Valentine’s Day for e-Commerce

It’s important to know your industry’s sales patterns. Holidays as well as peak times of each month and year play a key role in sales. Knowing which dates require special preparation can help you allocate sufficient time to become well-equipped and make the most of these opportunities. 

The days leading up to Valentine’s Day are a key period for many retailers, so we’ve collected some tips and tricks to help you boost your Valentine’s sales. Let’s get started!

Review your inventory

To be successful, you have to stay relevant. Reviewing your inventory and determining which items you expect to be in high demand during the Valentine’s period can put you at an advantage. This can help you to avoid spending money on campaigns to promote products that are in low demand during this season – and avoid running out of the most-wanted products. 

Sales data

Shoppers often feel time pressure when shopping for holidays, and the growing selection of online shops and different products makes their choice even more difficult. 

Tracking recent best-selling products is a fantastic way to help you identify which products you should promote to your customers in the short term. In addition, displaying positive reviews from shoppers who’ve recently bought these products might help indecisive shoppers to make up their minds and choose your product instead of a competitor’s. The easiest way to do this is to set up Product Review Feeds for Google Shopping. 

Cart abandonment notifications

Cart-abandonment notifications remind people that they’ve left products in their shopping cart without completing their purchase. This is an easy and effective way to nudge your customers to reconsider buying the items in their cart. 

Cart-abandonment notifications can be delivered via email, text message – or even push notifications for app-based sales. Don't be afraid to try different channels to see what works the best for your audience. Text messages on average take around 90 seconds to be opened paired with a 36% click-through rate. In comparison, emails take about 90 minutes, with a 3.2% click-through rate. Feeling convinced yet?

Countdown timers

For customers who are lost in the digital space, browsing website after website, a reminder of the approaching holiday might be just the thing to convert them. 

A countdown timer creates a minor sense of urgency, which could be enough to convince your shoppers that it’s time to complete their purchase.

Delivery times

Reminding customers of important dates is a great strategy, but it’s crucial to ensure that you can keep up with demand and deliver their orders before the approaching holiday – otherwise you risk disappointing them and creating bad word of mouth. Consulting historical data and demand forecasts can help you confirm that you’re able to meet delivery deadlines.

Valentine’s Day giveaways

Many marketers find that giveaways are an excellent tool for discovering new leads, boosting engagement, and increasing conversions. Introducing a game or asking a question on social media and drawing a winner from everyone who participated can generate leads while increasing engagement. To increase conversions, offering a free gift with purchase is often an effective tactic – and a brilliant way to clear slow-moving products that are costing the company money by taking up valuable storage space.

Show “bought-together” items

Gift boxes and bundles are one of the most popular purchases leading up to Valentine’s Day. Shoppers often feel like one small item isn’t quite enough, so they end up buying curated product bundles or gift boxes containing multiple items. 

Some buyers prefer a DIY approach. To convert these shoppers, an excellent alternative to curated gift boxes and bundles is to show “frequently bought together” items. This makes it easy for them to choose complementary items with confidence. To sweeten the deal, offer a discount on the complementary items.

Optimise for mobile

It’s important not to overlook how e-commerce trends affect sales.

Global mobile commerce sales are forecasted to reach almost €4.5 trillion by 2024, accounting for roughly 69.9% of all retail eCommerce sales. It’s never been more important to optimise for mobile devices and make as easy and secure as possible for customers to checkout from their smartphones.

Keep an eye on your competitors

Many companies are already gearing up for Valentine’s Day. Regardless of whether they’re using discount codes, price reductions, product bundles or other tactics, being familiar with your competitors’ strategies can make a huge difference in your sales.

Using a competitor-monitoring service makes it easy to follow your competitors’ activities. WakeupData’s competitor price monitoring tool can help you increase your sales growth and ROI by uncovering your competitor's prices and tactics. With this tool, you can choose which competitors' product pricing to track, and we'll monitor how your pricing compares. Find out which of your products have the most and least competitive prices – and how they stack up against your competition.

Google shopping strategy

Having a CSS Partner will save you 20% on your Google Shopping CPC compared to selling without a partner.

If you’re currently listing products directly through Google Shopping, you’re paying Google a 25% commission on top of the click cost. This can add up to thousands of Euros! Fortunately, there’s a workaround. 

Premium Google CSS Partners, like WakeupData CSS, enable you to avoid paying the Google Shopping commission. Instead, 100% of your ad spend goes directly to click costs. With this saving, you can increase your bids to become more competitive – or just enjoy a better return on your ad spend. Either way, your business will have a competitive advantage vs. those that don’t use a CSS partner. 

Good luck!

We hope you’ve found these tips helpful and that you’ll use them to get the most out of the upcoming Valentine’s period. If you’d like to boost your eCommerce sales during this period – and beyond, you’re welcome to book a free Demo of the WakeupData platform and see how we can help.