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Valentine’s Day is a special occasion that offers an opportunity to connect with your audience and grow your customer base. But it’s extremely competitive. Many brands know it’s a popular commercial holiday and they want their piece of the pie.
Valentine’s Day is a special occasion that offers an opportunity to connect with your audience and grow your customer base. But it’s extremely competitive. Many brands know it’s a popular commercial event and they want their piece of the pie. Around 32.7 million people in the UK alone are planning to celebrate Valentine’s Day in 2025 with an average spend of £52 per person. Young love is set to dominate, with 4 in 5 Gen Z marking the occasion. So how do you stand out during a time when consumers are bombarded with marketing communication?
Check out Part 1: Valentine’s Day Marketing: 4 Brands that Got it Right ->
Back in 2021, Pandora released a short video called ‘little acts of love’. It featured real couples talking about the small things they love about each other and how they celebrate Valentine’s Day. And of course, everyone was wearing Pandora jewellery.
What is it about the campaign that stops people in their tracks and holds their attention like a delicious box of romantic chocs? The video captures the essence of everyday relationships. But more than that, the creative strategy is based on real audience insights. Pandora’s target audience are mainly young consumers, women, and people who want to connect with a product emotionally. The video hits this demographic perfectly. And Pandora must be doing something right: in Q2 of 2024, its financial results showed 15% growth in organic traffic. Pretty impressive for a brand that’s been around since 1982.
Pandora’s strategy demonstrates the effectiveness of customer data and using it to power marketing decisions. How? By creating truly personalized and targeted experiences.
If you know your audience, you can build a marketing strategy. But don’t worry if your product or service isn’t considered typically V’day. Valentine’s Day does not have to be limited to traditional gifts like flowers or chocolate.
Scream Factory is a scare attraction running Valentine’s Day themed ‘scare rooms’. We definitely wouldn’t associate being terrified with the day of love, but the brand mashes its core message of the best scary experiences with the day perfectly, demonstrating that you can use national holidays to your advantage, whatever your product.
European company Wonderskin call themselves ‘a beauty brand that does things differently.’ Its marketing tactics are a perfect example of this. For Valentine’s Day this year, Wonderskin encouraged audience participation with the help of a quiz to find your perfect shade of lip stain.
The email encourages existing customers to head to the website and take an interactive quiz, with a personalized result at the end. This multichannel campaign utilized email and social media and gives the brand a perfect opportunity to connect with its audience. It’s also a great example of customer re-engagement – by providing an interesting and interactive hook in what could otherwise be a quiet period for sales.
Wonderskin are also masters of UGC (user-generated content). Its peel off lip stain is a viral TikTok sensation, and it regularly uses influencers to promote its products. The campaigns for Valentine’s Day follow the same pattern.
Social media Influencers have been promoting different Wonderskin products with very clear captions, such as ‘valentine’s lip? Colour is XOXO’, so customers know exactly what to search for. The combination of social media, email, and website means the brand hits several touchpoints, reaching customers at the right time and place.
Data is key for Wonderskin’s campaigns. From understanding its audience and knowing where they hang out, to identifying the best content and messages to use, all the way through to analyzing the success of campaigns and planning new ones.
By regularly posting on social media and taking advantage of user-generated content, the brand gets people talking and encourages customers to order products to try out for themselves.
By Rotation is a fashion rental site. It calls itself the ‘world’s largest shared wardrobe’. As a brand it knows from its customer data that many people go out on Valentine’s Day, whether that’s on a date, to an event, or just out with friends, and need an outfit for the occasion–so it sends curated outfit ideas via email and in its app.
Having gathered insights from customers on previous Valentine’s Days, the brand knows what type of outfit is frequently rented and who is doing the renting. It uses that data to send personalized recommendations.
This works particularly well if you are tracking your email engagement rates. These metrics can help you understand how your customers are engaging with your emails. For example, you can track how subscriber interactions evolve over time. By Rotation have tracked subscriber lifetime value over previous Valentine’s campaigns to understand engagement patterns and overall campaign effectiveness. This can help you determine who is most and least engaged with your emails to optimize and target more effectively for higher engagement, while reducing unsubscriptions.
By Rotation also uses email click-throughs to promote its app. After landing on the home page, a pop-up modal appears offering 15% off your first rental for new app users, with a QR code that takes the user to the app store to download. By encouraging customers to download the app, By Rotation is able to collect First-Party Data giving them further insights into customers’ needs and wants.
Valentine’s Day is a key occasion for By Rotation – a time when customers are looking for something special to wear. Using a strategy that highlights individual products appeals to its customer base and enhances the key message of renting designer outfits for a fraction of the price of buying them and, at a time when fast fashion is making headlines, being a conscious consumer. All this helps to enhance customer loyalty while also attracting new customers.
Sticking with the theme of conscious consumption, the last brand to feature on this list is World of Books, the second-hand book marketplace. This year it has used Valentine’s Day as an avenue to understand its customer base and offer personalized recommendations.
World of Books collects first-party data via email from its customers to later provide personalized recommendations based on the options given. After clicking on an option, the user is taken to the homepage where a pop-up modal confirms the choice and offers an incentive: ‘keep your eyes peeled on your inbox as we may be sending a little surprise, just for you…’.
This tactic achieves a number of things. First, the Valentine’s email hooks customers in with a reminder to purchase a book for either themselves or a loved one. Second, it re-engages customers who may not have purchased anything recently. Third, it collects data about the customers in order to send personalized suggestions, thus increasing the likelihood of purchase. And finally, it provides a solution for customers who may be looking for a different, but thoughtful, Valentine’s gift, and also supports environmental initiatives–a well-executed an thoughtful campaign!
Cross-channel campaigns can be tricky to execute, but well-worth your time and effort. As seen in the examples above, it really pays to spread your marketing campaigns across a number of channels. Brands that spread their message see significantly higher customer retention than those who don’t, in some cases up to 89%.
There are a number of ways to engage your customers. For the most part it comes down to using your data to understand who your customers are and what they want and need to see. Our platform gives you in-depth insights into your data, allowing you to create strategic multichannel campaigns that convert.
If you’re thinking about using customer data to plan strategic campaigns, Mapp can advise the best way to collect the data and how to use it.
Valentine’s is just one day of the year, but the most successful brands know that frequent, year-round targeted campaigns bring home the bacon. With in-depth oversight of your customers’ first-party data, you can achieve winning cross-channel, segmented marketing campaigns.
With Mapp Marketing Cloud, you can use your data to launch campaigns that convert. With AI-powered digital analytics alongside marketing automation, we collect and unify your data and give you insights into your customers that you can take action on. The result? Multichannel campaigns across emails, SMS, app, and website that lead to more.
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