10 Valentine’s Day Mobile Marketing Strategies

With Valentine’s Day coming up, mobile businesses will benefit from developing and launching campaigns around this special day. Valentine’s Day remains one of the most popular days of the year for shoppers following the holiday season, with the average shopper spending around $165 on this day. Many of these consumers will be spending this money on apps, including eCommerce apps and many others. This is why mobile marketing for Valentine’s Day is so crucial to increase user acquisition, engagement, and sales. To give you some guidance for your strategies, the following are some Valentine’s Day mobile marketing tips to get you started.

1. Identify Your Target Audience for Valentine’s Day Mobile Marketing

When developing marketing strategies for Valentine’s Day, you may initially want to focus on targeting couples. However, couples are far from the only ones who are spending money on Valentine’s Day. Pets alone are some of the biggest gift recipients, and many single individuals are likely to spend money on friends and family as they’re also inclined to be more generous on Valentine’s Day.

Don’t be afraid to think outside of the box and consider who your customers could be based on your industry. To make sure you’re connecting with your audiences with your Valentine’s Day marketing, conduct A/B split tests with different marketing materials. As an example, you might have two different ads that share the same messaging but have different images, with one featuring a couple exchanging gifts and the other showing a couple embracing. You can then figure out which marketing materials to use based on which content performs the best.

2. Use Love-Inspiring Push Notifications

You can generate a lot of excitement around Valentine’s Day with push notifications. These messages can create a sense of urgency among audiences. Thus, letting them know they have a limited amount of time to purchase gifts and benefit from Valentine’s Day sales. You can also send these well in advance to encourage people to engage with your app ahead of Valentine’s Day.

Your push notifications should feature Valentine’s Day-related messaging and visuals, such as heart emojis and other designs. Again, you can A/B test these notifications to see which ones drive the most in-app engagement.

3. Make Plenty of Valentine's Day Offers

To make sure your business grabs and holds people’s attention in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day, determine which types of giveaways, promotional deals, and discounts to offer. You’ll want to choose the offers that yield the best results when it comes to both user engagement and sales.

In addition, your offers should help you meet any long-term business goals you have in place. For example, you might offer customers certain app-exclusive giveaways and discounts, which would encourage more people to download and install your app to access these deals. Also, promote these deals across all of your marketing channels, including push notifications and SMS texts, social media platforms, your website, and emails.

4. Don't Neglect Social Media for Valentine’s Day Mobile Marketing

To get the most from your Valentine’s Day digital marketing strategy, you must promote it on social media. Make sure you engage audiences with posts using the themes of love and generosity to appeal to your audiences. These posts should also include plenty of vivid, colorful imagery that further gets people into the Valentine’s Day spirit.

When used properly, social media can be the key to driving app downloads and installs, particularly if many of your deals are exclusive to the app.

5. Use In-App Stories to Connect With Users

If you want to promote your Valentine’s Day campaign to existing users, you can resonate with them through the use of in-app stories. These consist of engaging content that’s personalized for each user and shows that you care about your audience.

Using Valentine’s Day-themed stories, you can promote deals that would appeal to users based on their interests or previous purchases. You can also include clear CTAs that make it easy for users to perform the desired action, which can dramatically increase conversions. Like other marketing content, stories can feature plenty of appealing visuals. Interactive stories could also engage users through polls, questions, and other ways to further connect with them.

Storyly makes it easy to create high-quality in-app story campaigns that speak to your audiences.

6. Don't Avoid Valentine's Day Cliches

People still enjoy everything that’s instantly recognizable about Valentine’s Day. For example, the candy hearts and chocolates to the imagery of hearts. That’s why you don’t need to avoid them in your marketing if you’re worried about being too traditional.

Most importantly, you must do what you can to creatively promote your Valentine’s Day discounts and other offers. You can promote matching items that appeal to couples, use the same language as Valentine’s Day cards, and incorporate imagery that’s automatically associated with this day. In short, if it works and resonates with users, keep using it.

7. Market With Influencer Campaigns for Valentine’s Day Mobile Marketing

Another way to reach audiences who may not trust you is to work with influencers. Target everyone from micro-influencers within a hyper-specific niche to bigger influencers, depending on who you want to reach and your allotted budget. These influencers can greatly assist with attracting new users around Valentine’s Day.

There are several ways you can connect with influencers to market your app. For example, a shopping app provides influencers with a free product in exchange for a video that details their experience. Then, encourage customers to purchase it with a discount on this item. People will be far more inclined to buy with the endorsement of an influencer they know and trust.

If your app offers a premium subscription, such as a dating app, you could offer this version to influencers and ask them to highlight specific features. In turn, people will more clearly see what they’re getting with this version over a free edition.

Yet another way to collaborate with influencers is to use shoppable videos in your app. These videos feature familiar influencers encouraging customers to buy a particular product, with a CTA button that instantly adds the item to users’ carts or takes them to a checkout page. This is a quick and effective way to drive more sales leading up to Valentine’s Day.

8. Partner With Complementary Brands

Before Valentine’s Day, you may discover that a non-competing brand is running a similar campaign to yours with offerings that are adjacent to yours. In these instances, it might be in your best interest to reach out to them and attempt to form a partnership. The right co-marketing campaign will be beneficial to both brands and expose them to each other’s audiences.

You can even play around with Valentine’s Day-relevant language when establishing your partnership, equating your collaboration to a couple and the perfect match.

9. Use Email Marketing

One effective means of connecting with existing users is via email. You can incorporate email into Valentine’s Day mobile marketing campaigns to reach existing users who may no longer be using your app, with personalized messages encouraging them to come back to you. Combined with push notifications, email is a potentially invaluable asset to help keep people aware of your app.

Remember to make sure your subject lines and body content stand apart from the rest of people’s inboxes. Otherwise, people may simply scroll past your emails and make your campaigns a waste. Try to address recipients by their names and send different subject lines and offers for each audience segment.

10. Create Gift Guides

People often have a hard time finding the right gifts for their partners and others, but you can eliminate some of the guesswork with well-composed gift guides. Your app could make suggestions based on users’ input about partners’ interests, for instance.

Gift guides could make recommendations based on the gift recipient’s gender, age, or hobbies, pointing people in the right direction. You might even consider creating lists based on the budget of the sender. Also, you can then list items that you sell and encourage people to purchase them with a convenient CTA. You can also include gift guides on your company’s website, tying them to in-app offers and, subsequently, encouraging more people to download and install your app.

Drive Your Valentine's Day Mobile Marketing Strategy Results

A strong Valentine’s Day marketing strategy will help you get the best possible results. By making full use of multiple channels with the right marketing content, speak to all of your audiences. Whether targeting couples or single audiences, you can reach everyone and encourage significantly higher user engagement, ultimately boosting your ROI. With the help of Storyly’s in-app stories and other mobile marketing tools, you’ll have the ability to meet your business goals and enable your app to flourish well beyond Valentine’s Day and into the years ahead.