Valentine’s Day is the fifth-largest spending event in the US following the winter holidays and Mother’s Day.
According to The Balance, half of the people in the US celebrate Valentine’s Day, and in 2022, they spent $23.9 billion on Valentine’s Day shopping.
So, now that you know how important it is to market your product right on this holiday let's talk about seven Valentine's Day promotion ideas for your Shopify online business.
Outline
- Personalize Your Offer for Valentine's Day
- Run a Love-Themed Campaign on Social Media
- Mention Your Delivery Time & Rates Clearly
- Create Gift Guides
- Include Urgency
- Send Your Customers Valentine's Day Card
- Take Advantage of User-Generated Content
Top 7 Valentine's Day Promotion Ideas To Try Out
01. Personalize Your Offer for Valentine's Day
Promote Relevant Products
Gift-giving is almost like a ritual on Valentine’s day. You can make the most out of it by offering products around Valentine's theme.
If you already have products that people buy on Valentine’s Day, give them a little touch of love. Doesn’t matter if you’re selling a digital or a physical product.
The glitters, the hearts, and the color scheme (red or rose pink) is one way to go.
Like how the clothing brand Cotton Bureau did with their heart print t-shirts:
But, what if your product is boring and no one buys it on Valentine’s day?
Like a battery!
That doesn’t mean you can’t market it right. You can curate a marketing strategy based on Valentine’s Day and bank some cash.
One way to do this is to find ways to link your product with the occasion.
Take Whataburger, for example. They Promoted their reusable tumblers with a love-based theme on their homepage:
Who would’ve ever thought about buying a reusable tumbler on 14th Feb, right?
If you don’t have a physical product, you can still curate special Valentine's Day offers around your services that can be used on Valentine’s Day.
Most businesses can offer “two for one” or “buy one, get one” deals.
A trampoline park, Rush, ran their “two for one” offer for Valentine’s Day in 2017 with revised prices for the occasion. The campaign was a success!
Leverage Email & SMS Marketing
Showing love to your customers in their inboxes can be a great Valentine's Day campaign.
Out of all the Valentine's Day promotion ideas, emails are one of the most powerful.
They are a great way to reach out to your customers. Send them a Happy Valentine’s Day card with a special offer to increase conversion rates.
In 2022 alone, 333.2 billion emails were sent and received daily.
Have a catchy subject line to garner attention. And since this is an occasion meant for two, encourage the shoppers to buy things in sets.
Here’s an example of how to leverage email marketing the right way:
For shoppers who don’t need a gift set, send them an email offering via which they can personalize the products according to their needs.
Disclose your intentions in the subject line with something like: “A Personal Touch Just for Your Valentine.”
Another effective way to reach out to buyers is by SMS.
It fosters direct communication and has a higher open rate than emails.
It’s a no-brainer that during a holiday, shoppers are more likely to choose brands that provide them with personalized experiences.
What they want to receive via SMS are coupons, discounts, and promotional offers. So, offer them special discounts on Valentine’s Day themed products or specific product categories.
You can go a little off-road here, and instead of promotions, use this time to launch a new product based on the theme - love.
Look at this French bakery - Pastreez, for example:
Lastly, don’t just focus on romantic love but celebrate all kinds of love.
So, be varied with your offerings. Remind your customers to love themselves, their pets, and others on this occasion.
02. Run a Love-Themed Campaign on Social Media
Social media is one of the best ways to increase your brand’s outreach.
According to Smart Insights, 57.6% of the world’s population uses social media.
That’s ~4 billion people!
Running Valentine’s Day-themed campaigns on social media can be a game-changer for your business in 2023.
Make it all about love. For example, you can have love-themed photoshoots or eye-catching graphics on your page.
You can also run polls around your product or service, such as a poll asking to choose a piece of clothing or their preferred drink for the occasion.
Ask the audience what a perfect Valentine’s Day evening looks like for them, and then share their answers. The point is to engage with them in a fun, light-hearted manner.
You can also let your customers know what special things you are doing for them on Valentine’s day.
See how Bottle Breacher leveraged Twitter to sell their keychain:
Create a Dedicated Hashtag
Another way of engagement and creating brand awareness is by running a hashtag campaign.
This gives rise to user-generated content. Find a way to connect your brand with the occasion via some unique hashtags.
Ask the customers to share their love stories in the form of social media posts and give them special offers on your product for using your hashtag.
Here are some trending hashtags that you can use on Valentine’s day.
Make sure to use a hashtag that's trending, unique, and memorable.
Pro Tip: Share the hashtag on all the social media platforms to create a buzz around it. Offer people special prizes and discounts for their creativity.
This will result in increasing user engagement which will in turn increase conversions.
03. Mention Your Delivery Time & Rates Clearly
Delivery time is one of those things that can make or break your business. And if it’s some holiday, buyers take the delivery dates too seriously.
They want the ordered product to reach them or their loved ones on time.
Sometimes, even before deciding what they have to buy, customers check when the product will be delivered.
To convert these visitors into potential buyers, mention your delivery dates clearly across your website, app, and emails.
Also, specify the last date to place an order to reach on time.
For example, check how Calvin Klein mentions when to place the order for it to be delivered on time:
Here’s another example where MeUndies clearly communicates all the options that a buyer can choose and when they should expect to receive their order.
