The holiday season is usually when business owners witness their biggest increase in sales, making this a great time of year to focus on boosting your private label brand to capture as many of those seasonal shoppers as possible! Read on as FLPL shares some top tips that will help your company to make the most of this festive time of year.

Revamp Your Packaging

Although the primary purpose of packaging may be to protect your products, packaging has a huge influence over consumer decisions too. It becomes even more significant during the holiday season – a time when people are seeking out giftable products. Many of these are impulse purchases, with 81% of those buying decisions being traced back to ornate and festive packaging.

If you’ve been hoping for your private label brand to grab a slice of the holiday market, seasonal packaging could definitely help. This becomes much easier to implement if your private label manufacturer offers packaging design services, just like FLPL does. Whether you want to make a few small tweaks to your existing packaging or go all out with a completely new, festive design, we can make that happen in no time!

Create Some Seasonal Specials

During the holiday season, consumers are naturally drawn toward seasonal products. Placing your regular products into festive packaging can help to encourage a seasonal vibe. However, your private label brand could also go the extra mile by creating some limited edition products.

Start by figuring out how your chosen niche could connect to the holiday season. Say, for example, your private label brand produces skin care products. You could launch a seasonal collection that addresses the various skin issues that people usually face at this time of year. Alternatively, you could put together a holiday skincare collection that has a wider appeal, making it an ideal gift even if the purchaser doesn’t know much about the recipient’s skin type or skin concerns.

Improve Your Green Credentials

Sustainability is a huge buzzword these days. Many brands are placed under scrutiny by eco-conscious consumers at this time of year, when waste becomes an even bigger problem. If you would like to boost your private label brand while also reaching out to those who care about the environment, now would be a good time to work on improving your green credentials.

There are several ways in which you could do this. Perhaps you start focusing on products that have been created with sustainable ingredients or create holiday packaging that’s fully recyclable. Either way, once you’ve implemented some changes, make sure that you promote these. You want consumers to be well aware of the efforts that your private label brand has made. Brands that pay attention to sustainability are quickly becoming consumer favorites, and yours will soon hopefully become one of those too!

Optimize Your Website

E-commerce sales boom during the holiday period and you don’t want your private label brand missing out on that. This means turning your attention to your website.

If you’re aiming to push festive sales, a seasonal landing page would be a good start. Ideally, this page should feature some of the holiday promotions that you’re running, in a way that will quickly engage your target audience.

You’ll need to also ensure that your website is optimized for holiday traffic. Many consumers shop via their smartphones and tablets, so your website needs to look good when viewed from various devices. Go over the basics too, from loading time to ease of checkout. People are often stressed when holiday shopping and they’ll quickly lose interest in your private label products if your website isn’t user-friendly enough. If this is something you need help with, team up with a private label manufacturer that has a dedicated team to help with e-commerce, just like FLPL does! 

Get Festive on Your Socials

Social media is a fantastic way to get your private label brand out into the world. It’s a particularly effective tool to harness during the holidays as you’ll be able to use your social channels to spread the word about your brand’s seasonal products or festive deals. 

There are so many ways to use social media to bring in sales at this time of year. From regular posts to Facebook Live to Instagram hashtags, these will all help to grab the attention of holiday shoppers. Don’t forget about social commerce either. It’s becoming increasingly popular. It enables people to purchase your private label products directly from a social media platform, offering the utmost in convenience. 

Offer Product Samples

Have you been gearing up to launch a new product collection in time for the holidays? Great idea – but you now need to focus on convincing consumers to try your new products, which is where product samples can really help.

Research shows that 63% of consumers end up purchasing a product that they’ve sampled. They don’t stop there either. Many also then purchase additional products from that same brand while also recommending the brand to friends and family.

Product sampling has also been linked with an upsurge in user-generated content. People love posting videos and reviews of samples that they’ve received, making this such a great marketing tool. While producing samples can be a headache for some companies, those who are working with a private label manufacturer will find this a breeze! 

Explore New Pricing Strategies

There are a number of different pricing strategies that you could implement during the holiday season. In many ways, it’s important to do so because consumers now expect to see deals and discounts when holiday shopping. 

Some of the options to explore include:

• Promotional discounts – offering limited-time deals can help to push consumers to make a purchase sooner rather than later.
• Anchor pricing – when offering a deal, display the original price before showing the discounted price. This makes it seem like an even better offer.
• Bundling – consider grouping some of your products together into giftable bundles. Then, offer a discounted price for that bundle. This price should be a figure that’s lower than if they had purchased each of those products individually.
• Upsell premium products – consumers love finding ‘special’ holiday gifts and they’re usually happy to pay a higher price for these. Try upselling your premium products at this time of year and they should start to fly off the shelves! 

Collect Reviews

Product reviews have a huge impact on a consumer’s purchasing decision. Not only do reviews tell an interested shopper more about how that product functions in a real-life situation but it also helps to give a product some extra credibility. Research shows that 94% of consumers need to see at least 10 reviews for a product in order to view that product as being credible. A lack of reviews during the holiday season could be enough to sway a shopper to opt for one of your competitors instead of you.

So, how do you build up those reviews?

Email requests work well. Send customers a heartfelt plea to leave a review for their newly-purchased products, explaining how much those reviews mean to a small private label brand such as yours. Many businesses also offer future discounts when a review is left, or offer free product samples in exchange for an honest review.

Get Personal

In this digital day and age, when AI is slowly taking over, consumers yearn for a personal touch. Sure, automated emails and chatbots can help you to run your business more efficiently but, sometimes, forming a personal connection with your target audience is what’s needed.

How can you do this? Here are a few ideas:

• Consider reaching out to your high-value customers with personal emails, direct mail, or even a phone call.
• Include a handwritten thank you card with every product you sell.
• Directly engage with customers via social media, instead of using automated responses.

While this may all require more effort on your part, it will put your business at the forefront of people’s minds, making them much more likely to choose you over your competitors. 

Consider a Collaboration

The holidays are a great time to collaborate with other businesses in a way that showcases the services that you both have to offer. Collaborations not only encourage creativity and productivity, both of which commonly dwindle during the festive period, but they can also be a great way to increase your reach and connect you to new audiences. 

It goes without saying that you wouldn’t necessarily want to team up with a direct competitor for a collaboration. However, working with businesses that offer products that complement your own private label goods can be very beneficial. 

Say, for example, that your private label brand is all about producing holistic aromatherapy products. Collaborating with a business that focuses on other aspects of wellness would help to highlight your product line. Whether this involves cross-promotions, working with influencers, guest posting, or anything else, a clever collaboration can really help to increase demand and boost sales.

Boosting Your Private Label Brand Over the Holidays

While most businesses will acknowledge the holiday season in their own way, this becomes so much easier to do when you’re working alongside a private label manufacturer. At FLPL, we can help with all of the above. This will save you from having to struggle with an excessive workload at an already busy time of year. Whether you’re thinking about creating a seasonal product line, adding some festive flair to your packaging, ramping up your e-commerce efforts, or anything else, we’ll work with you to give your private label brand the extra ‘oomph’ that it needs to really rake in the sales over the holiday season!

Click here to contact FLPL to find out more about the private labeling services that we offer. 

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