The year 2021 Valentine’s Day may have to adapt to our social distancing reality, however, romantic dinners outings or any other experience-based expenditures will likely be off the table for many couples. With this extra money in their pockets and nowhere to go it’s possible that couples will instead choose to celebrate valentine’s day with flowers, décor, gifts, champagne, and sweet treats.
With in-store shopping also out of scope for many people and the need for convenience, that means a great opportunity for ecommerce. We Shoppers aren’t just sharing the love with in our circle we’re sharing the wealth among these online businesses. For 2020, it is estimated shoppers spent more than $5 billion on jewellery, more than $4 billion for an evening outing, $2.9 billion on clothes, $2.4 billion on chocolates, $2.3 billion on flowers, $3.3 billion on gift cards and greeting cards and $2 billion on vacation trips and Spa experiences.
Here are the top 9 things you need to know as a customer to do a smart Valentine’s day purchases.
Best thing is you don’t necessarily need to buy heart-shaped chocolates or soft toys to cherish your Valentine’s Day celebrations. Here are the 9 effective Valentine’s Day online shopping tips to follow, with real-life examples from our surveys.
- Be careful with exclusive sale: Millions of consumer’s gift shop online, there’s one way to bring these online store to the forefront of the competition and that is running a sales campaign. With offering huge discounts to generate a successful sale from you, what’s more important is how, when, and where to catch these promotional products and the best way to do that is by avoiding all combined sales popups with promotional emails.
- Don’t fall for free shipments: Offers on free shipping especially during a holiday season can attract you from the sellers. After all, free shipping is one of the top factors that influence online consumer’s buying decisions, and it’s more than possible for most retailers. Don’t fall for a well presented limited-time offer with an added sense of urgency to it to encash customers emotional behaviour.
- Catch the irrelevant products: Valentine’s Day is about love, hearts, and glitter something you wouldn’t associate with other holidays. If sellers’ market their products with that theme, then valentine’s Day is the perfect time to promote their irrelevant product too as an ideal gift options. For example, Vimal Cottons promoted its heart print t-shirts for this day. After featuring an exclusive t-shirt design for this day, the company curates its products with a love theme in one email: Although their products aren’t necessarily a valentine’s Day material but Vimal Cottons finds a smart way to link the two, Even if sellers products have a farther association with this concept they can still use valentine’s Day as an excuse for their product marketing, just like optical does: in their marketing gimmick distributed flyers in malls around Valentine’s Day, simply leverages an association, and promote its rose-coloured glasses. It’s a customer tricking strategy especially if sellers’ products come in multiple colours and shapes.
- Stay alert while checking out gift guides: By offering gift guides in the form of emails, popups, or landing pages, sellers will help your prospects make a better profit making opportunity and position their products as great gift ideas. Sellers usually play with the idea by providing a gender, hobbies, interest or personality type based customizations to its consumers by showing the high priced and non-discounted products as an apt choice for your provided inputs. You need to be well aware and choose only those products what you actually needed.
- Gamble in product deliveries: When someone’s about to buy a gift for the special person in their life, the first thing they check is likely delivery times. So if seller wants to convert a shopper into customers they make their delivery dates clear and visible across their website, as well as in their popups and emails. Regardless of the time of the year, delivery is always a soft spot for online shoppers. However, it becomes an even more sensitive concern during the gift shopping season. What’s more, Sellers will write the last date customers can place orders for valentine’s day or when customers can expect to get their items delivered. Sellers smartly creates a sense of urgency in their promotions with a timer positioned with the limited hours deal with free shipping or fastest shipping if ordered with in next 2 hours, as usually customers fall into this and purchases more products which aren’t really necessary for them but to fill up the cart up to that amount to get the ordered items delivered free.
- Don’t be a target of timeline: While many e-retailers chase after last-minute shoppers by triggering a sense of guilt, there’s a more effective way sellers are opting to convert procrastinators into customers. Naturally, if sellers are offering faster delivery to last-minute customers, then it’s obvious customers go beyond their limits and purchase the deals which are highlighted as available best offer. Actually those best offers in last minutes doesn’t have any real discounts on it they usually sell customer the product on MRP after showing an offer waiver on website by making a calculation of additional charges, sales tax etc. which the remove in final checkout and sells you the product as it is. Remember online sales mostly not have sales tax included in it, where as in shop sales do gets sales tax added to it that’s the reason we find online products bit cheaper than in shop products.
- Customer fooling or redefined marketing: Valentine’s Day isn’t for every brand or person for that matter. Yet, sellers can still take advantage of this special day by redefining it for their brands depending on the nature of their products and their value proposition, sellers can take an anti-valentine’s day position or support singles on this day with their products, alternatively sellers will celebrate a made-up holiday that fits their brand. That’s what OTT platform Prime does: Instead of focusing on Valentine’s Day, the company celebrates single ’s day a day before Valentine’s day. In case you’re unfamiliar with the concept, single day is a nothing but a passive promotion of an online comedy shows and its online merchandise for men who are single and doesn’t buy anything online for Valentine’s day.
- Don’t fall in fake Love: Valentine’s Day is an excellent opportunity to show some lovely marketing for sellers, many online stores already use this day to appreciate their subscribers and subtly promote their products. Sellers usually set an auto email ready to send their customers with a lovely greeting and a discounted offer exclusively made based on your choices or wish list you updated on their shopping portals, as per survey done by major e-commerce giants any customer is a potential who comes back to the portal with the link provided to them with exclusive offers and same can gives sellers a much better revenue as earlier. Being a smart customer do not see each and every email you received from these sellers with an eye catching subject lines and heart melting greetings.
- Limited Edition or over-rated product marketing: Sellers do offer a Limited Edition Product; this strategy isn’t done by every seller as its isn’t a last-minute project. But if seller have the time, resources, and willingness to go the extra mile, it’s perfect for creating exclusivity and driving scarcity. sellers will reach out to its potential customers with an offer of limited edition of their product with an emotional tagline which can directly triggers your valentine’s day shopping. A big watch brand creates such limited edition promotion on their retro styled watches which might get launched soon after valentine’s day with some jazzy term as highlighted technology put in product. This will drive the all potential customers to pre-book it on a 50% price even without seeing the proper terms & conditions. Hope this makes a clear understanding on how to eliminate the smart marketing influence from your online shopping spree this Valentine’s day and enjoy the celebration with real happiness and joy.
Online shopping is convenient, quick, easy, and often more affordable than shopping in person. Of course, such convenience comes with a price and as with most things related to the internet, that price is privacy and information security. #KhabarLive #hydnews
