Published on 01/02/2023

Valentine’s day e-commerce: 5 tips to boost your sales

As an online merchant, Valentine’s Day is an opportunity to reach out to your customers in the hope that they will buy from your website.

Running out of ideas? Here are 5 tips to help you stand out from your competitors and boost your sales.

Tip 1: map your Valentine’s Day segments in advance

Valentine’s Day is not only a time to make a special person feel appreciated; it’s also an opportunity to differentiate your business and personalise the shopping experience as much as possible for your customers.
The first step is to split your customer base into segments. On Valentine’s Day, the most common way to segment customers is by gift recipient, by creating “gifts for him/her”.

Once you have mapped the segments you want to create, you can then launch Valentine’s Day-themed email campaigns using a unique UTM* tag for each segment. These tracking links are used to measure the performance of each campaign, and then to create a relevant gift guide for a specific customer segment.

You can create another segment for all the customers who did not buy anything during your Valentine’s Day campaign. A few days before D-day (when it’s already too late to place an order and receive it in time), send a reminder email to these customers offering them e-gift cards. This is a helpful tip for increasing your sales while ensuring immediate customer satisfaction.

Tip 2: display banners on the homepage promoting products specifically for Valentine’s Day

Online stores need to prepare well in advance of 14 February so they are ready when consumers start searching the web for Valentine's Day gift ideas and experiences. Attract customers’ attention as soon as they land on the home page of your website. For example, you can use Valentine’s Day-themed banners promoting last year’s bestsellers, or create a specific product section for the occasion, as noted in tip 1.

Tip 3: create useful gift guides

Valentine's Day can be a particularly stressful time for some people. Obviously, people want to make a grand gesture for the person they love, but buying the right gift can be difficult. With thousands of websites available at the simple click of a button, how can you differentiate your website from all the rest?

Make your customers’ buying decisions easier by providing them with useful gift guides (for him/her/us). You can upsell the products in these guides by offering additional recommendations that go well with the product the customer is looking at (such as a bag to match an outfit or a high-quality wine to go with a meal).

For example, after clicking on the home page banner (tip 2), the prospect could be directed to various Valentine’s Day gift options. For each product or service offered, you should display complementary products or services next to the item. This technique, known as cross-selling**, is a clever way of making products easier to find and thus of increasing the average shopping basket value.

Tip 4: offer free delivery and additional incentives

As your loved one might say, sometimes the little things make the biggest difference. Once you’ve attracted prospects to your website with a gift guide and promotional offers, try to increase the average basket value by offering free shipping with a minimum spend.

Useful tip: it will be easier for your customers to reach the required spend for free shipping if you offer the payment in instalments option. Why? Find out in tip 5!

Finally, offer your customers a free gift wrapping service to show them that you care.

Tip 5: offer payment in instalments to boost your average basket value

Just a few weeks after all the Christmas spending, budgets can be tight. It would be a shame to miss out on sales because of problems with cash flow.

Make it easier for your customers to buy by offering payment in instalments.

Offer them the FLOA payment in instalments service. This option should be promoted on the product page, to avoid losing prospects who are reluctant to pay the final price all at once.

This will help you customers to:

- buy immediately in order to benefit from promotions while repaying their purchases at a later stage

- spread out the cost of Valentine’s Day over several months

- avoid reaching their credit card limits which can be inconvenient, for example, while on holiday As an online merchant, offering payment in instalments means:

- increasing turnover and profitability by removing certain barriers to purchase

- improving the user experience by making the payment process easier and more seamless

- building customer loyalty and attracting new customers by offering a value-added service (+20% conversion rate***)

- and all without taking any risk, as you are paid immediately and in full, with any non-payments covered by us

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