Quick Valentine’s Day email marketing recipe for WooCommerce stores

How great holidays are for online stores! In fact, only Americans spent $19.7 billion shopping online last Valentine’s Day.

With that in mind, we sat down to help a client with his holiday strategy to get more sales.

It’s a quick and dirty strategy using minimal resources to put him in the holiday game on time. So we thought, “Why don’t we share that with others?” More of you selling on WooCommerce could actually implement it to reap good profits this Valentine’s Day.

So if you don’t have anything special planned, this quick fix got you covered – it can be set up and running in one or two days.

If you, on the other hand, already have a promotional strategy in place, you can still check it out for ideas to add. Let’s turn this holiday into orders, right? 🙂

This marketing mini-strategy catches both new leads and existing customers. We’re aiming to get a better engagement of visitors, less cart abandonment and higher conversion rate on holiday items. Plus better margins because we don’t rely on hard price cuts.

Tools you need to implement this mini-strategy:

• Pop-ups
• Email Software
• Facebook and/ or Adwords
• Blog article(s) + article to ebook plugin

The best part is you can do it today and start seeing results tomorrow. Don’t worry, the peak sales days are 7th and 11th February

Ok, here it goes.

Holiday content marketing game

Step 1: Preparing a Valentine’s day blog post

The first step was to prepare a Valentine’s Day multi-purpose material to use throughout the marketing campaign. It can be a blog post or other piece of content, fitting for your business and kind of products (we’re doing a recipe book).

The trick is to make it so it mentions one or more of your best gift-material products in a constructive, non-intrusive way. Enough to spark interest, but not pushing too hard.

You can best help by supplying them with fresh ideas how to surprise their loved one in a pleasant way. Search for a fresh perspective on your products and how they can serve various purposes. That’s the only part where you need to be creative.

Examples of such content are:

• A gift guide for the geeky boyfriend (including your Star Wars t-shirts);
• A recipe for a simple yet elegant dinner for two (featuring your fresh lobsters);
• Ways to celebrate Valentine’s Day away from the crowd (with hiking gear from your store);
• A fun cartoony piece on what the best girlfriend wishes for (complete with some of your cat mugs and chunky bed throws);
• A quiz: how can you say “I love you” without being obsessive (resulting in ideas like giving her a membership for online yoga classes);
• An article: How to show your favorite woman you care for her and her wellbeing (surprising her every day thanks to a healthy juice subscription).

Step 2: Turn your content into an ebook

After we had the content ready, we turned it into an ebook (a downloadable resource for retargeting purposes). Anthologize is a free plugin for WoCommerce and WordPress that can do most of the heavy lifting.

Basically, it grabs your blog article(s) and creates an ebook out of them, while allowing you to add branding and structure.

That way you’ll have a valuable material to give in exchange for email addresses in addition to content on your blog for regular readers.

Making the most of the holiday traffic

Next in our smart holiday campaign is engaging traffic.

Step: 3 Locking regular traffic with a holiday pop-up

To make sure we can re-engage holiday shoppers browsing the site, we made a special pop-up on the home page. It’s festive and a bit cheezy but if people want to celebrate, who are we to judge? 🙂

It’ll essentially capture their emails with the promise for exclusive offerings before it’s too late to say “I love you”.

Step 4: Paid traffic

Of course, that’s nothing new. If you’re among the few lucky online sellers who don’t need paid traffic, we salute you (and admire your brand). But if you do paid ads, have you set up something special for Valentine’s’ Day?

We are going about it the usual way – on AdWords and Facebook, targeting men and women separately and using Facebook’s relationship status data.

Our bonus here is what we’re doing with the people who don’t buy right away.

It’s remarketing to keep them around. After they bit on the ad but don’t place an order, we’re retargeting them with a different offer – not a product one, but value.

We’re showing them the valuable content created in step 1 and offer it for free in a nice e-book format. Our recipes will be entertaining or inspiring and can make them rethink gift-buying.

Here, we needed a simple landing page for the retargeting campaign specifically. It will promote the downloadable resource so people subscribe to get it. Tools like Unbounce would work with WooCommerce and it allows you to have an email capture form on that page.

This whole thing is needed to put some distance between desperate sale offers and the brand – we’re focusing on providing value, not clearing stock. That funnel will show visitors value first and products – a lot later.

Email Marketing drip campaigns for activating customers

We arrive at step # 5: the emails.

We have 3 different flows for the different customer groups.

1. Visitors subscribing through a pop-up on site.
2. New subscribers from remarketing.
3. Existing customers who need reactivation.

Pop-up subscribers engagement

Those are visitors who entered their email in the special themed pop-up. They’re apparently in shopping mood because they were browsing the site.

That’s why we’re sending them one loaded email with both the gift guide/ article/ quiz/ etc. and the featured products. They can choose what to engage with since both lead to our desired end – an order.

New subscribers from remarketing

1st email

Now, for the new leads that are interested in resources, the promised material (ebook in our case) will be sent out immediately.

2nd email

Since we’re very short on time, we’ll be following up in just a few hours. This second email is an offer highlighting the product(s) mentioned in the material. In your emails, you can stress how they’re running out of time to get ready for Valentine’s.

Optional 3rd email

A discount for those who don’t convert from the second email – only if you wish (we’re not huge fans).

Idle old customers

What about the current subscribers who haven’t seen that special landing page?

We’re using the piece of content for them as well – the original because they might think an ebook is too long to read.

1st email

Providing value with the content and wishing “Happy Valentine’s”.

2nd email

Then, to those who open the email, we’ll follow up with a related product offer as in the campaign for new subscribers. They indicated some interest so they might be on the lookout for gifts.

3rd email

For the most stubborn bunch who don’t open the content email, we’ll resort to sending a good old coupon code. At least we’ve done everything to convert them without it!

As you see, our strategy is to push the sale offer a lot down the line and convert at several steps before cutting profit margins.

Conclusion

When mapped out, our Valentine’s Day strategy appears to have 7 (yes, seven) points of conversion. You have 7 chances to realize a sale. And only two of them at reduced price.

That’s what we call a quick and effective marketing tactic.

Key takeaways:

• You can prepare for the holiday quickly and easily.
• Don’t have to rely on discounts only and use them only when nothing else works.
• Value-first works for your bottom line too.
• It’s good to use separate flows for different customers.

As you can see, it’s easy to get off the ground – you probably already use the tools mentioned and only need that spark of inspiration to jump start.

We’re implementing this strategy with the client we mentioned in the beginning. We’re making a case study out of the experience – if you’re interested in the results, and you’ll get it after the holidays when the numbers are in.

See how our campaign perfоrmed

List of alternative tools to use (all WooCommerce-friendly):

1. Article-to-ebook: Zinepal, other converting plugins
2. Pop-ups:  SumoMe, Bloom, Thrive Leads, and Email Subscription Popup
3. Landing pages: Instapage and Leadpages
4. Email Software: Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Metrilo