12 evergreen Valentine’s day marketing ideas for long-lasting customer relationships
Have you ever wondered if there’s a secret to winning the hearts of your customers? Here are 12 Valentine’s day marketing ideas to win customers for life.
Whichever way one looks at it, a brand’s relationship with a customer is comparable with that of a couple in love.
We’ve put together a few tips, to help you stay on top of your game, be it marketing or romance!
#1. Understand her: It can’t get more basic than this. Well, who is she? What are her likes and dislikes? Does she have a wish list?
Easier said than done in a traditional relationship but not anymore in a digital customer-brand relationship.
Talk about customer profiles- it’s about understanding the history of her relationship with your brand and finetuning every step that you take in line with it.
Sounds great, isn’t it? See it to believe it. Take a demo here.
#2. Talk to her in her language: Engage her in the language that she likes – This is easily the first relationship advice that anyone would offer. How do you understand what language she likes? It may sound hunky-dory unless you have a mechanism to find out.
Marketers who used personalized experiences report an average increase of 20% in sales. A whopping 79% of customers say they are likely to engage with an offer only if it has been personalized to reflect their previous interactions with the brand.
Lend her your ears and reserve a place for your interactions in your memory. After all, personalization is as old as the hills. Still unsure how to do it? Talk to us.
#3. Be present: Sometimes, just being there is good enough for a relationship to keep going. You may not do much, but show that you care by your presence. You may be taken for granted eventually, but it’s better than not being there.
We encourage brands to keep in touch with their customers, but not to the extent of their presence being a nuisance. Just a tad, a dash, a pinch, a smidgen, and a drop, as required. It is a simple marketing idea which you should always keep in mind.
#4. Be patient: Patience is a virtue. Leo Tolstoy, the great storyteller said that ‘the two most powerful warriors are patience and time.’ There is no point rushing into anything. Patience is the perfect antidote for an eager lover or a marketer anxious to win over a customer.
There is no formula for how much of communication is too much communication. Apply your discretion and keep in touch with your customer, to the point of engaging her effectively.
As brands grow digitally, bumps are bound to stifle marketing efforts. Your response to these setbacks will have a bearing on marketing success.
Just remember, keep calm and stay in love.
#5. Make sure you reach her, every single time she needs you: What’s the point if you are all out romantic but are not around when she actually needs you? Well, we don’t need to tell you as you may know the consequences more than we do.
We understand this quite well. Talk about ‘deliverability’ especially when it comes to emails. An undelivered mail is an effort gone waste, sagging stats and dipping ROI graphs. And, if you end up in the wrong place, it’s not only embarrassment but also setting a bad precedent.
Nothing like being there, at the right place, with the right person. If you are keen about your relationship, won’t you do everything possible, just to be there? We do the same thing. Missing even a single email is something which we can’t afford.
cmercury has a full-fledged email deliverability team who work hard to ensure our emails land in the right inbox, mail after mail! But it’s no cake walk. Read about cmercury email marketing here.
#6. Give her space when she needs it: A break will do good in any relationship. When it gets all sweet and syrupy, you may need to step back and let her be. There is no need to constantly make your presence felt especially if she is the kind who values her space.
Making ‘recommendations’ on what the customer would like to buy, or see, in the case of content, and nudging her to check out her cart are things that show that you are interested in her. But it’s quite possible that in this relentless pursuit of wooing her, you may be earning the reputation of a stalker.
Taking a break is good for any relationship. Welcome that occasional burst of freshness.
#7. Learn to remember: Goes without saying, right? It’s quite possible that if you’ve been in a relationship and if you have a tendency to be forgetful, you may have your fair share of memories. Remembering things that matter to your other half and reciprocating in an appropriate manner shows that you care.
In the brand-customer relationship, remembering dates like birthdays and anniversaries have become hygiene factors, nothing to write home about. In addition, if you can go the extra mile and send a thank you note say in appreciation of her first purchase a month ago with a coupon, it may delight her.
It’s not easy to keep her engaged amidst all the other distractions! But keep trying.
#8. Be grateful: Keep in touch and tell her from time to time, how valuable she is. Don’t fake it, mean it. Sound truthful and genuine.
An effective way to stay in touch with your customer and make her feel special is to give her previews into new products and services. This gives you an opportunity to promote your new offerings and while making your customer feel special.
All it takes is a sneak peek into the future!
#9. Follow her: The movie that she wants to watch may not be your best choice, but it doesn’t harm to accompany her, it only helps build your relationship, brick by brick, movie by movie!
As a marketer, you may want to talk about this till the cows come home. It’s a no-brainer that you go where your customer goes, be it the vast world of distraction that social media has become or finding your sweet spot in the world of app-push notifications or to get a moment of hers to check the SMS that you’ve sent her.
The message is not to do an all-out blast, but choosing the ones that are relevant to your business, to pick the appropriate tools, to be seen and heard by her.
Remember to work your brand magic across devices, across screens while staying consistent with the messaging on all critical channels like Email, Mobile, Web and Social.
#10. Seek permission: What if she values independence more than anything else and guards her me-time?
In that case, you save yourself the trouble of accompanying her for that movie which was never the movie of your choice.
It’s not that easy to draw the line when you are early in a relationship. The best way forward is- to seek permission before you decide to tag along or follow. Ask.
In digital marketing, permission is not only common courtesy but also mandated by Terms of Use for most companies. An unexpected message can feel invasive while a requested (signed up) message is more likely to be paid attention to or even welcomed.
It’s highly probable that your email campaigns are likely to be reported as Spam by customers who haven’t give you permission. Which means they are unlikely to engage with your email campaigns let alone make purchases. Keep in mind, spam reports can lead to spam filtering or even blacklisting, which’d make it nearly impossible for some subscribers to receive your campaigns.
Want to be in her good books? Ask her, take her permission.
#11. A bit of fortune-telling, perhaps? You’ve known her for a while and you are good with remembering; memorable dates, places where she likes to go to, things she likes to buy, her choice of books and music, the kind of movies she would like to go to, etc.
What if you are able to make meaningful and relevant predictions about her expectations in the future?
If you are good with some plain simple data analytics, based on historic data, you may be able to delight her with that perfect gift for Valentine’s Day!
Predictive Intelligence: It’s no crystal ball gazing. It’s plain simple. It’s no rocket science, but it’s all about data science.
You look at a customers’ transactional history with your brand. Understand their preferences and automatically tailor content or product recommendations delivered in email and on the web.
Essentially, you employ meaningful match-making of customer profiles with machine learning algorithms to delight the customer. Read all about it here.
#12. Find out how you are doing: It’s time to know how you are doing. Have you examined the factors that have worked in your favour and the ones that haven’t? Well, in a strong relationship, you may not care about these things and you may be on auto-pilot. Good for you.
In a customer-brand relationship, it’s advisable to keep track of your performance.
If you don’t take stock of your progress, you wouldn’t know what you’re doing right and what you aren’t.
Track your metrics to eliminate possible errors while investing more in areas that add to your success. Each channel has its own tracking metrics.
Read about web analytics here.
We hope you enjoyed our Valentine’s day marketing ideas to keep the marketing love going.
Let us know how you liked it. Feel free to add more tips in the comments section.
Have a fabulous Valentine’s Day!
4 comments
Good post. Gives marketeers ideas to toy with.
Thank you for your valuable comment.
Insightful!!!
Thank you, Brito.