6 Valentine's Day Marketing Ideas to Try This Year (Campaign Examples & Templates Included)

In 2021, 52% celebrated Valentine’s Day despite the pandemic. In fact, consumers spent an average of $165 on their loved ones.

So if you were having second thoughts about whether to leverage Valentine’s Day marketing, stop right there. Instead, start planning your V-Day offer and marketing campaign.

Unsure what would appeal to your buyers?

Let’s walk you through six real-life Valentine’s Day marketing ideas from other ecommerce businesses, so you can plan a sales-boosting campaign. We’ve also got Valentine’s Day marketing best practices and templates to get you started today.

SEE MORE: Retail Marketing Calendar 2023: Key Dates, Campaign Ideas & Ready-to-Use Templates

Valentine's Day marketing best practices

No matter what your Valentine’s Day idea is, make sure you follow these practices:

• Be sure you know who your audience is. Fundamentals first: dig into your audience analytics to identify what appeals to your target buyers. Are they singles looking to celebrate with themselves (15% of Americans do that). Or will they celebrate with their loved ones?‍
• Work out a Valentine’s Day offer that appeals to your audience. Once you’ve an idea of how your target shoppers will celebrate, figure out what offer they’d appreciate the most. Free shipping, gift cards, themed products, personalized gifts are some examples.‍
• Market a clearly defined offer with shipping and delivery details. Define your Valentine’s Day offer in one line to catch buyers’ attention. Be sure to specify shipping details and delivery times, too, as that’s the information buyers are always looking for.‍
• Instill FOMO with your offer. Scarcity-driven messaging prompts people to take action without overthinking (and, eventually, forgetting) about it. To this end, plan a limited-time offer or launch a limited-edition product line that buyers know they won’t get if they don’t hurry. You can also instill urgency with a countdown timer on your site—subtly indicating the time left to avail your special offer.‍
• Plan for last-minute shoppers. No matter the occasion, you’ll always have last-minute buyers, so make sure your offer runs until Valentine’s Day. Or, if you plan an offer centered around buy-before-X-date, create another offer for last-minute shoppers. ‍
• Create Valentine’s Day-specific content. This could be anything from a V-Day landing page, gifting guides, promotional posters, and social media graphics. Use it for marketing your Valentine’s campaign well.

When is the best time to start Valentine's Day marketing?

According to Google, Valentine’s Day searches start after Christmas. These build throughout January and spike from February 11 to 13:

Meaning: it’s safe to kick off your Valentine’s Day marketing campaigns by January—initially sharing content such as gift guides, before special offers later on.

Take LARQ, for example. They started sharing helpful guides in January:

To target late shoppers, though, they continued sharing content close to Valentine’s Day itself:

As for the Valentine’s Day offer itself, the brand started marketing it (gifting personalized water bottles) in January itself:

The lesson? Get ahead of the game with your Valentine's Day marketing. Know what your offer is going to be and have your campaigns planned out.

Now for inspiring Valentine’s Day marketing examples that you can steal or reinvent:

1. Vinebox created a special Valentine's gift box

Vinebox put together some of its most relevant Valentine’s Day products into a gift box and paired it with “a special fill in the blank Valentine’s Day card” for a touch of personalization:

Best of all? The brand knocked together a Valentine’s Day landing page for its offer—complete with compelling copy that did a clear and concise job at addressing essential details, such as:

• The price
• Contents in the box
• Why it made a good gift
• Who it was for
• When it’d reach the buyer

Vinebox also made sure to add social proof to the landing page:

This is a great way to convince shoppers to buy—especially when the review is so well mapped to the gift giving mindset Valentine's Day shoppers are in.

2. M&M's personalize your chocolate campaign

Candy is among the most shopped Valentine’s Day gifts. M&M's knows this, but they made chocolate gifting special by allowing buyers to personalize M&M's (and gift boxes) for their loved ones:

But that’s not all. The brand also created Valentine’s Day gifting content ideas to get its buyers’ creative wheels spinning.

And, like Vinebox, they made sure to target everyone—men, women, and also even companies:

Another noteworthy thing: the content kept users on their Valentine’s Day landing page instead of sending them to other pages. 

Doing so means as soon as shoppers are ready to buy, they only have to click “Personalize” or “Shop Products” on the page above. This reduces friction—making it easy to place orders 🔥

3. Bobbi Brown paired shoppers with an expert to help select gifts

Another fantastic idea among this list of Valentine’s Day marketing ideas is Bobbi Brown’s campaign. The beauty retailer did three cool things:

Firstly, the team created a Valentine’s Day landing page curating relevant gifts to give:

Secondly, notice how they also offered the option to give gift cards for buyers with picky partners? Gift cards are among the most shopped Valentine's Day gifts, so Bobbi Brown took a thoughtful approach in offering them with some clever position in the copy:

Thirdly, Bobbi Brown allowed potential buyers to talk to a makeup artist to help them pick the perfect gift for their loved one:

Like this Valentine’s Day marketing example, you can also design popups or embedded CTAs to make your offer. Simply make sure you strategically position them.

For example, position one on-visit popup to drive users to your V-Day landing page as soon as they visit your site. Then, have another one surface after a user has scrolled down to a certain point in your landing page to announce an enticing aspect of your offer, such as free shipping.

4. Postable offered themed cards with a discount

Like other Valentine’s Day marketing examples here, Postable also created a landing page to showcase its offer:

They also threw in a little social proof by adding “top seller” tags to the Valentine’s Day-themed card collection:

The company offered 20% off on the themed cards to sweeten the deal further, so buying from them became a no-brainer for shoppers (themed cards and ones at a discount—that’s two birds with one stone for buyers).

Here's a snippet of an email Postable sent to its list:

To make sure you’re marketing such a discount adequately, try creating a sticky bar on your site. It will help you announce the deal and help it stay front and center so buyers don’t miss it 🙌

5. Snif extended its trial period

Snif took a unique approach to its Valentine’s Day campaign by offering an extended trial—more than the standard 7-days in length:

This way, Snif doubled-down on its value proposition of try-before-you-buy candles.

Plus, Snif leveraged FOMO marketing by offering limited edition Valentine’s Day cards. And by marketing the offer on its Instagram account, the company tapped into multichannel marketing to get a wider audience.

6. Jeni’s ice cream offered a Valentine’s special collection

Jeni’s Ice Cream launched a range of Valentine-special ice cream flavors and collection boxes that triggered FOMO. The team announced it perfectly by designing a gift guide-like landing page:

This page did a couple of things.

First, it linked to the Valentine-special gift box, then the “new arrivals” page and “shop all flavors” pages.

And, two, it helped them target different folks, including ones who celebrated Galentine’s Day and one’s who were recovering from breakups with new relationships by offering them a “Rebound Collection.”

So you see, from offering discounts to creating limited-time, theme-specific products/collections, there are a lot of Valentine’s Day marketing ideas you can try.

Ready to market your campaign?

Don’t wait for developers. Instead, start creating your Valentine’s Day landing page, popups, countdown timers, site messages, and more with ConvertFlow.

We've got a template library filled with hundreds of designs to make getting started as easy as pie for you 💪

Here are a few you can start using now: