With the muchly anticipated $9 billion Halloween spending this 2018, you’ve definitely crafted the perfect Halloween plan. You have gutted and carved the pumpkins, put up the spiders and webs, and the entire neighborhood is ready for candy.

With almost every online store already launched its Halloween marketing ideas, you want to draw every shopper’s attention to your online store. Halloween is practically upon us and you want to make sure that you’ve got everything covered. Good thing you bump into our last-minute Halloween marketing tips and tricks.

Our list of 7 Halloween marketing ideas will ensure that you won’t miss anything. From Halloween themes, designs, engagements, and promotions — you’ve got a continuous marketing effort to engage and draw your audience attention until the Halloween hits.

Ready for your most successful Halloween yet? Let’s begin!

1 – Add spooky Halloween marketing elements to your store

Your website is the most visible area of the Halloween celebration. How you decorate your online store during the Halloween season affects the shoppers’ perception towards you and what you could potentially offer them during the spookiest season of all.

While redesigning your website is important, it’s not recommended to apply a whole new theme. It would be expensive and requires a lot of effort in your backend, especially if it’s just for a couple of days.

What you can do as an alternative is to add Halloween decorations on the more flexible elements of your website. This way you can still easily catch your visitors’ attention the moment they enter your online store.   

Here are our top Halloween marketing ideas for decorating your store:

• Halloween homepage slider

A website slider is used as a slideshow of images that can be used to display critical messages and call-to-actions to important contents. If you have a homepage slider, it’s a great area for you to place your Halloween promotions and messages.

Halloween Online Store Inspiration: As early as now, Amazon’s homepage slider has already embraced the Halloween spirit to promote all Halloween related products.

• Halloween header bars

Header bars are used by online stores to deliver new, important or urgent messages, such as sales promos. They float or stick at the top of a web page which attracts the attention of visitors. This is why it’s a good Halloween marketing idea to include your Halloween greetings and promotions on your header bars.

Halloween Design Tip: You can include a countdown timer on your Halloween header bar to trigger urgency.

• Halloween welcome popup

When visitors enter your website, you can display a popup notification promoting direct links to your Halloween offers, coupons, and deals which are up for grabs.

Recommended Tool: Flash a spooky welcome popup the moment visitors enter your store. Better Coupon Box already has predefined Halloween themes to grab your shoppers attention. Plus, you can offer a coupon code at the same time.

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2 – Create profitable Halloween product bundles

Product bundling is a great idea to help your shoppers find the right Halloween items. It doesn’t just make your shoppers’ life easier but it can also help you promote your lesser known products and slow-moving inventory or increase your average order value during the Halloween season.

What you can do is to collect behavioral data from customers to craft what products should be bundled to cover a range of needs at once. Leverage on customer’s perception of savings, value, and convenience to create profitable Halloween product bundles.

There are different product bundle types that you can choose from. The two most recommended bundling for Halloween are upselling and cross-selling bundles. You can upsell an upgraded version or a more expensive product. Alternatively, you can cross-sell complementary or supplementary items as add-on offers.

Recommended Tool: The pre-designed Halloween theme of Boost Sales will help you create a beautiful popup offer of upselling and cross-selling bundles during the Halloween.

3 – Offer Halloween-themed freebies

While it is expected that you will be offering Halloween discounts, it is also recommended for online stores to get a little more creative by offering a free gift or incentive that is appropriate during the Halloween.

If your online store does not usually offer any Halloween-related items, offering these Halloween freebies will be a great Halloween marketing idea to boost your Halloween festivity. Find a low-cost freebie item that’s mini-sized and light to ship with every Halloween order– such as trick-or-treat bags. These delighters will help you convert reluctant shoppers and make regular shoppers feel a little special.

4 – Create Halloween how-tos and DIY contents

During the Halloween season, people are looking for inspirations — from desserts, cocktails or costumes, they want to serve the best food and have the greatest Halloween celebration. This is the best time for you to help your customers with Halloween guides, tutorials, and do-it-yourself contents.

