8 Ways to Impress Clients During the Holiday Season

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There’s no better time to bring customers on board than the Christmas period. People are splashing their cash and the upcoming new year resolutions are just around the corner. But as you’ve heard a million times before, it's cheaper and easier to retain existing customers than to attract new ones. 

1. Find out what your clients really want

It might seem obvious, but it’s impossible to impress clients if you don’t know what their top priorities are. Market research is of course a key part of running any business, but you can really send it into overdrive as the year comes to a close. This means getting down into details well in advance of the holidays to see what will really make your customers tick. 

Luckily, there are all kinds of ways to gather information and adjust your strategies to impress clients during Christmas. 

See what your client’s competitors are doing

The way businesses operate moves fast, and by fully understanding your client’s industry, you can stay one step ahead of the game. Impress them with your knowledge of their competitors, and back it up with a specific sales pitch tailored to them. 

Get the opinion of your leads and customers well before December

The best source of info on what your clients want is from the horse’s mouth. Email your database with a customized form and dig into what they’re lacking and what they wish they had. For a less formal approach, hook your current and future customers in with a social media quiz. You can even use your post-Christmas customer satisfaction metrics to inform next year’s campaigns.

With all of this information, you can direct your end-of-year marketing campaigns strategically and impress clients by speaking their language. 

2. Prepare your business for the holiday season

Around the Christmas period, there’s nothing worse for clients than finding products out of stock or a delayed delivery service. Conversely, there’s nothing better than getting everything you need in one fell swoop and finding it on your doorstep exactly when predicted. 

Busy periods are crunch time for your reputation, but a great opportunity to impress your clients.

Use sales analysis to predict the stock you'll need

In most industries, customer behavior changes radically during the month of December, and you can’t simply complain and say you weren’t expecting it. That’s why you should pay close attention to your sales analytics and put plans in place to prepare your stock. When you’re trying to impress clients, it’s best to be overstocked than understocked, and we’ll explore ways of dealing with overstock later in the article. 

Create a risk management plan for when things go wrong

Even if you’ve got the best sales analysts in house, you can’t account for everything. But rather than letting nature take its course, you can prepare for the unexpected. Create backup plans for broken supply chains, put a plan in place in case of your website going down, and make contingencies for unreliable deliveries.  

3. Offer strategic seasonal discounts to attract new customers

Everybody jumps on the bandwagon with offers to impress clients over Christmas, and you want to get your name out there at this ripe time for revenue. However, to combine standing out from the crowd with smart business sense, you’ve got to be strategic. 

Get people on your subscription packages

Flash sales for subscription services are a great way of drawing new customers in, and are rising in popularity as a gift. By offering first-time users a free month, or a discounted year-long subscription, you can promote significant savings to your customers as a special holiday offer.

Shift excess stock

We touched on overstocking earlier, and here’s how you leverage the situation to your advantage. In the post-Christmas lull, launch everything-must-go sales to get rid of your unwanted stock. This is a great way to impress customers who are on low budgets or love a thrifty deal. They can get prepared a year in advance and you’ll clear out your stock rooms for the coming spring. Win-win!

4. Reward your top clients with special perks

Customer loyalty is the backbone of most companies, and you can really impress clients by rewarding them for their continued business. 

As you might have noticed in your personal life, often the best offers are for new customers only, which can be very off-putting if you’ve been spending your hard-earned money for a long time. Therefore, to impress clients during Christmas, you can encourage continued loyalty with a special offer to your top clients.

In practice, this will take a bit of work behind the scenes. In your CRM, segment your customer database by amount of purchases or total amount spent, and create a specific campaign just for them. Get creative with your outreach by targeting email and social media, and send a private message with a discount code. Choose an area to target, such as free delivery, a month or two of free subscription, or a heavy discount — whatever works best for your business model.

As one year ends and another begins, it’s the ideal time to secure loyalty. It’s when customers tend to reassess their priorities, and if a competitor is offering a better deal, you could see a mass exodus, especially as people all around the world are tightening their purse strings. You can go on to analyze how well you impress clients by comparing your customer retention rate to the previous year. 

