The holiday season: a 10-step guide

Here’s a checklist of 10 things you will need to help you power through what is traditionally one of the busiest periods of the year.

1. Christmas collections - The sooner you start selling Christmas-themed products and bouquets, the better. According to data from Floom.com, customers start searching for Christmas products in early November.

Buying Christmas gifts for friends, family and loved ones is always hard.  But remember to keep your holiday ranges tight. It’s better to offer a few things done well rather than stretching yourself too thin trying to offer a broad range.

2. Popular products tend to include:

• Wreaths. Always popular, try offering one or two different designs - make sure to add these to Floom in early November!
• Winter stems such as winterberry, eucalyptus (an all-rounder, but particularly good for wintery foliage) and mistletoe will ensure your bouquets feel festive.
• Mini Christmas trees were really popular last year. We expect them to be again this time around.
• Full-sized Christmas trees. If you have the operational capacity to deliver larger-sized Christmas trees, we recommend doing so. Demand for trees will go up this year, with people going on fewer holidays and spending more time at home.
• Scented candles.Including them as add-ons is an effective way of increasing your average order size.

3. Creating Christmas content. It’s a good idea to create multiple pages as part of your campaign, from sales-based pages with lots of products to content pages, this will help make your site visible for multiple Christmas-based searches. If you're able to link all of your pages from one central Christmas-focused landing page, it will help your main page. Here are some tips on what kind of pages you can create based on Christmas-based keywords that consumers often search for:

• Content Pages: most content pages are created around popular questions. For example, ‘How to make a Christmas wreath. The purpose of creating these pages is to target keywords that you would not necessarily be able to target on a sales-based page. Below is a list of popular search terms that generate the most searches over the Christmas period.
• Choose content ideas that you can then link to products or services. Perhaps you have a Christmas wreath collection, or offer Christmas-making workshops? Not all content needs a large amount of copy and it can be quite a simple process. Check out Floom's content here:

Christmas Tree

How to decorate your Christmas Tree

Christmas Bouquets

History of the Christmas Wreath

How to make a Christmas Wreath

4. Metadata and keywords. Below is a list of keywords you can use within your Christmas pages that generate the most engagement. Remember that if your site does not receive as much traffic, try to add your location to titles to help you rank higher for localised searches. Take ‘Christmas Flowers Delivery Clapham,’ for example. By using a keyword phrase like this, you will still rank for ‘Christmas Flower Delivery’ as well as ‘Christmas Flower Delivery Clapham’.

Christmas flower delivery

Christmas flowers

Christmas tree flowers

Christmas bouquet

5. Advertising your Christmas collection. When advertising your Christmas products on your site as well as through other channels such as social media, email marketing and in-store advertising, it is important to think about what messages the consumer needs to know to help sway them to make a purchase. Consumers will be looking for the extra value your product provides, such as add-ons. Perhaps your products already provide value that consumers need to be reminded about, such as gift-wrapping services, and message cards delivered with every product. Make sure to advertise this as often as possible as it may elevate your product over others.

6. Ensure you have a supply of flowers throughout any lockdowns. Ensure you know the stems and products which you can reliably secure Our online wholesale offering in the UK continued to operate throughout the first lockdown.

7. Stay safe. We know that the most important thing to many of you is keeping your team safe. Ensure you have a backup plan if a member of the team starts experiencing Covid-19-related symptoms and has to go into isolation. Do you have enough people to continue to deliver? Do you have someone who understands your business in case you get sick?

8. Stay Connected. Don't forget to capture and store email addresses for any new customers. Whether they are taking a virtual wreath-making class with you or just sending a bouquet to a loved one, these are new customers who can help boost orders for the rest of the year. Also, don't forget to make time to re-introduce yourself on social media and create some emails to re-engage campaigns for Valentine’s Day.