the slump.
Tying it all together
If you’re looking at the data from sales, social engagement, email clicks, and SEO trends, you’ve got all the vital information you’ll need to innovate your products, create some incredible campaigns, identify strong partnership opportunities, and ultimately turn your slow sales period around.