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5. Bolster your customer service efforts around the holiday season

It’s fair to say that we’re talking about one of the most stressful times of the year. With work piling up, festive parties, and preparations to take care of at home, the last thing people want is to make a mistake at the checkout. 

Therefore, one way to impress clients during the holiday season is to make sure everybody on your team is fully informed about your delivery, return, refund, and cancellation policies. You’re aiming for a seamless experience where the right presents arrive on time, just like Santa would do.

Remember what age you’re living in too. You can’t just fill a call center with temps and wait for the phones to start ringing. Instead, you need to be across all channels, including emails, and social media platforms.

To really impress clients, you can even solve problems before they arise. Take preventative action by including a customizable instant messenger widget on your website so your customers can resolve issues before they make a purchase. This can save a massive headache of returns and refund claims later down the line, and your customer service agents can take the opportunity to upsell. 

Internally, web chats are far more efficient than call centers as you can offer a few clickable options up front and direct every interaction to the right agent. When it’s time for a human to take over, they can handle multiple requests simultaneously, rather than taking one phone call at a time.

6. Make life as easy as possible for your clients

We all know that the festive period is one of the busiest times of the year for businesses. Trying to get last-minute deals through the door while ensuring your books are balanced means you need to fight for their attention and make it count.

Once you’ve agreed on a meeting, share your calendar with them and allow them to pick a time themselves. This avoids the tedious back-and-forth of emails trying to decide on a slot. Now you’ve agreed when the meeting will take place, share an agenda so everybody knows what they’re getting into. As a result, you can keep your meetings short, sweet, and to the point, which is exactly what you both want. 

For your own internal organization, workflows are a great way of covering everything you need to and checking every box as you go. By structuring your processes, you can remove a massive amount of stress, which will allow you to arrive at meetings with a clear head, welcoming attitude, and confident pitch.

All of this is in the spirit of making life as easy as possible for your clients, so don’t be afraid to tell them! You don’t need to go overboard, but you can offer a video call instead of an in-person meeting because you know how busy they’ll be at this time of year will really impress clients. 

7. Give them something to keep them engaged once you've left

For B2B and boutique B2C companies, you’ll be interacting on a more personal level than businesses with massive amounts of customers. And with fewer customers, you can’t afford for them to forget you. 

Successful sales teams always leave a little something at the end of a meeting to impress clients. At the entry level, a business card gives them an easy way to reach out to you, but you can go much further than that. Share a user-friendly presentation for them to look back once you’ve planted the seeds of their customer success in the meeting. Alternatively, an exclusive how-to series of short videos serve as a great reminder when your clients are looking for business solutions. 

To really impress clients, run A/B testing on your materials and ask for feedback on how useful they were. Sure, it’s a great way of refining your strategy, but it’s also another little way to start a conversation.

8. Follow up on sales and meetings

Follow ups are the perfect example of how a little effort can go a long way. As you’ve already left materials for consideration over the holiday season, you’ve got a great conversation starter for the beginning of the year. Now your clients have a better idea of what you offer, you can revise your ideas and drive towards a deal.

But it doesn’t have to be that complex. Automate emails to go out after purchases wishing your clients happy holidays and thanking them for their custom over the past year. For in-person or video meetings, add a personal touch to follow-up templates and ping them out a day or two after your meeting to stay fresh in your client’s mind. 

Whether you’ve made the sale or not, your follow up should offer further contact, whether it’s through email, over the phone, or on a video meeting. Customer success is huge for a reason now, so if there are any issues you can resolve, your follow up sets the stage for it, and it’s a pretty good opportunity for some upselling too.

Now you know how to impress clients, you can get started launching your efforts for the festive period. But preparation is key, and if you don’t have the right tools in place, you’re going to struggle to hold everything together.

But Bitrix24 is here to help. When you need a CRM, sales workflows, and communication tools that work in harmony, they need to be all in the same place. It combines an excellent UI with an attractive price tag for all users. 

So if you need to impress customers this holiday season, sign up to Bitrix24 and make it a Christmas to remember.

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