Valentine’s Day – the holiday of love, is rapidly approaching. As a matter of fact, people all over the world spend a lot on this special day to send gifts to their loved ones. Last year, Valentine’s Day sales reached a record $19.5 billion worth of products only in the US, with one in four Americans buying their gifts online. In addition, apart from traditional presents such as a box of chocolates or flowers, people these days also splurge on a wide range of products for this romantic day, from fashion items to even pets!

For the reasons above, there is no denying that Valentine’s Day is one of the most potential opportunities for retailers to increase their revenue. It would be definitely a big mistake if you don’t have few of brilliant Valentine’s Day Marketing ideas in hand to take advantage of this potential occasion.

In this blog post, we are giving you 7 top-notch marketing tactics to bring your online stores’ sales this Valentine’s Day to a higher level. Unlike many other tips which are too generic for e-stores, these 7 ideas are specific, proven-effective, and easy to execute without having to hire any tech guys (because we’re suggesting the helpful tools for you).

Let’s check it out:

Make your store a merry place to shop!

1. Create a romantic look for your storefront

This is probably one of the most all-time things that store owners would think of during the preparation for holiday sales: decorating the store to make it have the look and feeling of this romantic day. Showing people the spirit of Valentine’s Day on your store will enhance customer buying experience and stimulate them to buy more, especially when your design layout is eye-catching.

However, we don’t recommend creating a totally new site theme just for the Valentine occasion. It would be charming but very costly, time-consuming and may be troublesome for your site’s back-end, especially when it is only temporary for a couple of days.

Our suggestions for your store’s decoration:

Welcome coupon pop-up: design a romantic welcome popup that appears when a customer first enters your store to catch their attention, impress them with a catchy Valentine image and an enchanting message.

Suggested Tool for decoration: Better Coupon Box app.

Banner on homepage slider: If your homepage has a slider, make a Valentine banner and add it to the slider. It is also a good position to promote any promotions, contest or giveaway for Valentine’s Day as well, because most of new visitors will first lay eyes on your banner to see if there’s anything trendy on the store. You can utilize Canva, which is a simple design tool for everyone with thousands of free holiday templates to create a banner on your own.

Header bar + Call-To-Action (CTA): If you don’t have much available space to decorate on your website, placing a small banner on the header bar isn’t a bad option. Message and CTA copies can also do the trick when being put in the right place. The meaningful or funny messages make customer happy and keep your brand in mind longer than the other ones. Instead of the normal text “We offer X% discount on every order”, change it to, for example, “Please take our petite gifts and let us be your Valentine :* ”.

2. Facilitate the gift giving with holiday e-Gift card buttons

Unlike other holiday occasions like Christmas or Black Friday, which are more likely to encourage personal purchases, Valentine’s Day is a high-yielding time for gift giving. Shoppers usually browse through various websites to find the perfect gift for their loved ones, friends, and family. Why not allow your shoppers to directly send the products to their loved-ones with an e-Gift card? By doing this, you make the shopping easier for the gift senders, so they are able to rapidly send the gift to their friends in a couple of clicks.

Gift Wizard is an eCommerce marketing app that lets you run an e-Gifting solution. You can integrate an e-Gift card sharing button directly displayed on your product page.

Once a gift recipient’s email information has been filled out, the e-Gift will be directly sent to the recipient. Gift Wizard also allows the gift recipient to modify the product’s size and color to match his or her preference.

In short, Gift Wizard’s alternative checkout not only enables shoppers to send their holiday gifts with ease, but also allows gift recipients to choose their favorite item’s size and color, which helps prevent possible returns and exchanges to maintain your profitability.

Available on: Many platforms
Pricing: From $0.00/month. FREE trial for 7 days

3. Create daily deals and time-sensitive offers

You may have heard us saying this a couple of times, but we still have to reiterate that creating sense of urgency can significantly enhance site conversion rate by 25 percent. That is because many of the problems that affect conversions are issues of cognitive friction: people think too hard, wait too long, or simply don’t respond to our call-to-action. Raising the urgency level cuts through a lot of this delay to create a significant improvement to conversion rates.

This is why when shoppers enter your site, it is recommended that you generate urgency to prompt them to make purchases immediately.

How do you create that sense of urgency? Offer a special Valentine promotion with a countdown timer using Checkout Boost, as online shoppers are usually urged to make an instant purchase if they have a limited time to qualify for a sale or a special offer. This is why flash sales and time-limited promotions can be extremely helpful during this occasion.

You can easily build flash sales and time-pressured deals with Checkout Boost’s countdown timer to drive shoppers to complete their Valentine purchases before time runs out. Plus, Checkout Boost is highly customizable so you can decorate a festive mood using its Valentine icons:

Available on: Shopify, WooCommerce, Lightspeed, BigCommerce
Pricing: $20.00 – $29.00 / month. Try it for FREE

4. Offer anonymous gift delivery and free gift wrapping

Everyone wants to make their loved ones surprised on Valentine’s Day. Thus, offering your customers an anonymous gift delivery showcases how thoughtfully you treat your customers. Imagine if a person wanting to confess his love to someone but doesn’t have enough courage to give her the gift personally, this Valentine’s Day marketing idea would truly a ‘lifesaver’. It, thus, helps kick your customer engagement into high gear.

