New year, new rules: How to keep consumers spending in January

As retailers eye the end of the holiday shopping season, they must shift their strategies to cater to resolution-driven purchases in the new year.

• While fitness products and services are popular among post-holiday shoppers, all brands can find opportunities to engage consumers.
• “[The new year] can be critically important for certain categories of brands and retailers and service providers,” said our analyst Sky Canaves on a recent “Behind the Numbers” podcast. “Traditionally, we think of gyms, but [it also extends] to brands that are in the wellness and good-for-you [categories], as well as home organization. It can be a great time for booksellers, too.”

Here are three strategies to help retailers maintain holiday sales momentum through the first month of the year.

Extend the holiday season

“The holiday season doesn’t necessarily end at Christmas,” said our analyst Jeremy Goldman. “There’s a lot of post-Christmas sales that do quite well.”

• To coax consumers to keep spending in January, retailers can position gift cards as a way for shoppers to pamper themselves.
• “The idea of leaning into gift cards as this thing that you can do to be good to yourself with ‘new year, new you’ type of promotion, it can be really impactful,” said Goldman.

Know your customer

Retailers with younger customer bases should embrace New Year’s resolution trends like Dry January or Veganuary. For older demographics, brands can create witty campaigns acknowledging the difficulty of sticking to resolutions.

“Some data I've seen indicates younger consumers are more optimistic about whether or not they're able to really transform their lives,” said Goldman. “And after a while, there are a lot of us who just kind of get jaded and realize that this is the type of thing that you are going to quit at some point.”

But retailers need to balance getting consumers’ attention and not offending them.

• Last year, Equinox coined the slogan “We don’t speak January,” and banned new membership signups on January 1.
• The campaign faced criticism, with some consumers calling it “tone deaf and exclusionary,” per Hypebeast.
• However, it did earn Equinox 2.4 billion media impressions and resulted in a 504% increase in brand conversation, according to Collins Agency, who worked with Equinox on the campaign.

It’s all about the timing

Retailers can engage with consumers throughout the month of January with a variety of different tactics.

• The first week of the month is typically when consumers fully commit to their resolutions, so be sure to have a wide product assortment to choose from.
• A few weeks in, many people drop off, culminating in something called Quitter’s Day (usually the second or third week in January). This is when retailers can leverage their loyalty programs to engage consumers with discounts or sweepstakes.
• “A couple of years ago, Natural Grocers had product discounts and sweepstakes that were connected to its loyalty program and it actually waited out and did this later in January, which is a time by which a lot of the resolutions have fallen by the wayside,” said Canaves.

To keep consumers engaged throughout January, retailers can invite them to participate in monthlong challenges, rewarding them for sticking to their resolutions with special deals or exclusive products.

“That’s where you have the opportunity to do something like create a 31-day challenge to engage people who are trying to participate in dry January,” said Goldman.

Listen to the full podcast.

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