Maximising Christmas Food Sales

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How to Captivate and Win Christmas Food Buyers

Maximise Your Food Sales this Christmas! Retailers can spread the emotional experience of shopping of their bricks & mortar store to their online store. When we go into a fine food store, we are often greeted by a knowledgeable producer or retailer. If we're lucky there's a chef in the mix demonstrating recipes or talking about how to match different foods and wines.

In the online world, we can easily boost content on food retail web sites with search engine optimised recipes linking to the food items for sale. While we can't replicate smell or taste (yet), the choice of words we use both in the articles and to merchandise the products online, can help entice customers. 'Sumptuous sausages', for example. Attracting customers is one thing, but delighting, engaging, and enticing them to buy is another. Where budgets allow, retailers should invest in quality video clips demonstrating cooking, gifting or eating. The retailer's objective is to give the customer the ability to imagine themselves, either in that kitchen cooking and smelling those wonderful Christmas foods, watching the happy face of the person they are given a product to, or sitting and eating with their families in a magical Christmas dinner setting. Videos have the power to captivate an audience if done well, and industry statistics demonstrate an estimated 40% increase in sales with videos (particularly on the product pages). Effective merchandising, cross-selling and up-selling in the online store, will also help to maximise sales.

Retailers should always choose marketing channels that deliver maximum results and the best return-on-investment. It's about knowing where they will find their target audiences and reaching them at the right times and frequency, in an engaging way. There's no point attracting customers to an online store, if it does not engage and sell, the transactions aren't smooth - from viewing products and buying right through to delivery. Fine Food retailers should focus on making the product and category pages engaging, employing effective cross-selling and upselling with incentives on the product pages, an easy fast check out experience, and reliable delivery. A trusted click-and-collect option will also be helpful, as well as supporting customers toward online, and online to in-store. These should appear as one seemless experience for customers of multi or omni-channel fine food retailers.

Christmas is a fantastic time to attract buyers. If retailers attract, captivate, engage, service and deliver with a wonderful experience from beginning to end, their customers will return again and again and again.