It’s that time of year! Valentine’s Day is a special time for many and has become an opportunistic time for marketers. It’s a chance to connect with your audience on a personal level while promoting your products and services. By tapping into the emotional power of love, you can engage with customers, boost sales, and cultivate customer loyalty.
A well-planned Valentine’s Day marketing campaign with a strong hook can boost sales and re-engage customers, but it’s important to tailor your messaging to your audience’s interests. Email marketing is an effective channel to provide a personal touch, but it might not capture your customers’ eye in an inbox full of competitors.
Using a combination of channels, for example, websites, SMS, push notifications, and social media, can help your messages reach customers at the right time and place. Let’s dive into how different brands have creatively leveraged multiple channels to pull off some of the best Valentine’s Day marketing campaigns.
#1: Creed Fragrances exudes extravagance
Founded in 1760, Creed Fragrances has long been a brand with luxury and exclusivity. Originally tailoring scents for royalty, Creed has maintained its high-end appeal while transitioning into the broader consumer market. Ultimately, it exudes extravagance and confidence.
This year’s campaign includes strategically targeting new Valentine’s Day shoppers by kicking off with a blog about the perfect Valentine’s gift. Halfway through the blog, readers are greeted with a pop-up – enabling zero-party data collection to identify customers and send tailored communications.
To help streamline their target lists, customers have the option in their preference centers to opt into Valentine’s emails.
Creed’s Valentine’s Day marketing approach conveys an eloquent and classy style when communicating with those who have subscribed to its email communications.
With this approach, they offer luxury fragrance gift sets that embody sophistication and heritage in their message —perfect for Valentine’s Day.
Highlighting new individual products, such as their new fragrance – Absolu Aventus – as a collector’s item adds an exclusive touch, making it an exceptional gift choice for fragrance connoisseurs and their target customers. The email’s focus on opulent gifts and exclusive offers makes it an excellent promotion for those seeking memorable and luxurious Valentine’s Day gifts.
For Creed, this strategy not only boosts sales during a critical shopping period but also reinforces the brand’s image as a purveyor of fine, desirable products, enhancing customer loyalty and attracting new buyers. It’s elegant, classy, and gives its target audiences a confident and spacious approach.
#2 Turtlebay opens its doors for all
Turtle Bay is a Caribbean restaurant chain in the UK known for its vibrant atmosphere and flavorful dishes inspired by beach shacks and street vendor food found on the islands. It’s all about the experience.
For the past few years, Turtle Bay has been consistent with its Valentine’s Day marketing messaging toward its target audience with an open approach. Its Valentine’s campaign is rooted in empathy, acknowledging the varied experiences of the day with an open and friendly tone. Whether it’s a romantic dinner, a first date, or a lively gathering with friends, Turtle Bay’s campaign resonates by recognizing that Valentine’s Day can be different for different people and still appear as the best destination.
On the same page, Turtle Bay becomes even more personable with its Galentine’s Day messaging. This showcases how the brand can really relate with its customers to engage, be recognized, and feel welcomed at any of its establishments.
Turtle Bay isn’t just dishing out flavors; they’re tuning into the customer’s love for music, adding a whole new layer to their experience. Their blog lists last-minute Valentine’s tips and cleverly promotes their Spotify, cueing up playlists to help people express when they think someone is “alright.” After all, how else could you win anyone’s heart besides the harmony of food and melody?
#3: Moonpig makes sure you never miss
Since launching in 2000, Moonpig has revolutionized how people buy greeting cards, offering a platform for personalized cards and gifts.
Occasions tend to slip people’s minds, which is why Moonpig stepped up to be the reminder in your inbox. Customers often receive email reminders based on past purchases, such as personalized birthday cards and gifts purchased in the past.
And just like Cupid, Moonpig’s marketing ensures customers never miss! Moonpig sends several emails in the build-up to Valentine’s Day, showcasing a range of new designs. Based on observation, Moonpig seems to send these emails to their customers around ten days before the main event.
It’s important to note the opt-out option at the bottom of the email. Being mindful and acknowledging customer message preferences creates a mutual understanding between them and your brand. Behind the scenes, you benefit from cleaning up your lists, ensuring your emails become even more relevant and better performing.
