Boosting Valentine’s Day Sales: 6 Proven Strategies For Brands

Roses are red, violets are blue, here are six actionable Valentine’s Day sales tips for you!

If you’re on the fence about whether your business should participate in Valentine’s Day sales, we’re here to tell you that you shouldn’t sit it out. Using the right strategy, anything can be giftable and marketed for Valentine’s Day. With these 6 tips, you’ll be able to maximize your Valentine’s Day sales with strategies that fit your business’s specific needs. 

Valentine’s Day: is your business ready?

Valentine’s Day follows a similar formula to other marketable holidays, like Christmas or Black Friday. While you likely won’t see as many aggressive sales or long campaigns, having a campaign ready to launch in January will help you build the hype. To get ready for Valentine’s Day, your business should:

• Ensure you have relevant products to promote
• Prepare your marketing strategy in advance
• Create content surrounding Valentine’s, such as social posts, graphics, emails, or blogs

While you don’t need to start promoting Valentine’s Day months in advance, you also don’t want to wait until the very last minute. According to email marketing trends, customers tend to shop for Valentine’s Day throughout February, though the first few days of the month have been shown to account for 20% of sales.

6 Sales Strategies to Use This Valentine’s Day

Depending on your industry, there are different approaches you can take to marketing Valentine’s Day products and growing your sales. While promoting gift cards as a last-minute Valentine’s gift is a given, there are a number of other ways you can capture shoppers in the days and weeks leading up to the holiday. Here are a few strategies we recommend trying.

1. Nothing says ‘love’ like free shipping

As customers have just come out of the holiday season where they’ve likely spent a lot on gifts and holiday fare, they’re likely looking for deals when it comes to buying gifts for their loved ones. Offering free shipping gives you an edge over the competition and also helps entice customers to convert. Make sure to also clearly state your latest date to place an order for it to arrive by Valentine’s Day to make it easier for customers to plan ahead. 

2. Curate a list of gifts

Getting a gift for someone can be nerve-wracking. Not everyone knows exactly what their loved one wants. Creating a section on your website for a Valentine’s gift guide with products selected from your inventory and potential recipients. This will help guide your shoppers to the right items and is also a good way to move excess inventory that you have left over from the holidays. Here’s a look at how Target presents its 2023 Valentine’s Day gift guide:

3. Bundle items together for a memorable gift

Another great way to move inventory is to bundle items together to create a gift set at an attractive price. Items that are grouped together and wrapped in something like a basket or special gift box make it easier for shoppers who are looking for a ready-to-gift item. You can create bundles based on themes or items that are frequently purchased together. For example, a jewelry brand might bundle a necklace and earring set together at a discounted price as a special Valentine’s Day promotion.

4. Host a giveaway or contest to share the love

One way to create buzz for any special Valentine’s sales or products you might have is to host a giveaway or a contest a few weeks before the holiday. You can get creative with this and get customers to participate by engaging on social media, signing up for your newsletter, or registering for your loyalty program.

5. Promote more than just romance

For some people, just the thought of Cupid, hearts, and tons of pink elicits an eye roll. Luckily, Valentine’s Day has evolved to not only be a holiday about romantic love but all kinds of love. That could mean love between family members, friends, or even self-love. In fact, 44% of women agreed that Galentine’s Day, a day to celebrate female friendships on February 13th, is just as important as Valentine’s Day. Use this trend in your marketing strategy to promote items as a gift to friends or even as a way to treat yourself. Here’s how beauty brand, Olay, promoted Galentine’s Day in a previous campaign:

6. Couple up with other brands

Whether you look locally or online, pairing up with other brands is another way to bundle gifts that are more likely to appeal to customers. For example, beauty or jewelry brands can offer a bundle including a box of chocolates or a bouquet of flowers as a gift. You can also look for opportunities to partner with existing bundles that other brands offer by offering your products to add to the bundle or gift basket. This can help you create more brand awareness while also moving overstock.

A work tool to make you swoon: meet Cymbio

For many businesses, the holidays are a peak selling time. But, with more sales comes more work, especially if your brand is selling on multiple retailers and marketplaces. Coordinating Valentine’s Day sales across several channels presents a unique challenge. There’s inventory to sync and then orders to process and ship according to different retailer guidelines. 

Automation tools like Cymbio can help you simplify these types of operations. With Cymbio, you can automatically sync inventory across all your retail channels, put your order management on auto-pilot, streamline payments, and easily manage your sales operations, all while keeping your overhead low. This will enable you and your team to focus your time on creating better sales bundles, coordinating marketing efforts, partnering with other brands, and generally getting your company ready for Valentine’s Day or any other peak sales period.

Keep the lightness and fun in Valentine’s Day and remove all the stress by automating otherwise manual and time-consuming tasks. Book a call with one of our retail experts so that you can see why so many brands have fallen in love with Cymbio.