Online stores can add value to their Halloween marketing efforts by providing guidelines and ideas that heighten both their engagements and shares. There are lots of contents that you can share such as video tutorials or a recipe cookbook.

For instance, Kraft Heinz has a dedicated blog of Halloween recipes while incorporating their products in the recipe guides like promoting their Jell-O brand in the Jack-o’-Lantern Cake recipe.

Halloween Online Store Inspiration: Sephora launched its Halloween at Sephora to provide its target audience with DIY Halloween makeup looks and at the same time promoting their makeup products.

5 – Encourage user-generated Halloween contents

Your online store’s Halloween marketing won’t be completed without engaging with your audience on various online platforms. You can ask your audience to participate in your Halloween merriment by encouraging them to post their very own user-generated contents (UGCs).

Halloween-inspired UGC s such as photos, videos, stories, jokes, and even illustrations can build up the hype among your target audience and also help generate traffic to your site. UGCs work because of the authenticity of the post. Customers trust organic posts more than sponsored ads because they know that they come from real sentiments of fellow customers.

You can amp up your UGC strategy with these Halloween marketing ideas:

• Run a Halloween costume photo contest on Instagram with witty hashtags
• Run a Facebook Live most creative pumpkin carving competition
• Run a scariest Halloween story competition using Twitter threads
• Run a best Halloween costume makeup

However, your competition can’t be restricted by using one social media platform. You can mix and match them or run them across all social media sites. You just have to remember that all contents must contain a memorable hashtag and should mention your brand.

Halloween Online Store Inspiration: Meijer hosted a Halloween pet costume contest and encouraged participants to create UGC photos with a chance to win a $500 gift card.

6 – Dress up and automate your Halloween email marketing

You should also not discard email marketing as one of your Halloween marketing ideas. During the Halloween period, you can get a little more creative and spooky with emails to attract and engage with your customers.

It’s best to dress up your emails in a Halloween theme. Add spiders, ghosts, pumpkins or bats to your email template. You can even push further by adding ghost or pumpkin emojis on your email subject line.

But more than the design elements, you need to time your email marketing and automate the sending of emails based on your customers’ behaviors and actions. Here are some tips to personalize your email interactions and amp up your Halloween email marketing:

Before Halloween

• Send out a Halloween greeting together with your Halloween-related products or promotions.
• Email a Halloween countdown with a reminder when your promotion will end.

During Halloween

• Send a last-minute reminder of your Halloween promotions like “Last 10 hours! 50% off is still up for grabs!”

• Trigger cart abandonment emails for those who shop before Halloween with Halloween freebies or discounts.

After Halloween

• Clear out Halloween inventory by emailing your extended Halloween deals.

• Send winners of Halloween contests.

• Share Halloween UGCs
• Bid goodbye to Halloween and send a welcome email to mark the start of the Holiday season.

Recommended Tool: The artificial intelligence capabilities of Mailbot can easily help you automate your emails and target the right customer with the right email at the right time.

7 – Build urgency with your Halloween deals

We all know that Halloween will eventually come to an end so instead of waiting for your visitors to convert, make sure to push them to purchase by bringing in the sense of urgency. The more time you give your visitors to decide, the more chances that you’ll lose them to your competitors, especially during a highly competitive season.

You can intensify urgency by using time-related and scarcity triggers to your Halloween deals. Display messages like “Two stocks left, buy now or gone forever” as scarcity message or add a countdown timer to your Halloween deals to heighten your visitor’s the urgency to buy.

Recommended Tool: The countdown timer and stock countdown features of Countdown Cart allows you to quickly add scarcity and urgency triggers on your products. Plus, you can choose to display the Halloween themes.

Marketing Tips and Tricks this Halloween

If you want your online store to take advantage of this festive Halloween season, remember to get all your bases covered. From Halloween designs, themes, social media engagements, contents, emails, promotions, and a lot more, our Halloween marketing ideas will provide you with effective tips and tricks up your sleeve.

The post Top 7 Last-Minute Halloween Marketing Tips and Tricks to Try for Your Online Store appeared first on Beeketing Blog.