What You Need to Know About Consumer Behavior This Holiday Season

Holidays are a special time–or at least, you try to make them special, since they come by only once a year. That’s true for both you and your customers. So, it’s on you to try and do your best during what is a critical period for any business, service, or product.  

What Do Customers Want During Holidays?

In particular, the holidays are often the peak of when customers want to buy products or services. According to survey data from American Express, one-third of customers aim to purchase gifts during this time. 38% plan to make purchases for their significant others, while 32% plan to make purchases for children. 73% hope for a sentimental, rather than just material gift.

But customers don’t always just want gifts. Experiential gifts, too, are on the rise. According to the same survey, 59% purchase entertainment, 54% spend on travel, and 49% spend on food and drink. Friends are more likely to exchange experiences, with 73% more likely to purchase experiences with friends.

As in general, the trend is toward finding information about potential purchases using mobile, inclusive of gifts. In this sense, the mobile experience is key when trying to craft a holiday experience for potential customers.

As this is what the data says, how should you plan accordingly? What the data tells us is that customers make purchases based on emotions. Feelings of sentimentality and emotion, particularly as linked to experiences, is what leads to the preference for sentimental gifts and exchanges of experiences.

Trustworthiness, sincerity, and honesty are key. This is key to leveraging on customers to make purchases during the holiday season, then, to tap into their willingness to buy, and their desire to have treasured experiences with loved ones.

What Can Membership and Loyalty Programs Do for You and Your Customers? 

Membership and loyalty programs are of special importance during this time, then. Hopefully your membership and loyalty program already cultivate a sense of ties built on personal and emotional connections with your customers, rather than transactional ones. That is, customers should feel a sense of shared values and emotional resonance with you. If they do, then they are more likely to want to share that with their loved ones.

Your customers are likely to celebrate the holidays in different ways, so through accurate survey data, you’ll want to know how they celebrate the holidays. You will want the experience to seem personalized to them, rather than scattershot and directed toward anyone and everyone. Again, if they feel it is particular and special, then that is likely to increase their willingness to share that experience with loved ones.

Connecting with Customers During the Holidays

You’ll want your membership program to reward loyalty during the holiday season. This, too, will draw on emotional ties with customers, in that this makes them feel as though you are rewarding them on the basis of your mutual connection.

The holidays themselves contribute to this. The holidays are a time of cheer, empathy, and mutual understanding–or they should be. You can embrace holiday messaging that doubles down on this point, framing your promotion as part of this larger season of broader generosity and sharing, adding to the sense of authenticity behind your promotion. It has to have a sense of reciprocity behind it to seem authentic.

But you’ll also want to be conscious of your customer’s price point. After all, customers, like us, are trying to balance their budget while making their necessary purchases for loved ones. It’s necessarily a trade-off, and you’ll want to seem economical for them, rather than simply trying to get them to buy, buy, buy. You won’t want to overwhelm, either. It’s easy for customers to get emotionally overwhelmed by all that is happening during the holiday season, and you don’t want to add to that.

And you may want to embrace the timeliness of the holidays, seeing as they are only one time a year. That sense of having a limited, one-time offer–available only during the holiday season but not after–may be quite motivating to customers to purchase now, rather than later.

More broadly, the same basic principles for managing a successful membership system apply during the holidays. But during the holidays, membership systems prove their worth in gold, in that this is when the emotional links and resonances between you and your customers can most come into play.

To learn more about how you can monetize your loyalty program, get in touch with our consultants today!