How to boost your sales through better logistics [Valentine's Day]

The year is punctuated by major celebrations, every one of them an excellent way to boost your sales. Once the end-of-year holidays are over, Valentine’s Day comes round very quickly and opens a new year in which those dates are keenly awaited. These key selling moments usually bring a sharp rise in volume, and that is when the importance of logistics becomes obvious. Whether it is stock management or deliveries, logistics is decisive in growing sales. Handle it badly and you can spoil those key moments and lose sales. So how do you make the most of these occasions to boost your sales significantly?

Valentine’s Day: still a key period for your sales

The winter months are marked by several key moments. They begin with Black Friday, continue with the end-of-year holidays and close with Valentine’s Day. For chocolate makers, florists, restaurants, caterers and retailers alike, Valentine’s Day is a peak in activity across many sectors.

A celebration for everyone

Valentine’s Day offers businesses so many opportunities because of the sheer breadth of its audience. Celebrating love speaks to everyone, and it does so from early childhood onwards. Adults and children together make up a wide spectrum of targets, multiplying the opportunities in every sector. No two people are the same. Depending on the situation and on individual tastes and preferences, every kind of gift gets bought. That is an enormous sales potential.

Valentine’s Day in numbers: a strong moment for growing sales

According to a report by France 2, more than 185 million euros was spent in 2020. That is a jump of 275% in ten years. The most popular gifts include flowers, jewellery, chocolate and perfume. In 2020, bouquets of flowers, mostly red roses, brought in a total of 37 million euros.

Logistics: a key ingredient for growing sales

While the occasion is a perfect chance to multiply your sales, it also puts considerable pressure on the whole supply chain. With the rise in volume, logistics is the first lever you need to secure, because the risk of leaving it to chance is missing out on potential sales. Even when the buying experience on your site has been excellent, it is the delivery that completes it. That last link in the chain therefore plays a crucial part in whether your sales succeed. To take advantage of the opportunity, you have to think about the whole chain, right through to the final logistics step. Optimising it turns it into a serious asset that keeps improving your sales well beyond the 14th. So which elements matter most in getting there?  

How to improve your sales dramatically at Valentine’s Day

1. Analysing your data

If you want an effective logistics strategy and effective processes, the statistics you can collect are a goldmine. The data you gather lets you understand your audience and its buying behaviour better, improve the customer journey on your website and manage your stock more accurately. Making use of those numbers is a real advantage for your customers too, who will not be forced to abandon a basket because of a poor experience on your site. Worse still, imagine you have misjudged the delivery volume for the year ahead. In such a short window, customers are all the more impatient to receive their orders and all the more demanding about deadlines. Taking last year’s delivery numbers into account and forecasting this year’s is therefore essential. That data is just as valuable when it comes to preparing your logistics.  

2. Logistics preparation and planning ahead

As with any event, you need to prepare, whatever your sector. Valentine’s Day purchases are concentrated into a very short window, from a few days beforehand up to the day itself, 14 February. That spike over a handful of days will put pressure on your stock management, your staff, your online shop and your logistics. As above, analysing your statistics lets you identify the key points and anticipate what the day will demand. To prepare as well as you can, ask yourself the right questions. Here is a full list:  

• What is your customers’ buying journey?
• What were the blockers last Valentine’s Day?
• Do you need extra staff?
• How do you handle your stock management?
• Do you have suitable packaging, and enough of it, for your deliveries?
• Do you have the delivery fleet you need, suited to your products?
• Do you want to bring in an external provider to absorb the peak?
• Do you, or does your provider, have a delivery tracking and communication system?
• Do you have an available, responsive customer support team to handle logistics operations?

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3. Optimising your website

Whether it is the buying experience or how you communicate your delivery options, optimising your online shop is something to tackle well before the day itself. For the occasion, you can play on the theme and refresh your site’s design. So do rework and optimise your home page, whether that means the colours, the images or the products you feature. Make sure your home page does not load slowly, because that will cost you conversions. Thin product pages and vague delivery information do the same: each of these can put a visitor off buying. Another thing that lifts sales during this period is dedicating a page or a tab to your Valentine’s Day offers and products. That way customers do not get lost and land straight on your range. That dedicated section is not wasted once the 14th has passed. You can reuse it to announce promotions, sales or any other big moment, such as Christmas or Easter. One last tip, and not a small one: think mobile. Every year, more of the traffic generated at Valentine’s Day comes from mobile. Between 2017 and 2018 alone, mobile searches rose by 170%. Adapting your online shop to smartphones is not something to neglect.

