The 2016 holiday season is just around the corner and Halloween marks off as the starting point of the e-Commerce Q4 holiday shopping season. Although Halloween is not a traditional gift holiday like Christmas and Thanksgiving, the annual Halloween expenditure in the United States in 2015 was around 7 Billion Dollars.
Here is a break down of the most popular items sold during Halloween:
Costumes – $2.53 Billion
Candy – $2.14 Billion
Decorations – $1.88 Billion
Greeting Cards – $0.33 Billion
But Halloween is not just a holiday for retailers selling the above items. As any retailer knows, ANY holiday is always a good excuse to re-engage with customers. This re-engagement means additional sales that would not have otherwise occurred. So with just a few simple steps, you can leverage Halloween to increase your revenue. Here are some tips on how to do it effectively.
Tip #1 – Find and Promote “Halloween Related” Items
As Halloween approaches, retailers find innovative ways to ride the festive wave by dressing otherwise unrelated items in Halloween costumes. For example, although Starbucks does not sell costumes or candy, every year they find creative ways to “dress up” one of their existing products in a festive Halloween-related theme.
Why? Because it is a reason to re-connect with customers and offer them an excuse to “celebrate the holiday” by consuming one of their products. How does this apply to you? Well if you put your mind to it, you may very well find items that can be related to Halloween, even if they are vaguely related. Anything related to pumpkins, witches, ghosts, scary monsters, and more can do the trick.
Here are some examples:
Even if you can’t find a Halloween-related item, you can still promote other items with the title “Halloween Special”.
Tip #2 – Increase engagement with Halloween-related content
Instead of just promoting products, add some value to customers by providing useful tips and ideas. For example, you can add content such as party tips, cookie and cake decorating ideas, and much more. Showing your products in the context of the Halloween festivities helps customers “connect the dots” and see these products in action.
Tip #3 – Target Last Year’s Customers
Out of everyone that has purchased from your store, last year’s customers are a relatively “low hanging fruit”. If they purchased something last Halloween, there’s a good chance they’ll purchase again. Remarkety makes it easy to target last year’s Halloween shoppers. Simply select the ‘Inactive Customers Campaign’ and then target customers have that haven’t placed one or more orders in 330 to 360 days. You may even want to include customers that haven’t placed an order in 360 to 390 days to increase exposure.
Tip #4 – Add coupons
Coupons are a sure way to increase sales. Of course, there are many retailers who prefer to steer clear of sending too many coupons. If this is you, a holiday like Halloween provides a perfect “special occasion” excuse to send these coupons. In Remarkety, coupons can be added to any campaign with whatever settings work for you Things like expiration date, one-time use only, or recipient use only are all customizable. Even better, a coupon can be directly linked to any page, such as the store’s homepage or specific product page. These coupons are automatically generated by Remarkety making the whole process as easy as a slice a pumpkin pie.
Tip #5 – Ready to use Halloween template
Remarkety has created some Halloween templates for you to get started. The templates are fully customizable and can be used for newsletter campaigns as well as triggered campaign types, such as Inactive Customers, etc.
Happy Halloween 2016 from the Remarkety team.
