How to Get More Patronage from Last Minute Shoppers

The Easter, Christmas, and New Year celebrations are one of the times when people make the most shopping. Even during discount sales like Black Friday and Cyber Week, businesses get more patronage.

However, the customers may be slow to make a buying decision and that could result in low patronage. As a business owner, you want to figure out the best ways to get more patronage from last minute shoppers.

Whether these buyers haven’t decided on shopping because of time, money or some other factors, it is in your advantage to draw them to your shop.

Here are some of the best ways to get more customers and raise your sales revenue during these festive periods.

1. Prepare Ahead of Time

Just as your prospective customers are taking their time, you also want to seize the opportunity to prepare ahead of the sales.

These are some of the things you should be doing ahead of the sales:

Stock Up on Goods

It wouldn’t make sense to wait for more buyers when you don’t even have what they intend to buy. If you haven’t stocked up on your goods, now is a good time to do so.

Already, you have some products that get the most sales all-year round. Those are the ones to prioritize. And because priorities change, your prospective customers may have new products they are interested in.

You can start by asking them what type of products they expect to buy at a discount during the festive periods. From their responses, you will know the new products to introduce to your store.

Create a Buzz for the Offers

Already, you know that it is important to make an offer if you expect to turn more last-minute shoppers to steady customers.

One of the best offers you can make is to create a buzz to get more of these prospective customers to know of the latest deals. You can do that by:

• Creating an online contest and rewarding the winner and the runner-up with a discount for their next purchase.
• Creating a time-bound offer that expires after a few hours or days. With this, prospective customers would want to jump on the offer and get a discount.

Be of Help to these Shoppers

The fact that these people are buying later than they should have could be because of different reasons, ranging from having little time to go shopping, not having enough funds at the time or simply because they wanted to wait until everyone had shopped so they can shop with ease.

Whatever their reasons might be, they are all valid because the customers have a right to decide when to shop and when not to.

It is best if you can help them out during this time, because honestly, it is not easy to shop at the “last minute.”

Here are a couple of ways you can assist the last-minute shoppers:

• Offer free shipping
• Promise to ship their goods in the shortest time possible.
• If they chose to shop in-store, you can offer to delegate someone to help them shop faster.
• Consider attaching a gift when the customers buy up to a certain amount.

2. Use the Scarcity Marketing Tactics

Enough of the “pity.” The fact that they are shopping later means that they have decided to buy after all, but you don’t want to give them more time to decide on whether they should buy immediately or wait a little longer.

That is where scarcity marketing tactics come in to help you “push” these prospective customers to add more products to their carts and checkout in good time.

These are some of the best marketing tactics to deploy:

Offer Limited Stock

Limited stock refers to those products that have only a few of the items left on the shelf. Anything between 10 and 100 can be counted as limited stock.

The idea? It is to convince the prospects to buy those products, seeing that there are only a few of them left.

Use Upselling to Sell More Products

If you are the type of business owner that wants to enjoy more patronages from last-minute shoppers, one of the things to do is to upsell.

Upselling is a type of marketing tactic that allows you to generate more sales from offering additional products. For example, you can “upsell” a pair of white sneakers to a customer who purchased a pair of black jeans.

The goal of upselling, aside from making more sales, is to offer a product that compliments the previous product. You can make up to 3 or 4 upsells and with a discount on each of them, you will make more sales.

3. Use Online Shopping to Make More Sales

Due to the fact that most retailers would be too busy processing walk-in purchases and attending to in-store buyers, it may take a lot of time to attend to everyone.

Thus, some prospects may turn to the Internet to get their purchases done. If you have an eCommerce store, you can close more deals by:

• Making sure that the site is smooth, in terms of having a faster loading speed and excellent navigation.
• Add countdown timers showing the prospects the time they have before the entire product page and all the offers go down for good.
• You can also embed a YouTube walkthrough video to show the prospects how to pick items, add these items to the cart and checkout in real-time.

4. Take Steps to Prevent Shopping Cart Abandonment

Shopping cart abandonment refers to the inability of the prospects to complete their purchases. Many factors ranging from lack of further interest in the product, the lengthy checkout process and not having sufficient funds in the credit card to complete the purchase could cause that.

You may be able to reduce your online store’s shopping cart abandonment rate by:

• Integrating a feature that saves the cart for the prospects so they can always come back to complete it. You may as well, consider allowing them to sign up on the site. That way, they will have a profile with all their intended and completed purchases in one place.
• Send follow-up emails, reminding them of the need to complete their purchases.

Final Words: More Sales are Made in the Last-Minute

The “last-minute” can be one of those times you make the most sales. Of course, it takes more time and you have to be strategic about it to break even.

Now that you know some of the best ways to get patronage from last-minute shoppers, which of the strategies would you use going forward and why?