Boost Valentine's Day sales with these proven voucher strategies
Apart from mega-sales events such as Christmas and Black Friday, Valentine’s Day is another day that gets businesses’ cash registers ringing:
According to Statista, consumers in the United States are expected to spend a total of $21.8 billion on Valentine’s Day gifts this year!
Want in on this action? Of course you do—but so do your competitors.
To incentivize customers to shop with you instead, dangling discount vouchers is a tried-and-tested method.
Or if you’re in the business of selling experiences, why not sell special Valentine’s Day vouchers for your attractions?
In this guide, you’ll learn Valentine’s Day marketing strategies that involve vouchers and how to execute them.
Let’s dive in!
Decide on your Valentine’s Day voucher strategy
Offer discount vouchers to shoppers
This is a classic strategy.
After all, before someone can give a gift, they have to get it from somewhere. And to encourage them to buy it from you, you could offer them a voucher for a discount.
For example, weighted blankets retailer Mosaic Weighted Blankets has made a discount voucher for customers to get 15% off its products:
Selling vouchers as gifts
Alternatively, what about intending the voucher to be used by the recipient of the gift?
In other words, the Valentine’s Day gift will be the voucher itself, instead of a physical item that was purchased at a discount using a voucher.
This can be a great strategy for a few reasons:
Not everyone knows what their special someone wants on Valentine’s Day
To save themselves the potential stress and worry about buying the wrong gift, they might prefer to give their loved one a voucher with a certain stored value instead.
This way, their loved one can go shopping on their own terms and buy something that they’ll definitely like.
If you’re using this strategy, it’s typical to offer the vouchers for sale outright.
For example, baggage manufacturer Tom Bihn sells its gift certificates on its website all year round:
Alternatively, you could also offer the vouchers to customers for free as a reward for spending a certain amount with you.
Not every gift can be enjoyed on the spot
This applies especially if you are in the business of selling experiences instead of products—such as a cruise or a visit to the aquarium.
In this situation, you could sell vouchers that can be used to redeem your activities or attractions.
Such a gift could be a tempting offer for gift-givers who want to give their loved one a once-in-a-lifetime experience!
As an example, tourist attraction BridgeClimb Sydney is selling gift vouchers for climbs of the Sydney Harbour Bridge on Valentine’s Day:
These vouchers can even be personalized for a more romantic touch.
Create high-quality discount vouchers
After you’ve decided on Valentine’s Day voucher strategy, it’s time to create those vouchers!
While you could hire a graphic designer, online tools like PosterMyWall can help you create high-quality discount vouchers—even if you have little graphic design experience.
For example, we now sport a wide range of voucher templates for using as the starting point of your voucher:
After you’ve picked your favorite template, use the drag-and-drop editor to customize it to fit your brand and campaign strategy.
Feel free to change the voucher’s fonts and colors, or add your own shapes and images—your imagination is the only limit!
When you’re happy with your design, you can either download the image or publish it as part of an email or social media campaign.
Publicize your vouchers to potential customers
If you want people to buy or use your vouchers, you’ll need to publicize them. Here are some ideas:
Email blasts
As mentioned in the previous section, you could share your vouchers in your email blasts to customers.
When doing so, try to personalize the emails as much as possible! This can help get more attention and interest in your vouchers.
For example, if you are a clothing company that has segmented your email lists according to the gender of your subscribers, you could send two separate email campaigns:
One targeted at female subscribers that includes a discount voucher for women’s clothing; and
One targeted at male subscribers that includes a discount voucher for men’s clothing.
Website banners
Putting up eye-catching banners on your website can help raise awareness of your vouchers to website visitors.
If you’ve used PosterMyWall to create your vouchers, you can download your vouchers as images for embedding in relevant areas of your website.
For example, graphic T-shirt retailer Design by Humans has put up a large Valentine’s Day discount banner on its homepage:
If your banner is smaller, you could embed it in your website header or sidebar.
You could also have your banner pop up while visitors are browsing your website!
Make it easy for customers to redeem the vouchers
To complete your campaign, you’ll need to have a way for customers to use the vouchers.
If the vouchers are to be redeemed online, then you could add a discount code field to your checkout form. Pop culture clothing and plushie retailer TeeTurtle has done exactly this:
Or if the vouchers are to be redeemed in person (such as at your store), then be sure to brief your staff about accepting these vouchers in advance!
Start preparing those Valentine’s Day vouchers!
Everyone loves discounts—and you can leverage this to rake in more Valentine’s Day sales with the right voucher strategy.
The first step is to decide whether the vouchers are for use by the gift-giver or by the recipient. If it’s for the gift-giver, then you’d be following the classic strategy of offering discounts for Valentine’s Day gifts.
But if the vouchers are for the recipient to use, this means that the voucher itself will be the gift.
Regardless of which strategy you adopt (you could even use both!), be sure that your vouchers are beautifully designed so your target users fall in love with them. And don’t forget to publicize them far and wide, and implement ways for customers to use them!
Can’t wait to get started?
