How retailers can make the most of gifting occasions this spring

Spring is a key sale-boosting period for the retail sector. Indeed, recent data suggests that Easter alone is worth almost £600m to retailers. That’s in addition to general ‘spring’ shopping occasions which are based around the start of a new season – for example, families looking to spring clean the home or exercise outside more. But how can e-retailers best take advantage of these opportunities to grow their customer base and increase sales? Let’s look at some easy-to-implement tricks. Gift guides Creating gift guides is a great strategy for helping customers find the right present on key gifting dates. Gift guides can be broken down into a number of different ways. For example, segmenting products into ‘gifts for her’ or ‘gifts for Mum’ provide a simple way to encourage sales, whilst breaking gift guides down by price bracket helps customers to quickly and easily find something within their budget. Gift wrapping Offering a gift-wrapping service is a simple way to convince a customer to purchase from one particular business, rather than a competitor - without having to offer a reduced price or discount code. Focus marketing campaigns around key themes For big events such as Easter, planning a collaborative campaign that all marketing teams can push - from social media to email to pay-per-click advertising – is highly recommended. Think spring cleaning, pastel colours, flowers, warmer colours and emotive language. This will help to bolster activity in transitional periods such as spring/summer and autumn/winter. Retailers should also create a destination landing page to introduce new collections or ranges, with incentives such as ‘% off your first order’ as this can help to increase conversion rate. Competitions Additionally, competitions work well to increase brand visibility and also encourages new customers to browse throughout the website. For example, "Win Your Wishlist", which gets customers navigating around a site and adding items to their basket. Retailers can then hit the entrants that didn't win with an incentive in their inbox such as 10% off to buy their chosen items, which is a win-win for any brand. Free delivery for a limited time only Free delivery works well as an incentive instead of heavily discounting products at key times of year when retailers may be running sales and discounts already. Besides highlighting the key USPs of the business, free delivery is a simple way to boost sales over busy sale periods without compromising on product margins. By Kathy Allen, senior marketing strategist at e-commerce and digital marketing agency, Visualsoft