The new year promises fresh starts and new marketing campaigns to plan for, and with Valentine’s Day a mere month away, it’s time to start thinking about wooing your customers before your competitors do.
Here are three nifty eCommerce tactics to help you boost Valentine’s Day sales.
1) Segmentation
Segmentation allows marketers to take control of customer data to deliver highly relevant content to shoppers at the moment they are most engaged.
In the run-up to Valentine’s Day, try creating a segment of shoppers who made a purchase with you around last year’s big day to make sure you can target them again with personalized content.
Another segment worth setting up is shoppers who have browsed your products in the couple of weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day but haven’t made a purchase yet, so you can encourage them to take the plunge and get a gift for their loved one.
With Fresh Relevance, creating segments like these is simple. Our Segment Builder empowers marketers to generate unique, granular segments based on behavior or stage in the customer lifecycle and purchase funnel.
2) Product recommendations
Product recommendations are a good idea all year round, helping you to display items that are most likely to resonate with your shoppers and convert them into customers. This tactic is proven to work, with one eCommerce company seeing a 24% sales uplift with product recommendations in their marketing emails and another seeing a whopping 112% increase in sales with onsite recommendations.
For your Valentine’s Day campaign, try restricting the products you display to a specific Valentine’s Day category if you have one, or categories you know perform well for your business during this holiday. This ensures that you’ll give exposure to the products that are most likely to drive sales.
Display these product recommendations on your website and email marketing for maximum impact.
With Fresh Relevance’s product recommendations functionality, you can achieve this by adding filter restrictions to display recommendations from specific categories, giving you control over which products are displayed.
3) Countdown timers
The sight of a timer counting down the hours, minutes and seconds to a sale deadline is something we’re all familiar with, as well as the feeling of urgency that goes along with it.
Add countdown timers to your Valentine’s marketing campaign to highlight the date for last delivery before the big day. Your customers will thank you for helping them avoid disappointing their other half with a belated gift. In fact, more than 1 in 4 consumers want online retailers to highlight important cut-off dates, making this an essential eCommerce tactic to use around big holidays.
Place your countdown timers on product pages to drive urgency and speed up the purchase process and add them to your marketing emails too.
Countdown timers are simple to create with Fresh Relevance. Messaging can be personalized – either based on the event, or for the individual customer, and in the case of bulk and triggered emails, countdown timers can be generated as a GIF at the moment a shopper opens the email.
Final thoughts
Get your Valentine’s Day campaign up and running to make sure you’re prepared for when shoppers start their romantic gift hunts. Here’s a recap of the 3 eCommerce tactics you can use to boost Valentine’s Day sales. Firstly, use segmentation to target shoppers who made a Valentine’s Day purchase last year or who have browsed recently but haven’t bought anything. Secondly, display product recommendations in your Valentine’s Day category or categories you know perform well during this time of year. Lastly, add countdown timers to highlight your cut-off date for Valentine’s Day deliveries, helping to boost urgency and speed up click to purchase rate.
