Valentine’s Day marketing is everywhere at this time of year. That’s why February 14th is often dubbed a “Hallmark Holiday”, and not in an affectionate way. While the occasion itself isn’t a product of commercial manufacturing, it does serve up a pretty good chunk of revenue for businesses to capitalise on. The problem, of course, is that everybody wants a slice of that pie, meaning the marketplace is even more crowded than usual. So, how do ensure you’re creating content that stands out from the crowd and pocket yourself a healthy piece of the pie?
Hitting them ‘in the feels’
Emotive email marketing is obviously a tried & tested formula, as we discussed in our piece about creating feelings effectively, and Valentine’s Day marketing is the perfect opportunity to create emotionally-driven content. However, this is virtually impossible if you don’t know who you’re talking to in your content. So, profiling your content is imperative to effective Valentine’s Day marketing. As we discussed in our blog about email segmentation, catering content to people’s interests drastically increases engagement rates. While targeting tailored content towards people of specific ages, genders, etc. is a fundamental part of general marketing strategy, taking into account their relationship status or other aspects relevant to a consumer’s love life would be the real game-changer in Valentine’s Day marketing.
This was expertly executed, in a move that has been imitated by almost all competitors every year since, back in 2019 when flower company Bloom and Wild offered people on their mailing list the opportunity to opt out of Mother’s Day emails. As explained in the Independent, this was met with open arms as it showed sensitivity to those whose mothers are no longer with them, those who have difficult relationships with their mothers and people who may not want a reminder of the date for various personal reasons.
While this helps improve brand persona, it also aids their marketing around Mother’s Day by generating a more efficient, targeted mailing list. If you can eliminate a large portion of uninterested consumers from your mailing list (we’re only talking about doing this for specific occasions – not forever) then your metrics, such as click-through rate and open rate, will likely look much better.
Now, imagine doing something similar around Valentine’s Day marketing. You can streamline your content or even segment your consumers and create different content for specific audiences. That might mean offering different products (cards specifically designed for men, gifts for same-sex couples and so on) or simply changing the voice of your content to more effectively provoke an emotional response from your target audience.
Standing out from the crowd
Profiled mailing lists do allow you to be more personal with your messaging and, as a result, stand out more with your Valentine’s Day marketing campaign. But other companies will be adopting similar strategies, so it’s important to always stay ahead with innovative ideas. One way of ensuring you don’t blend in with a mass market is to create a niche, unique subject line to pique your audience’s attention. In our blog about emojis in marketing, we discovered that the emojis with the highest click-through rates were the likes of an octopus, a train and a pair of jeans. Why? Because it makes people want to know what on earth you’re talking about.
Getting consumers to actually open your email is arguably the greatest obstacle in any email marketing campaign, and even more so in seasonal content like Valentine’s Day marketing. Of course, though, the job isn’t done with good open rates. Once they’ve opened the email, you need to present them with a reason to click through and continue their customer journey.
When it comes to Valentine’s Day marketing, leading with strong visuals or snappy, attention-grabbing content is always a good idea. With that said, leading with a call to action – creating yet another enticing reason for them to continue the process – could be even better. While this doesn’t always work, fast-tracking the route to purchase in Valentine’s Day marketing can help scoop up 1. Excited, already-engaged (not in that way) consumers and 2. Last-minute gift buyers looking for a quick solution (otherwise known as men).
Data-driven strategy
Our final point might not be the most glamorous, but it helps. Being able to predict consumer trends & behaviours allows you to adapt and optimise your strategy. You can achieve this by analysing data that’s already available and using your findings to guide your strategy. For example, you could look at the performance of your previous year’s Valentine’s Day marketing campaign and see where your strengths and weaknesses were. In your email marketing, if you find high open rates but low click-through rates, you can identify with confidence that your subject line was strong but your CTAs within the email weren’t strong enough.
You could then look at traffic to your page in that time period and investigate exit rates and bounce rates for that traffic to see if the landing page or website layout is inefficient. You could even take this a step further and breakdown the demographics of consumers who did or didn’t click through. For example, if you had separate ‘shop for men’ and ‘shop for women’ CTAs in your 2022 Valentine’s Day marketing email and one drastically outperformed the other, that’s an issue you need to address.
There’s no singular, all-encompassing solution when it comes to utilising this data to improve your Valentine’s Day marketing. However, one really effective way – particularly if you’re not entirely sure of the solution straight off the bat – is A/B testing. With this method, you can split your mailing list into segments and see how different content performs.
In the above example, you might send 50% of your female database an email with the same ‘shop for men’ and ‘shop for women’ layout while sending the other 50% a profiled, female-specific email. By doing this on various occasions and analysing the performance throughout the year between this year and your 2024 Valentine’s Day marketing campaigns, you can figure out a more effective strategy by the next time it rolls around.
Seasonal marketing and much more
At KAYBE, we’re always happy to share our marketing expertise with you. While we’ve spoken in depth about B2C seasonal marketing and Valentine’s Day marketing specifically in this article, we’d love to hear from you about whatever marketing issue you need help with. It’s our passion and our area of expertise, so please feel free to get in touch any time.
