The holiday shopping season is coming up, and it’s a perfect time for businesses to cause a buzz around their products, drive sales, and attract new customers.

With a great number of competitors on the market, business owners and marketers should do their best to attract and keep their clients during the holiday rush.

Look:

For customers, the holiday shopping season is an opportunity to hunt for the best deals possible, so they have neither time nor patience to deal with poor customer service. Thus, taking care of your customers gives you a competitive advantage during the holidays.

Have you ever thought about the importance of customer satisfaction?

According to Groove report, happy customers tell nine people on average about their experiences with a company. Since 80% of consumers rely on word-of-mouth from peers on where to shop, satisfying customers’ needs is a proven way to sell more.

If you want to keep your customers satisfied, you need to care for them at every stage of the customer journey. Thus, it’s important to improve customer experience (CX), and here’s why:

• 84% of organizations believe improving customer experience leads to an increase in revenue
• 64% of people find customer experience more important than price
• 42% of businesses claim customer experience improves customer retention

The bottom line? Your brand should put effort into increasing customer satisfaction, that’s why we put together a list of tricks for the holiday season:

Create Gift Guides

As the holidays are drawing closer, customers have less time to think about the gift ideas for their nearest and dearest. In fact, 36.7% of people find the pressure of choosing the right gift, and 2/3 of holiday shoppers want to get a curated list to help with their gift purchases.

To make your customer happier, you need to solve their problems, and creating gift guides for any gender, age, and budget is a proven way to satisfy your customers’ needs. For example, in the lead up to the festive period, Amazon has created a gift guide for the subscribers.

The gift guide may help to inspire shoppers, generate gift ideas, and engage customers in a funny way.

The good news for businesses? During the holiday season, customers are more likely to buy on impulse. With the help of gift guides, you can kill two birds with one stone: you help customers solve their problems and promote your deals. For brands, it means an opportunity to drive eCommerce sales.

Give Customers Bonuses and Discounts

It’s not a secret that people spend much money on buying gifts for their friends and families, so they seek out ways to get the best deals. So, wouldn’t it be great if you could help them save money during the holiday season?

If you want to satisfy your customers, there’s a trick for you: bonuses and discounts. Since the festive period is a time of giving, you can congratulate your customers on holidays with exclusive holiday deals.

According to one study by Coupons.com, coupon recipients experience a 38% rise in oxytocin levels and are 11% happier than those who haven’t received a coupon. Plus, most customers find delight and joy in receiving an exclusive offer. Moreover, limited-time sales affect 50% of customers to make purchase decisions.

You can easily create a coupon within a few clicks using Canva’s Coupon Maker that you can personalize using its drag and drop features and tailor-fit it to the holiday season.

Let’s take a look at the offer by The White Company:

Without a doubt, offering discounts can drive revenues if done smartly. If you want to choose the optimal discount that can both convert visitors into buyers and generate maximum profit, turn to math experts.

Provide Customers with Free Shipping

Free shipping isn’t an option these days. In 2016, free shipping was the most popular promotion during the holiday. If you want to satisfy your customers, you need to ensure they don’t spend extra money on the delivery.

Here’s the deal: 9 out of 10 consumers say free shipping is the top incentive to shop online more.

Let’s take a look at the case study by the Fab company that offers not only free shipping but also free returns. For customers, it means an opportunity to decide whether a product meets their needs without wasting money on returns.

During the holiday season, people crave for the best customer service, and offering free shipping is one of the easiest ways to keep your clients satisfied. However, if you can’t afford to offer free shipping, you can also drop a minimum order threshold.

Offer Gift-wrapping

While most customers want to wrap up gifts for their families and friends, 52% of people dislike gift-wrapping because it takes too much time. People are too busy during the holiday season to deal with gift-wrapping.

But what if you could make your customers’ lives easier during the holiday rush?

With a gift-wrapping service, you can take care of your buyers and make them happier. Let’s take a look at the holiday marketing campaign by Gucci. To help their customers who may buy gifts for their friends and beloved, the company offered free gift-wrapping.

Let’s face it: most people want their packages to stand out from the crowd, so they give their gifts a special touch with gift-wrapping. If you want to increase customer satisfaction during the holiday season, offer customers a convenience with this add-on service.

Improve Customer Support

To keep your customers satisfied, you need to ensure they get good customer support on-time. In fact, 47% of shoppers want a fast reply to all questions, problems, feedback, or complaint. When it comes to the holiday shopping season, customers are even more pressed for time to wait for your response.

To handle customer service during the holiday rush, it’s important to keep an eye on all platforms where your target audience hangs out as people may ask you questions everywhere. For example, J.Crew reads their followers comments on social media to provide their customers with quality service.

The faster you act, the better for customer satisfaction. People want to be heard, and they value when a brand has time to communicate with them online. If you can assist your customers in making cost-effective and correct use of a product, they will never forget you.

Your Turn

A good holiday marketing campaign can have a huge impact on sales and brand awareness. If you want to make the most out of the holiday shopping season, you need to put your clients first and do your best to increase customer satisfaction.

Although the unofficial kickoff to the holiday season is just around the corner, it’s not too late to jump on the bandwagon to take care of your customers.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to increasing customer satisfaction, but you can choose one of the above-mentioned tactics that fits your strategy better and bring your business to the next level.

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We’ve put together a resource with all 11 templates so you can keep your customers content during your time away. 

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