You may love St. Valentine’s Day or you may hate it, but one thing you can’t deny – it’s good for your business. According to statistics, less than $20 billion is spent on Valentine’s presents for nearest and dearest in the USA alone. By the way, despite the romantic undertones of this holiday, the tendency to congratulate and give presents to family members, friends, pets and colleagues has been steadily strengthening its positions. What is more, the anti-Valentine’s Day movement has recently been gaining traction, especially among singles.
Therefore, even if you are not trading one of the five most popular Valentine’s Day presents – which are chocolates, jewelry, cards, flowers and electronics – your online shop can still ace this holiday if you manage to correctly organize your promotion campaign.
In this article I will walk you through over how to correctly plan and implement ecommerce marketing strategy for St. Valentine’s Day:
Valentine’s Day design for ecommerce website
Items for promotion on St. Valentine’s Day
Organize fast and free delivery for St. Valentine’s Day
Provide free gift wrapping for St. Valentine’s Day
Email marketing for St. Valentine’s Day
Content marketing for St. Valentine’s Day
Social media marketing for St. Valentine’s Day
Valentine’s Day design for ecommerce website
Nothing creates festive mood and communicates it to the visitors better than a properly designed website. By styling online store to the event you also demonstrate you are not staying at the sidewalks for this event and actually have something to offer the customers. Moreover, a unique design will help you stand out from the crowd, in particular among your competitors and market leaders.
Nowadays marketplaces offer a great number of ecommerce platform themes, which makes the change of design not that bothersome and resource-consuming. The main thing here is to make a choice; you can fall back on the tried-and-true practice of red and pink coloring or go rebel way and select a cool non-romantic design. Here, the choice depends on your marketing strategy, the goods you sell and obviously personal preferences, but still there’s no shame in taking inspiration from others.
If you don’t want to restyle the whole website, this is totally fine, and there is a milder solution – create a temporary Valentine’s Day section. Here you can set up any design you wish and, most importantly, separately showcase the items you chose to promote as Valentine’s Day presents. You can simply create one page containing all the goods or take an effort and create a separate category with subcategories “Gifts for Him”, “Gifts for Her”, etc.
In case you’re short of time for implementing both design solutions, here’s a quick and easy solution for your webstore – a promotional popup, Valentine Day styled and offering some kind of discount or promo code. BelVG offers great extension for your Magento 2 store. Add these super sweet popups to inform your customers about special holiday offers.
Items for promotion on St. Valentine’s Day
Despite the fact that people seem to know quite well their nearest and dearest, when it comes to finding a cool non-trivial and exciting present, they get stuck. So help your customers – instead of leaving them to roam you webstore in hopeless pursuit for a present, select the items that will certainly be good presents and make them stand out.
After you and your marketing team have made a decision about what to promote, the possibilities for how to present it to the customers are limited to your imagination only. You can:
- place the gift collection on the main page;
- create a gift guide in your blog;
- mark items with a special badge to make them stand out in the catalogue;
- offer gift cards. It can happen so that Valentine’s Day is knocking at the door and a person still haven’t found perfect present his or her beloved one deserves. How can you help this desperate and picky person? Offer him a gift card for a present. This will be a win-win situation – the risk of making a mistake will be averted and the gift will still be presented.
Organize fast and free delivery for St. Valentine’s Day
According to the statistics, the majority of Valentine’s Day presents is bought less than a week before the date, which means that the demand for fast and timely delivery will be especially acute. Therefore, long before the 14th of February (right after New Year will be the best time) rearrange agreements with your current carrier for faster delivery or find an additional one for this holiday season. Providing free delivery may at first seem like unnecessary extra expenses, but believe me – it will pay off in the long run.
Provide free gift wrapping for St. Valentine’s Day
Another sensitive aspect of this romantic holiday is wrapping; most people think they are terrible at it or at least not as good as their significant other deserves. A gift-wrapping service offered together with fast and free delivery will be a true blessing for your customers and a wonderful competitive advantage at this period of hard competition. The same as free delivery, gift-wrapping service needs to be arranged and provided for in advance.
Email marketing for St. Valentine’s Day
Two weeks before Valentine’s Day is a perfect time to launch your targeted promotion campaign, and the integral element of it is email marketing. I’m not going to give you a long lecture on how to organize the email campaign in general, but instead will highlight the most crucial points here:
- make it multipurpose. Even the most detailed demographic data you can never guess how your target audience treats Valentine’s Day – if they will celebrate it at all, whom they will congratulate and buy presents for. Therefore, it’s better to create a number of letters with different messages and promoting different items and see where this experiment will take you.
- target the campaign precisely. In this situation the major targeting criteria is person’s gender; men search for presents for women and vice versa, therefore the colors, lettering and obviously the goods promoted in campaign letters should be crafted in respect with addressee’s gender.
- address the singles. Not everyone has a romantic partner for this day, so craft several letters which celebrate self-love and self-care; those in a relationship won’t be offended by such a message.
- last minute buyers. Some may have procrastinated too much and are now left with no gift to give on St. Valentine’s Day eve. Help them by offering great presents ideas, discounts and free delivery.
- be emotional. Craft your letters so that they appeal to people’s feelings. On this day there’s no shame in using a bit too many adjectives, emodgies and exclamation marks.
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Visit the pageContent marketing for St. Valentine’s Day
Promotion through content is another important aspect of marketing working in sync with other promotional activities. Before St. Valentine’s Day people are burdened with the necessity to find a present, therefore they don’t mind if the content you offer them will be little bit promotional – as long as it helps them make their mind.
Therefore, it will be wise to consider creating the following types of content:
- gift guides with a detailed description of each item’s merits and a direct link to them;
- love stories of your customers – they can include a subtle mention of your product or be totally non-promotional; their purpose is to show you care for your target audience and their feelings;
- date ideas; some people prefer to present their significant other not with a tangible possession, but with wonderful and unforgettable emotions. Help your audience organize the best Valentine’s Day date by providing them with a bunch of romantic and out-of-the-box ideas.
Social media marketing for St. Valentine’s Day
Nowadays social media by right holds the place of the fastest marketing tools with the best rate of audience involvement; so it would be silly not to use their power for your brand promotion for St. Valentine’s Day marketing. Here’s what actions you can take to boost your social media engagement:
- use thematic hashtags. The most popular among them are: #vday, #love, #myvalentine, #blessed, #chocolate; however, you can launch and make viral your own hashtag.
- organize a St. Valentine’s contest with an attractive prize for two.
- ask the audience to share their stories about their best / worst St. Valentine’s gifts or dates; select the best one with the vote and award the winner.
- start a countdown to St. Valentine’s Day in approximately 2 weeks and announce a new topic for each day.
This is all to the topic of Valentine’s Day marketing strategies for ecommerce; I hope it will be useful to you. If you have any comments or questions, please leave them down below.
You can also find other articles dedicated to marketing for ecommerce by clicking on Marketing category down below.
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