How to Prepare Your Store for Halloween
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!
Halloween marks the beginning of the holiday season, followed closely by Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas and New Year. This two-month-long holiday craze-a-thon is something that should put shivers down your spine.
I hope you’ve already made essential preparations for Halloween, but if not, don’t worry — we’ve got your back! Here’s our last-minute checklist to see if your store, both offline and online, is ready for Halloween.
Happy reading and trick-or-treat responsibly!
How to prepare a physical store for Halloween
Halloween is not just your typical run-of-the-mill day in a retail calendar. It is a special occasion, and you need to treat it as such.
You wouldn’t invite guests to your home on a special day and not even have the decency to decorate the interior, right? The same goes for your store. It is, after all, the home of your business.
Spookify the store layout
You can’t fake the Halloween spirit; the only way is to embrace it.
Why decorating a store matters? Because it helps put your visitors in the festive mood. When something affects them on an emotional level, they are more likely to purchase holiday-themed goods.
Offline retailers spend 60 billion dollars annually on in-store display for special events. If that doesn’t convince you to put bats and spiders all over your shop,
Even something as small as changing your usual store muzak to something a bit more eerie (but not too eerie) can do wonders. Show your visitors that you care about their experience.
Stock up on the goods
A sizable chunk of Halloween shoppers, up to 40%, start buying for Halloween a month in advance. If your shop is selling Halloween goods, you need to stock up early.
This includes not only Frankenstein’s Monster masks, but anything that could come in handy at a Halloween party. Candles and drinks, baking goods and wrapping paper — there’s no telling what people might need to have good time.
Train your staff
This isn’t so much a Halloween tip as it is a general holiday advice.
Every holiday should be marked in your employees’ calendar, for holidays are time when all their skills are put to the ultimate test. Holidays, Halloween included, are when even usually polite customers begin to elbow each other out of the way in hopes of getting to the front of the line.
If you’ve got performance monitoring equipment, this is the time to take full advantage of it. Is your customer service lacking? Do you need more hands? Do some employees require more guidance?
These are all important questions that the right tool could solve for you.
How to prepare e-commerce for Halloween
It’s the 21st century, which means offline isn’t the only thing you should be paying attention to. More and more customers are shopping online — and for good reason, too!
It’s convenient, oftentimes cheaper, and suits well those of us who are, to put it politely, far from being social butterflies.
But just like your offline store, your online space is in need of some Halloween makeover.
Update your design with spooky images
The reasoning behind this tip is the same as the one for offline stores: you need to put visitors in a certain mood.
You don’t have to stick ghosts and goblins onto every picture you have. Just a small skeleton or a bat here and there could get the message across. It can even be easter-egg level of
If you’re not brave enough to change images on your website, there’s always social media. Switch the header image, or pretty up your logo with spook visuals. Whatever
Write bone-chilling content
Halloween is not only an excuse to have fun with friends. It’s also a nice occasion to write some terrific content.
Around the end of October each year, blogs are filled with articles like 13 Spooky Tips on Halloween Customer Service, The Ultimate Drinks for Your Halloween Party, or even How to Prepare Your Store for Halloween. (Crazy, I know!)
Don’t let your fang-tastic content go to waste. Once you’ve published your article, you can use it in a Halloween-themed issue of your newsletter. Plus, you can always reuse it in 12 months’ time.
It’s a win-win for sure.
Run special promotions
Any holiday is a good excuse to offer a special deal. People are already in the mood to spend, which means there is a higher conversion rate on promotion events.
Halloween is as good of a holiday as any to up-sell and cross-sell to your customers. The good thing is that the promotion doesn’t even have to be connected to Halloween.
Add urgency to your deals (ONLY TODAY, LIMITED STOCK, UNTIL MIDNIGHT, etc.) so that customers would be prompted to act quickly on them.
EXTRA TIP: Don’t forget about free shipping!
Shipping costs are the main reason for bailing on an online transaction. If you offer free shipping, you’re basically giving your customers carte blanche on going hog wild with purchases.
Use social media
To take full advantage of Halloween, you need to become the Hitchcock-level master of suspense. Social media is the tool
In the days leading up to Halloween, you can promote your future deals, advertise spookerific content or simply post fun images. (Hey, we’re not judging.)
Social media is not something to ignore in this day and age. Use it to reach out to your customers and share important information with them.
What’s next?
You’ve cleared the first obstacle in the two-month holiday course, but you’ve got so much more to look forward to: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and of course Christmas.
Intimidated? Don’t be. With the right retail queue management tool, you’ll be ready for any influx of visitors, no matter the occasion.
