Ah, Valentine's Day, a time of hearts and flowers, chocolate and jewelry — and some of the cleverest, most heartfelt e-marketing campaigns. Even if your e-commerce business isn't in the business of selling chocolate or jewelry or flowers, if you aren't capitalizing on Valentine's Day, you could find your heart broken and your site abandoned.
Show Your Customers You Love Them via YouTube
Proof that you don't have to be in a traditional Valentine's Day business to feel the love is ThinkGeek. Last year, ThinkGeek, which sells "stuff for smart masses," created a quirky video to promote its 8-Bit Dynamic Life Shirt, one of the sites many offbeat Valentine's Day offerings, and posted it on YouTube.
That video "was watched more than 250,000 times and also helped us achieve a record-breaking Valentine's Day season," said Caroline Offutt, vice president and general manager of ThinkGeek.
And this year ThinkGeek plans to use even more social media sites and tools to get the word out about its Valentine's Day products.
"Social media techniques provide online retailers new, effective avenues for promoting their products," said Offutt. "And this year, we've grown our blog and Twitter feed significantly, giving us new ways to promote our Valentine's Day products in a fun, geeky sort of way."
Friend Facebook
And speaking of using social media to promote your site/Valentine's Day wares, CCBerries, which sells gourmet chocolate-covered strawberries, created a Facebook application and a CCBerries fan page on Facebook. The result? They allow Facebook members to send either electronic versions of CCBerries' delicious chocolate-covered strawberries to their friends or tag product pictures with their friends' names (which results in having their CCBerries pictures show up in their friends' Facebook profile).
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Facebook is an excellent extra channel for marketing your e-commerce business as seen here by CCBerries.
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In addition, CCBerries staff has been spending a lot of time in Yahoo Answers, answering questions about chocolate-covered strawberries and chocolate in general, reported Skip Manley, the owner of CCBerries/CCBerries.com.
And the entire CCBerries home page has been given over to promoting Valentine's Day, with important delivery and product information writ large near the top of the page and large, well-photographed pictures of the company's Valentine's Day offerings just below.
Use E-mail, Cross-Marketing and Special Promotions
Another site that specializes in chocolate, as in gift baskets and chocolate tours, Chicago Chocolate Tours, is also pulling out all the stops for Valentine's Day, one of its biggest times of the year.
"I am [currently] promoting some special Valentine's Day tours, such as a 'Champagne and Chocolate' girls' night out on Friday, February 13, which is Valentine's Day Eve," said Valerie Beck, the president and founder of Chicago Chocolate Tours. To promote the tour, and the site, for Valentine's Day Beck is doing multiple things:
- The event is listed on the Chicago Chocolate Tours Web site, in the Events section.
- The event was highlighted in the January Chicago Chocolate Tours e-newsletter and will also be in the February edition.
- Beck is co-marketing the tour (and her site) with a number of sites, including the Greater North Michigan Avenue Association's site, www.themagnificentmile.com, and trying to get listed in/links on popular local "what-to-do-in-Chicago" sites, such as www.metromix.com, www.centerstage.net and www.timeoutchicago.com.
- And Beck's tour guides are promoting the event on their Facebook pages.
Yvette Craddock, the founder and style director of ShopStyleFolio.com, a new e-commerce site "dedicated to bold, modern and luxurious women's jewelry that is really wearable art," has also taken a multi-pronged approach to marketing her site and wares around Valentine's Day.
She recently sent out the first of several e-newsletters to promote and sell her beautiful handmade, one-of-a-kind jewelry, with the subject line "Dripping in Drusy for Valentine's Day — Exclusively on ShopStyleFolio.com" and the headline "Give Your Sugar Some Sugar," explaining why the necklace featured in the e-mail is the perfect Valentine's Day gift.
Craddock has also come up with several innovative online services to help women and the men who love them get exactly what they want for the big day, including "Cupid's Custom Confectionary Service," a free design service (deadline February 2); the "'Honey I Want' Service," which is basically a wish list; and the "'Purge to Splurge' Program," which rewards shoppers who send in their unloved jewelry with up to 25 percent off their ShopStyleFolio.com purchase.
(Continue to Page 2 for More Valentine's Marketing Tips)
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