Valentine’s Day is a popular holiday in the United States with significant potential for marketing to couples (and singles, if you know what you’re doing). In fact, Americans are expected to spend $23.9 billion on Valentine’s Day this year. With the right lead generation strategy, you can capitalize on a slice of that pie – and help meet your revenue goals for the first quarter of the year.
So what’s the best way to get lovers to buy more of your products and services?
Start Early
As much as possible, start early when marketing for Valentine's Day. There's a portion of your audience who will be shopping for gifts up to a month before the holiday officially arrives, even if the majority of your customers are waiting until the last minute.
Starting early gives you more time that you can use to plan and research if you have strategy. It also gives you time to send out teaser emails and start marketing your solutions to an interested audience.
If your tactics don't give you the results you want, you'll also have plenty of time to readjust before the big day finally arrives.
Embed Videos in Email
One of the best strategies for generating leads in the modern era is email marketing, especially if you utilize video in your email marketing strategy. Email has long been one of the best marketing strategies around because of its inexpensiveness and accessibility; almost every member of your target audience will have an email address, and it's trivially inexpensive to reach them.
Embedded videos in email take the medium to the next level. Videos take a bit more effort to produce, but they tend to be much more engaging, uniquely differentiating, and better at persuading audiences.
If you use the VIEWED platform you can get more out of your videos. Embedding a video within the email and it plays utomatically within the email is now possible and very easy.
Viewed, thanks to its unique technology, allows you to host and send your video by email through 99% of ESPs on the market. In addition, you can automatically create personalized videos from a .csv file, so that each recipient on your subscriber list receives a perfectly tailored message.
The end result is that you'll reach more people, your message will be more relevant to them, your brand will be more memorable and you'll be more likely to inspire an immediate action, such as visiting your website or buying a product directly and increase your conversión rate up to 227%.
Start a Valentine's Day Sale
We shouldn't surprise you that one of the best ways to get more revenue around Valentine's Day is to host a Valentine's Day themed sale. Reducing your prices and modifying your selection of products available will help stimulate interest and motivate purchases where consumers might have been reluctant previously. Branding the sale around Valentine's Day will also help you optimize for search engines and capitalize on people who are openly shopping for a gift.
It's up to you how steep you want to drop your prices. Bigger discounts tend to get more attention and generate more sales, at the expense of profitability.
Show Off Your Most Relevant Products
While you're at it, show off your most relevant products. If you sell gifts, you can show off Valentine's Day essentials like flowers, stuffed animals, chocolates, and other commonly purchased romantic items. But feel free to get creative here too; show off some of the products that would be an ideal gift for a romantic partner even outside of Valentine's Day.
Create a Gift Guide
Content marketing is one of the most reliable strategies to build brand trust and visibility, since you'll be giving customers information that they genuinely want to read. During Valentine's Day, one of the best ways to generate leads with content marketing is to create a thorough gift guide.
Taking the form of a white paper or a video, this piece of content will educate your subscribers about the latest trends in Valentine's Day, the best strategies for choosing a gift in the modern era, and of course, your best product for the holiday.
Offer Reliable Shipping Options
Make sure you give your customers plenty of reliable information on your shipping policies and guarantees. As we get closer to Valentine's Day, customers are going to be more and more concerned about their products being shipped and delivered on time. Consider offering expedited shipping options to make sure all of your customers get what they're interested in well before the big holiday – and offer guarantees when you can.
Step Up the Urgency
As Valentine's Day approaches, you'll want to imply more urgency in your marketing materials. You can create a countdown clock on your main website, warning visitors that Valentine's Day is fast approaching. You can also inform your email subscribers how many days are left, giving them a “last chance” to get the right gift.
Many would-be customers end up failing to buy anything, simply because they procrastinated the decision. But the more urgent the situation is, the less justification a customer has for procrastinating. Count on seeing a spike in sales in the day or two leading up to Valentine's Day.
Don’t Forget About Singles
Much of your Valentine's Day marketing messaging is going to focus on romance between two partners, but you should definitely feel free to think outside the box. Your single customers, for example, will appreciate some attention on a day where they might otherwise feel bad about their current romantic situation.
Consider shifting your marketing messaging, at least for one email blast or one round of advertising, to appeal to these demographics.
Learn From the Experience
Finally, set yourself up to learn from the experience of generating leads around Valentine's Day. Measure every metric you can, including generated traffic, total conversions, and engagement with your embedded email videos. When your campaign is all over and Valentine's Day has passed, you can review the data and evaluate which strategies were most effective in generating leads. You can then use this information to improve your overall lead generation strategy – and be much more prepared when next year's Valentine's Day arrives.
Are you interested in better utilizing video for your Valentine's Day strategy? Or do you just want to increase your chances of generating leads with your existing email subscriber base? Viewed.video can help. Sign up for free today to start using the ultimate email SaaS platform!
