Marketers, it’s time to seduce your customers! This Valentine’s Day many shoppers may succumb to “heart-stopping” gifts such as books, trips and high-tech, or flowers and jewelry for the more traditional customers. To really make the most of the day and stand out from the competition, there are super effective campaign intelligence solutions. So draw back your bow, fire Cupid’s arrow straight into your customer’s heart and see the income from your campaigns soar.
Here’s how you can prepare for Valentine’s Day:
Planning is critical for Valentine’s Day campaigns
Planning is the key to a successful Valentine’s Day, just like it is for Black Friday, Mother’s Day or Christmas. You have quite a small window of opportunity. While the sales span a few weeks, your Valentine’s deliveries must be ready before 14 February. Hence you have to plan everything perfectly in advance.
The first step to getting everything ready is to plan your schedule in reverse, starting with Valentine’s Day:
- 14 February is the latest delivery date
- count back the number of days that your average delivery time takes
- add in some breathing space so that you can prepare and package the orders
- now you should have the final online order date for Valentine’s Day deliveries.
This deadline will help you schedule your Valentine’s Day marketing campaigns. To really boost your sales figures, you have to start sending out messages in the days and weeks leading up to the day, spreading your emails across this time period.
Make the most of Valentine’s Day’s unique appeal
Compared to your standard annual marketing schedule, Valentine’s Day is a one-off event. This means:
- you can only send a limited number of offers to your customer base
- your customers are ready to buy something more diverse and at a higher price than usual.
To make the most of this increased customer budget, your challenge is to identify the right people for each of your offers. For example, let’s look at the marketing agenda of an online jeweler:
- leading up to Valentine’s Day, the marketing team prepares their special offers, segmented by price range and product category (rings, necklaces, etc.)
- for each individual offer, the team needs to identify the most receptive targets from within their whole customer database
- they then create campaigns for each identified target group. The online jeweller begins sending the campaigns several weeks before Valentine’s Day. They continue to do so right up to the order deadline date, increasing the number of offers the closer it gets to this date.
For Valentine’s Day, it would be counter-productive to send the same newsletter to your whole customer base – you could end up shooting yourself in the foot. Let’s return to the example of the online jeweler: if they were to send just one newsletter, they would be unable to promote their more expensive lines because that would make 60% of its customers run for the hills. Equally, the jeweler’s more elite customers may be a bit disappointed to only see lower-priced items. Now more than ever, campaign intelligence solutions, like that offered by Tinyclues, make perfect sense.
Harness the power of artificial intelligence this Valentine’s Day
With Tinyclues’ campaign intelligence solution you can target the right people for each offer – and ward off base fatigue.
Working offer by offer, Tinyclues’ solution identifies the most receptive targets from within your database. Marketers can then cleverly communicate with all of their customers, not just those who have previously shown interest in a product. Tinyclues’ solution scores the contacts in your database from most interested to least interested. It also suggests an arbitrage for people who may be a match for several offers. Once the marketer has defined the maximum number of messages that each contact can receive, Tinyclues will determine how to best spread your various offers across the segments represented in your base.
This process can be regularly repeated throughout the promotion. So it’s really in your best interests to get your Valentine’s Day campaigns ready in advance. Your customers will receive a set number of messages throughout the campaign and you can ramp up the urgency of the messages the nearer we get to 14 February.
While we’re slogging through the sales, Valentine’s Day is a welcome opportunity to communicate something fresh with your customers and hone in on quality. Grab the limelight with emotionally charged messages and leave it up to Tinyclues to steal your customers’ hearts, boost their engagement and give your campaigns’ sales figures a shot in the arm.
