Valentine's day marketing ideas

Love is in the air 🎶.... 

When the smell of love and romance is in the air, it can only mean one thing: Valentine's Day is near.

Valentine's Day is the first opportunity of the year to boost your sales. It doesn't matter if you are an international company or a small local e-commerce, you have to take advantage of this date. To do so, you need a good email marketing strategy. 

Valentine's Day is the first opportunity of the year to boost your sales. It doesn't matter if you are an international company or a small local e-commerce, you have to take advantage of this date. To do so, you need a good email marketing strategy. 

On the Internet you will find many resources available with creative examples to design an email, but for a strategy that really generates results, you need more than just emails with cool designs. Here are 4 simple tips to create email marketing campaigns for this February 14. 

1. Focus on your goals

• Notoriety and recognition of your brand. Newsletters are the type of emails that will help you to raise awareness of a product, service and your brand. 
• Improve loyalty or interaction with your subscribers. Email marketing is ideal to establish many forms of interaction. You can create transactional emails to accompany your customers at each stage of the buying process, to thank them for their loyalty or to share with them valuable content according to their interests. 
• Increase sales. Promotional or remarketing emails are a great option to get your customers' attention and motivate them to buy thanks to discounts, coupons or special offers. 

2. Before, during and after...

No matter how many campaigns you decide to send at each stage, the important thing is to send the right message to the right person at the right time:

Before: you should never wait until the last minute to talk about your brand and what it offers. This is the right moment to promote your products or services.

• Create an initial email campaign to alert your customers, give them gift ideas and drive traffic to your online store or website.
• Activate automatic campaigns to recover abandoned carts and remind your users that the validity of the offers is limited. 
• Do not forget to send your most important customers a newsletter with the latest news on your loyalty program or with exclusive promotions for Valentine's Day.
  Finally, keep your transactional campaigns active to thank your customers for their purchase or to confirm the details of a reservation.  

During: we know that not everything can be perfect and that despite your efforts to promote early purchases, a large number of your customers will leave everything to the last minute.

• We know that not everything can be perfect and that despite your efforts to encourage early purchases, a large portion of your customers will leave everything to the last minute. 
• On February 14th you also send a promotional email marketing campaign with your latest offers or express shipping service. 
• Another email campaign that you should not forget for this day is an email with a video to congratulate and connect with your customers.

• Send an email to get feedback from your customers about their purchase. We know that most people will not respond to these emails, but the few responses you receive will serve as feedback for your commercial strategy. 
• Even though February 14 is already over, you can still send one last email with the last products or services available. Keep in mind that not everyone has the opportunity to celebrate on the exact day, and there are also people who will be looking to take advantage of the sales for themselves. 
• Continue with your cart recovery campaign. We assure you that you will recover several sales.
• Finally, analyze and take advantage of all the big data you have obtained during this season, to create personalized campaigns for future dates. 

3. Think outside the box

Do you think your product or market doesn't fit with Valentine's Day? Well, open your eyes. February 14th is no longer a date exclusively for couples, remember that we are already in the 21st century. 

Today, Valentine's Day is an opportunity to celebrate self-love, love for friends or family and even love for our pets. 

So stop thinking that romantic love is the only valid love and create creative campaigns for Valentine's Day.

An example that clearly explains what we are referring to is the one created by Phoenicia Hotel, who in 2018 created a campaign about what love is.

Ben & Frank have managed to fit their product in a creative and fun way.

Y para quienes tienen el corazón roto, Los 40 principales lanzaron una campaña que permite a su audiencia llamar para pedir que eliminen de su programación, aquellas canciones que les evoquen recuerdos tristes. 

Something hotter to break the romance on Valentine's Day can only be done by a brand like Dorcel Store.

¿Y qué decir de la campaña de Vueling? ... Rompe con la tradición de los viajes románticos en pareja con una promoción 3x2.

4. Let a video speak for itself

Valentine's Day and Christmas have one thing in common: they both carry an implicit emotional charge so it is an opportunity to connect emotionally with your customers to boost your sales. 

Videos have a greater capacity to communicate than static images or gifs, because they are capable of communicating the equivalent of 3 million words in the first 10 seconds. In addition, videos inevitably tell stories and arouse emotions in the minds of consumers. 

According to a study by Wyzowl, 87% of marketers use videos to increase website traffic and 80% claim that this format directly increases sales.

There is no doubt that including videos in your Valentine's Day email campaign is the best option. But be careful, videos within the email are only successful if they play automatically as soon as the user opens the email. If you try to insert a static image with a link to YouTube, you will probably not get better results, as the rate of people interacting with videos that play without clicking is up to 200% higher than linked images.

Enter Viewed to learn how to embed autoplay videos within the email.