4. Social media

Using social media is now essential to growing your site. As genuine digital marketing tools, they bring you traffic, raise your profile with prospects and let you build relationships with your customers. They also let you talk about your delivery service, a real trigger for the decision to buy. These tools give you a direct channel to leads, prospects and customers alike. If you are in B2C, you can also use comments and private messages on Facebook, for example, to gather:

• reviews of your service, and recommendations too,
• orders
• and new ideas and trends from your customers

If your audience is B2B, LinkedIn is the ideal place to share your expertise and get in touch directly with potential customers. A presence on social media builds trust between your followers and your business. On Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn, use Valentine’s Day to publish content with real value. Aim to earn your community’s engagement. And do not stop feeding that engagement once Valentine’s Day has passed. Tip: scheduling tools built for social media, such as Buffer, Hootsuite or eClincher, will help you organise. You can write and schedule your posts in advance, which leaves you free to handle operations and urgent issues on the day itself.

5. Email marketing

Another important tool for lifting your sales is email. Valentine’s Day is a perfect occasion to launch a campaign, and also to make sure your emails work as part of delivery tracking.  

The Valentine’s Day email campaign

Free and widely read, email is an extremely valuable tool in your marketing strategy, all the more so because emails are measurable, shareable, accessible to everyone and easy to personalise. That last point is essential: at such a busy commercial moment, expect your customers to receive a great many messages. Standing out, and not overdoing it, are the two fundamentals for getting your emails opened and making them pay.

Communication and delivery tracking emails  

Email plays a vital role on the logistics side too. As a way to keep people posted on their orders, emails are keenly awaited by consumers. However full of love this period is, it also makes customers anxious, and that comes down to how short the delivery windows are. Whether you run your own delivery operation or work with an external logistics partner, make sure your communication and tracking system does the job. Shippr’s delivery service supports the logistics of businesses across every sector, not least around this celebration. We know how essential communication is. That is why real-time delivery tracking is available to you and to your customers, along with emails and SMS keeping them informed at every stage of their parcel’s journey.

6. Your delivery offer

Finally, if you want to keep your customers happy and improve your sales during this celebration of love, your delivery offer plays a decisive part.

Offer a wide range of delivery options

Consumers now expect a choice of delivery options, and being able to pick where and when they take delivery has become central to keeping them loyal. Some of your customers ordering chocolates for their partner will choose their workplace rather than home, so the surprise is not spotted or, worse, taken in by the person it is meant for. The same goes for flowers: some will want to surprise their other half at work. And for the last-minute buyers, same-day or express delivery is very welcome. At Shippr we have taken that variety of profiles and delivery needs into account and given our customers the tools to tailor their deliveries. Whether you need scheduled or express delivery, at weekends or on public holidays, you have access to made-to-measure deliveries. That flexibility is now central to keeping your customers satisfied.

Trust your deliveries to professional carriers

Given the variety of products bought and delivered around this event, it is important to hand that transport to professionals with the expertise and experience to do it. Flowers, chocolate and fragile gifts such as perfume all need careful handling and suitable transport conditions. To be sure they are handled well and moved properly, make sure your own drivers and your external provider are professionals. Refrigerated transport, fragile or bulky parcels: Shippr deliveries are made to measure and run by transport professionals. We count more than 500 partner couriers driving every kind of vehicle, including temperature-controlled ones.

Back same-day delivery

Finally, as we have said, the goods being moved are usually fragile and demanding. To deliver a quality service and keep the risks to a minimum, backing same-day delivery is a winning bet. Foodstuffs and flowers obviously have to move as fast as possible. Even with e-commerce parcels, passing through sorting centres lengthens delivery times and raises the risk of breakage, loss or mix-ups. That is why Shippr has made same-day delivery its guiding principle.

To get your logistics ready for Valentine’s Day, talk to one of our business experts.