04. Create Gift Guides
As mentioned earlier, Valentine’s Day is the season of gift-giving. But, when it comes to finding a perfect gift, people have what’s called a perpetual dilemma.
They just can’t decide upon a perfect gift for their partner and are stuck in the decision loop forever and ever.
Come to their rescue and help them out by creating gift guides. Give them ideas that they wouldn’t have normally thought of.
You can do this by making Valentine's day gift guide. Break the guide into sections based on gender, interests, or personality traits like this:
- By Category: Valentine’s Day gifts for her/him, couples, teenagers
- By Price Range: Best Valentine’s Day gift under $25, $50, $100
- By Interest: Gift ideas for art lovers, dog lovers, and foodies
Following the above idea, Huckberry found a way to tap into two categories at once with this single post:
Use the holidays to your advantage and highlight your products. Not only would this help the business, but by helping them out, you are building trust with the customers.
Share your gift guides on your social media and add them to your promotional emails and even AdWords campaigns (if you run any).
Link these ideas directly to your products or your website's homepage.
05. Include Urgency
It is basic human nature to want something that you can’t have. This is exactly why scarcity marketing works.
Usually, people overthink before buying, wait too long to buy, or just don’t respond to a simple CTA.
Creating FOMO in such situations can often help.
You can leverage urgency to remind the customers of the approaching deadline on the offers.
Have a look here - how Man Crates leveraged FOMO like a pro:
Man Crates uses humor to lighten down the atmosphere yet maintains a sense of urgency by saying, “True love might wait, but our delivery team can’t.”
A countdown timer is another great way to create urgency and attract instant sales.
Just don’t make the buyers feel guilty about what they might miss out on. Instead, let them know there’s still time, but that time is limited.
Here’s another example:
You can also boost sales by creating urgency for limited edition products, offers to end soon, and even items running out of stock.
Flash sales and time-limited promotions can help you immensely on festive occasions.
Shopper’s don’t think twice if they see the product they want is discounted.
Shopify's page builder app PageFly has numerous different elements to help increase your page conversion rates, including countdown timer. Try PageFly now and optimize your website.
06. Send Your Customers Valentine's Day Card
In the 1840s, America began selling the first mass-produced Valentine’s Day greeting cards.
The credit for this goes to an artist and businesswoman, Esther A. Howland, also known as the ‘Mother of the American Valentine.’
Since then, the festival has come a long way.
It’s funny how it has now changed from being a day traditionally revolving around flowers, dinners, and cards to celebrating various kinds of love.
In the 20th century, people not only celebrated Valentine’s Day for love but for friendships (Galentine’s Day) and for even being single (Anti-Valentine’s Day or Single Awareness Day).
But, in this digital age, we still keep the tradition of sending cards alive. You can do the same for your brand and shower some love on your loyal customers.
After all, they are the reason your brand exists in the first place, right?
Send your loyal customers a token of love in the form of an e-card. Acknowledge how thankful you are for their continuous support and loyalty.
To encourage them to keep supporting you, include a special offer with the card.
Like a one-time use coupon code for online shopping or a voucher redeemed at your online store.
If you have a mobile app, you can even send them Valentine’s Day cards as a push notification on their phone, directly taking them to your store.
Here’s a simple Valentine’s Day card sent in an email by charity: water showing some love to their customers:
07. Take Advantage of User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) is any form of content created by the user (customer), like reviews, images, videos, etc, and shared on social media.
It can be a tweet, an Instagram post, maybe even a blog post showing how to use your product.
UGC provides social proof, which builds trust for new visitors.
It also gives your current customers a chance to share their opinions. And their opinion on any day will have more value than any brand-generated content.
The opinions can be both - positive and negative, but leverage the negative ones to your advantage and deliver what your customers want.
When it comes to UGC, hashtags are one way to influence your customers to produce content.
Other ways are by encouraging users to review and share customer feedback.
To do so, try inculcating these three steps:
- Tell all your product users to put up a video on social media using your product
- Users should tag your page in the video and add a hashtag if your brand has one
- If you have a significant social media following, tell all your followers to vote for the best video and give the winner a prize
Dunkin Donuts has done this for Valentine’s Day by getting the users to compete in a “Dunkin Love” Instagram contest, streaming on Facebook Live, and even having some Snapchat Geofilters on certain Dunkin locations.
#Bonus: Ask Your Customers to Share Their Love Stories
Everyone loves love stories. Ask your audience to share their own love stories and find a way to plug them in with your brand.
Don’t stick to the traditional romantic stories, but be more inclusive and encourage them to share stories of friendship, family, pets, etc, and offer prizes to the winners.
You can ask quirky questions so that more and more people engage.
Questions like, ‘What’s the weirdest thing you’ve done for love?’
Or
‘Their first-date story that turned into a life-long love.’
To build the hype, design these contests in a way that they tag more people on social media.
Wrapping Up
Focus more on the customer and cater to what they might find appealing.
To design a perfect Valentine's Day marketing campaign, don’t make the occasion only about your brand and your sales.
The endpoint is to capitalize on the occasion but do it subtly through methods like gifting them special offers and making them feel more like insiders.
Think outside the box and prioritize your customers above your brand.
Lastly, connect with all types of customers regardless of their relationship status - the couples, the singles, and the families. If you market your product right, everyone will buy it.
So this Valentine's, sell your products like a pro!
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