Roses are red, violets are blue. Customers love sales and so do you!

Valentine’s Day is an important date which is fast approaching, and it’s a great gift giving opportunity to market your eCommerce business. According to statistics, Valentines’ Day achieves multi-billion dollar sales figures, and is celebrated by over 50% of customers (Pixel Union, 2018).

However, with such a great opportunity, competition among retailers will heat up, as everyone wants a piece of that pie. For small businesses, achieving enough awareness and capturing attention through campaigns might be even more difficult.

We’ve listed 3 ideas to help your small business get an edge on Valentine’s Day.

1. Categorise And Highlight Gift-worthy Products

Make sure people who visit your site know that you’ve got Valentine’s Day gift recommendations for them. A great way to do this is to combine a special Valentine’s Day gift guide with your products to promote your items.

Creating gift lists that your customers’ significant others would love to receive is also creating upselling opportunities, which means prompting shoppers to purchase something additional or more expensive.

Choosing the right present for a significant other on Valentine’s day can be a clueless and tricky process for many people sometimes, as there are too many choices. It’s better for you to assist customers by giving them some ideas based on the history selling data or various scenarios. Let me give you an example: think of the different segments of your customers. Are they young mums or older males with a Peter Pan complex? Based on your segment data, which items are more likely to be purchased as gifts? Then categorise the items as gift-worthy products for those segments and highlight the contents on relevant pages for your customers.

2. Engage Your Customers, Including Singles

Engaging your customers online is a great way to provide right experience and foster an online community for your brand. 64% of consumers expressed positive attitudes toward brands which have close interaction with people on social media(Sensis, 2017). An online community is important for your brand equity, which differentiates your brand with your competitors’.

You can encourage participants to share stories. Engaging topics could be: the best gift or the worst gift they have received, or voting for the best gift ideas. Additionally, you can engage customers by solving a problem related to Valentine’s Day together as a group.

Don’t limit your customers to couples. Statistics show that couples are not the only ones who celebrate Valentine’s Day. In fact, 48.7% of divorcees and 48.2% of singles plan to spend on this day (Finder, 2018). Singles are celebrating for their other families members, friends or themselves.

By sharing experiences and thoughts, shoppers are more likely to build a relationship with your brand. Furthermore, it creates liking and preference towards your brand, particularly among your target customers.

3. Have Fun With Hashtags

To get an edge on Valentine’s day, you’d better employ an effective medium channel to deliver your messages. Digital media is an effective way to launch your campaign and increase awareness. Many small business owners adopt social media as the primary platform for campaigns. However, with heaps of posts by competitors during this period, how could you get attention?

Hashtags are a great way to expand the reach of your social media posts, increase inbound traffic of the official account and web pages of the brand, and benefit the search engine rankings. Users who are not your followers have a better chance to know your products by clicking through their interested hashtags.

To increase your visibility, you can use an existing hashtag on Valentine’s Day or create your own hashtags. Choosing the right and unique hashtags can help you locate appropriate users.

Hope these ideas help your eCommerce journey. No matter if you are selling typical Valentine’s Day products, you still have a chance to achieve success.