Besides, brick and mortar stores usually offer free gift wrapping service to their customers during the holidays, which is a very valuable gesture for shoppers who want to give gifts to their loved-ones.

Did you know that you can implement the same marketing strategy to your online store? With Gift Checkout, you can allow your shoppers to select a gift wrapping option. Plus, they can also include a greeting card in their package. Now that’s a perfect value-added service for the holiday gift giving spirit!

Available on: Shopify
Pricing: From $0.00/month. FREE trial for 14 days

Promote your holiday deals, offers or campaigns

5. Re-engage with your past holiday shoppers

According to a research by Bain & Company consulting group, selling more to current customers is 67% easier than acquiring new ones. Therefore, it would be relatively cost-efficient when retargeting the customers who made purchases with you during previous holiday season, sending them a thank-you email and informing them of your collections or promotion this Valentine’s Day.

Re-engage by email marketing: For sure, email marketing cannot stay out of the list of must-have Valentine marketing channels you should concentrate on. A lot of well-known brands, such as Amazon, Mango, Uniqlo, The Body Shop, Sephora,etc. send numerous newsletters to their list when their holiday promotions take place.

With email automation app Mailbot, it is like a piece of cake to re-engage with your previous customers by uploading their email addresses, shooting them some emails to remind of the store’s promotion. Try it for FREE now!

Tips to optimize your email automation strategy this Valentine’s Day:

• When promotion starts: send a captivating email to introduce your promotion, with a code to apply and a clear CTA that redirects to your store so customers can start shopping right away
• During promotion: Send product recommendation emails to customers every day, highlight the discount and the date when your promotion ends
• To those who abandon carts even when you give them discounts: send cart recovery emails with an additional bonus (as long as it does not hurt your profit margin) to get them back to finish purchasing.
• Before promotion ends: Send a reminder (and try to create a sense of urgency, such as “Last 12 hours to grab 50% OFF all items”) to get customers back. Consider giving additional bonuses/discounts/free shipping if you want to sell out quickly on the last day

Re-engage by Facebook Ads: Facebook Retargeting Ads is also one of the most effective channels you should think of to connect with your customers on the Valentine’s Day.

Facebook allows store owners to upload an email list, as well as the phone number of their current customers to retarget them via Facebook Ads. Go to Facebook Ads Manager, create a Custom Audience and upload your user list.

Besides, you don’t need a crazy budget either, because this custom audience will likely be small, so retargeting ads generally perform well with a small budget of $5-$10 a day.

You may also want to learn more about Facebook Ads with our guide here.

6. User-generated content – let every customer be your brand ambassador

Another Valentine’s Day marketing idea you should consider to build a stronger brand for your business is using User-Generated Content (UGC). One simple example of UGC is that during “Share the Coke” campaign in 2014, Coca Cola encouraged their customers to share pictures of themselves enjoying the drink on social media. Getting customers to join actively in building up your content will not only arouse their love and trust towards your brand (because they feel themselves a part of it) but also spread your brand to a much wider pool of potential customers.

In regard to the UGC on the Valentine’s Day, Travelex has encouraged couples around the world to send their most romantic travel photos with the hashtag #TravelexKiss. By allowing people to upload from Twitter, Facebook, or directly through their websites, Travelex has leveraged all of their major outlets to raise the brand awareness towards thousands of people with a tiny budget.

For this Valentine’s Day, consider these UGC marketing ideas:

• Host a Valentine photo contest on your Facebook page
• Host a Valentine video contest on your Facebook page or Youtube channel
• Social media content generation: Give away a favorite product your customer likes, if they write a caption about their idea of how to turn that product into a Valentine gift, share it on Facebook and get at least 50 likes from their friends.Make sure it can be viewed and shared on social media easily, and become viral so that you can reach potential traffic from social platforms.

7. Launch Google Adwords Ads

People love Google Adwords advertising for the simple fact that it can lead to massive sales in a short period of time. Unlike other traditional digital strategies – like social media and SEO that typically take time to pay off – Adwords can get almost instant results as long as you do it right.

Furthermore, this method of advertisement usually brings an impressive cost per conversion back, because you only have to pay once people, who are already interested in a specific product like yours, click on your ads and enter your website.

According to Google Keywords Planner, the needs of buying gifts on the Valentine occasion is reasonably high, with hundred thousands of search terms every single month.

Therefore, it would be definitely a good idea for shop retailers when allocating a budget to skyrocket traffic from Google Adwords channel on this Valentine’s holiday as a number of stores are doing right now.

Conclusion

There are tons of Valentine’s Day marketing ideas out there to promote your sales campaign this special occasion, but not all of them are practical, easy to implement and cost-efficient for eCommerce websites. We hope this article, with detailed instructions and suggested tools, will be of great use to you this special occasion.

Additionally, if you are owning a Shopify eCommerce site and still struggling to find the effective methods to boost sales and conversions, take a look at our recommendation of Top 10 Best Shopify Apps to Boost Conversion and Sales for 2018.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

The post 7 Valentine’s Day marketing ideas to skyrocket sales and conversions for eCommerce stores appeared first on Beeketing Blog.