Moving on later in the email sequence, we see these emails become more personalized and tailored to the customer’s previous purchases. For instance, if customers bought humorous cards in the past, they’re likely to receive an email tailored to their past purchases, current preferences, and likes.
As part of what seems to be a Valentine’s Day marketing reactivation tactic, Moonpig seems to drive general reactivation strategies by offering a free card to net new customers. Below, you can see Moonpig sends an email offering customers a free standard card if they checked out within ten days of the email being sent, aptly timed with the 14th of February – Valentine’s Day. It’s almost as if Moonpig is doing the customer a favor!
Moonpig’s personalized emails serve a dual purpose. First, they work to reduce churn by re-engaging customers who have not made recent purchases. Secondly, their hook is to provide a convenient solution for those looking for thoughtful, last-minute, personalized Valentine’s Day gifts.
#4. Peacocks pop up with celebrity ambassadors
Peacocks is a UK-based fashion retailer known for offering trendy clothing and accessories at affordable prices for men, women, and children. With an omnichannel model, they appeal to customers both online and offline.
If you’ve got room in your budget, influencers and celebrity ambassadors can help set you apart from the competition. In Peacock’s case, using channels such as Instagram helped push a lengthy social campaign to help foster engagement. Below, you’re able to see a competition to guess who their mysterious lingerie ambassador is via comments, likes, follows, and tags for high social engagement.
After announcing Caprice Bourret as their ambassador, Peacocks’ social media strategy and websites highlight the Caprice lingerie edit, setting the tone for Valentine’s Day. Having increased awareness and engagement, Peacocks sets a new competition for a luxurious one-night stay via their website. By clicking on the link, the audience is taken to the website first to submit their details for the competition, helping Peacocks collect zero-party data to identify customers.
By pairing this social media campaign with its website, Peacocks can encourage users to explore their lingerie collection via their website. From there, they’re able to collect first-party data and send targeted communications based on their on-site behavior to drive purchases for a very special Valentine’s Day.
Quick Tips for Your Valentine’s Day Marketing
1. Segment Groups: Valentine’s and Galentine’s Day Campaigns
Looking to market to diverse groups? From couples celebrating Valentine’s Day to friends celebrating Galentine’s Day, defining who you’re targeting is important. However, you need a clear strategy to segment these groups based on their past interactions and preferences to truly be relevant in your campaigns.
As an example, Mapp Marketing Cloud unifies your customer data, creates and enriches customer profiles, and enables you to segment customers based on attributes. Opt-in emails and preference centers often help clear this up to get your lists intact.
You can create segments like ‘romantic buyers,’ ‘friends celebrating together,’ and ‘first-time buyers.’ Following this, you can personalize content and tailor journeys in your email campaigns, SMS alerts, push notifications, and more for each segment, with messages and offers to resonate with their specific interests (like romantic bouquets for couples and vibrant or fun flower arrangements for friends).
2. Optimize Stock Based on Customer Analytics
If you’ve got a wide range of products good for Valentine’s Day but are unsure about which items will be most popular, you might miss the mark on what to push and when. This often leads to potential overstocking or missed sales opportunities.
Leveraging analytics in Mapp Marketing Cloud helps you track and analyze past and real-time Valentine’s Day sales data and customer interactions with different products. Identify top-visited or selling items and use these insights to create targeted promotions and bundle deals for exclusive collections. This also enables you to keep an eye on stock levels.
Alternatively, you can look at the poor-performing products and push them in your promotional communications to help drive sales and balance your stock.
3. Contact customers at the right time, on the right channel, with the right frequency
Valentine’s Day is a big day, but not for everyone! While email is an effective tool for personalized messaging, overusing it risks unsubscribes and deliverability woes. To avoid email fatigue, diversify with SMS, in-app notifications, and website push, timing your communications for optimal engagement. Providing opt-out options for Valentine’s Day communications demonstrates that you respect your customers’ preferences. This prevents you from overwhelming them with irrelevant messages, preserving the health of your long-term customer relationships.
NEED MORE INSPIRATION BEYOND YOUR VALENTINE’S DAY MARKETING?
No matter the occasion, you can never run out of inspiration for your ideas. Have a look at our improve your marketing hub, which is full of use cases that you can use for your future campaigns!
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