eCommerce trends to help you make the most of Valentine’s Day

Love it or not, Valentine’s Day sells, and there are some key eCommerce trends you need to look out for this February. Let’s kick it off with five cringe subject lines

• Drop a hint for Valentine’s Day…
• Make-Up or Breakup
• A Valentine, from you to you
• Share the love and save X%
• Love is in the air! Get inspired by…

Create a Valentine’s Day-themed email campaign

• Segment your email list and personalize your messages.
• Offer special deals and promotions to encourage purchases.
• Highlight gift ideas for different types of relationships.
• Use attention-grabbing subject lines to increase open rates.

Opinew – Fall in love with Reviews

4x 2023 e-commerce trends to ignite Valentine’s Day sales

Maximising social proof

 
Who better to show just how powerful your offering can be for capturing the heart of the one you love than the customers who have come before? This social proof can not only create a feeling of FOMO, but inspire a new wave of reviews, deeper customer relationships, and even community building around your brand. Memara, a UK-based jewellery brand does this very well with their use of a review carousel on the homepage and an aggregated review banner above their navigation bar.

Upsell the heart-sell with gift wrap options

 
During Valentine’s-gifting seasons, just about any product can be sold with a gift wrap option. For products like jewellery, cufflinks, wine and champagne, or anything that is typically gifted, offering a gift-wrap option can be a powerful strategy for increasing AOV while allowing customers to add an extra touch of thoughtful personalisation to their Valentine’s Day gifts. Accessories brand Levenger offers gifting and personalisation options, including gift wrapping for a charge or a free gift message, on items like wallets, notebooks, and bags.

Increase AOV with a free gift or shipping threshold

 
Looking at last Valentine’s Day sales data, you could offer a free gift or shipping as part of a seasonal promotion. Offering a free gift or shipping based on a threshold spend, and using tools like Bold Sales Motivator to give customers real-time calculations of how close they are to reaching that threshold can help you boost average order values and achieve record-seasonal sales.

Create a sense of urgency

Despite the sentimentality around the occasion, Valentine’s Day tends to be the last-minute shopping event of the year with web traffic often spiking the day before. Remind shoppers how close they’re cutting it to the line with a countdown timer to create a sense of urgency. Additionally, a timer could remind shoppers of how close they are to missing on-time delivery—a powerful inspiration for propelling conversion.

Gorgias – Make exceptional customer service your valentine in 2023.

 
Valentine’s day brings high purchase intent traffic to your store and with some tender loving care, you can make the most of it.

If you know you’re going to have spikes in traffic over the course of the coming year (starting with Valentine’s day), automate as many of the easy questions as possible such as WISMO, shopping policy, valentines cut-off dates, and basic product questions. You don’t need to waste time responding to these when they can be so easily automated. Jewellery brand Jaxxon did this to increase revenue by 46% and CVR by 6%.

Bonus tip: show off your bestselling and relevant products – easily done with Klaviyo and proactive live chat – to cross-sell and upsell.

For cross-selling, make sure you’re using highly targeted, highly useful products, and make sure they’re already good sellers. If you’re selling whole coffee beans, a hand or electric grinder makes great sense. A nice £50 manual brewer (like a siphon or AeroPress) might make sense too. But a £999 espresso maker? Not so much.

Likewise, aim to recommend similar products whenever possible. A related product is anything that compliments the product in the customer’s cart or a product that better satisfies the customer’s need that drove them to add the original item.

Odicci – Creating loving connections through digital experiences.

What Odicci noticed in 2022 amongst beauty brands was the heavy focus they had on the Christmas season. Christmas was big this year, bigger than usual. Christmas 2022 saw a shift in the way businesses marketed their products and services.

With the rise of e-commerce, businesses put more emphasis on digital marketing strategies. Social media, email marketing, and content marketing were the main ways to reach customers. Odicci helped our clients to utilise this with our digital experiences.

A great example would be Neom, who reached six figures and three global markets with their ‘Spin The Wheel’ experience and ‘Hit The Jackpot’ experiences. Their experience aimed to replicate what they already had going on in-store but as a digital version.

Further, Odicci created plenty of ‘Advent Calendar’ experiences, which allowed the customers of their clients to receive a prize every day of the holiday season as they ticked off the dates. It was an amazing way to engage customers and is a strategy that can be applied to holidays such as Valentine’s Day or Easter as well.