How can digital marketeers take advantage of Valentine’s Day?
Love is in the hair, but so is traffic.
More than half of the US population plans to celebrate Valentine’s Day, spending a total of $27.4 billion dollars. This day of love is no longer solely about gooey feelings and butterflies in your stomach, it’s also a great opportunity for savvy businesses to make hardcore profit. Online businesses especially profit as 29% of the Valentine’s Day shoppers do their shopping online, therefore, skyrocketing the online traffic that occurs on the 14th of February every year. Valentine’s day is a goldmine of digital marketing opportunities and it’s essential for marketers, to take advantage and cash in on this favorable circumstance. Don’t feel bad about optimizing this holiday as a business opportunity, get ahead, and prioritize it instead.
How can digital marketeers take advantage of this?
1) Campaigning & Online User Experience
During the Valentine’s Day period, customers will be both targeted by and targeting many businesses. Even though it’s a day of love, as a marketer you should avoid polarizing your demographic and make sure to cater to non-romantic love as well— think of friends and family that might want to be celebrating each other as well. Good marketing practices for a Valentine’s Day campaign include promotions (like 2-for-1-deals), social media catered to the occasion, curated last-minute gift options or guides and special discounts. As stated previously, most of the shopping over this holiday will be conducted on mobile devices.
Consider giving your online outlets a Valentine’s Day makeover starting at the beginning of February. This action will not only get your company in the spirit, but it’ll also prompt those who haven’t started their holiday shopping. Regardless of the product type, you can always adjust your look and incorporate Valentine’s day “looks” with banners, fonts, backgrounds, colors, or graphics. Prepare those in your business who are in charge of these changes, like the graphic designers for example.
2) Email-Push Engagement
Charm your audience and direct them to relevant pages while you do it. Emails and push notifications can help with an increase in both visits and sales. There are 5 factors that are critical to any email campaign; those are:
- Send an email or push notification before Valentine’s Day
- Segment your email marketing and push-based on activity
- Leverage your order confirmations
- Send an email or push notification on the day of Valentine’s Day (Show some love but remember to avoid polarizing your demographic, some people aren’t in relationships)
Segmenting your email and push notification list will also help redirect the influx of traffic that your company will be hosting on the day of love. This means that not only will you be targeting the right people with the right information; you’ll also be compartmentalizing important information for future usage. A good way to do this is by sending personalized email at the beginning of the Valentine’s Day season with different calls to action (CTA) and depending on your subscriber’s actions, you can then redirect them to him to different online conversation gathering more data. The more information you can collect from this kind of soft introduction, the more successful your business will be at providing the right information to the right people at the right time. The use of AI and ML-based technologies will also help facilitate the deliverance of relevant and contextual user experiences.
3) Establish a deeper and more invested connection with your clients. Target, target, target!
All in all, Valentine’s day is an incredible marketing opportunity for savvy businesses, especially those with an online presence. February 14th is a truly important playground for online marketers and so it’s equally important for them to remain informed on how to fully take advantage of these peaks. Attention to
aspects of your business such as data analytics, mobile optimization, campaigning, online user experience, and creating engaging emails, are a very good start. If done correctly, a company can obtain lasting ROI’s that leverage today’s digital landscape of mobile-first customer engagement solutions. It’s a season to build meaningful connections with your clients that will out-run the holiday season of love.
“For historical comparison, 2020 spending will also be more than these prior years: $20.7 billion in 2019, $19.6 billion in 2018, $18.2 billion in 2017, $19.7 billion in 2016, $18.9 billion in 2015, $17.3 billion in 2014, and $18.6 billion in 2013.”
Take note of those big numbers, Valentine’s Day is notoriously a very fruitful time for businesses. Indulge in the love but also indulge in the traffic that you will be receiving— it’s no longer just a day of romance.
