We’re headed into the season of love – Valentine’s Day is on February 14! The most romantic day of the year presents a prime opportunity to attract new audiences and boost sales for your product- or service-based biz.
Modern consumers are breaking the bank for Valentine’s Day more than ever. In 2024, spending hit an all-time high of $14.2 billion dollars, according to Drive Research. While chocolate and flowers are still popular, many shoppers are now prioritizing meaningful gift-giving in the form of romantic dinners, trips away and keepsakes from their favorite brands.
This presents a fantastic opportunity for brands that previously have not engaged with Valentine’s Day to curate a unique, strategy-led marketing plan that celebrates love in all its forms. There are tons of effective ways to spin your marketing tactics for Valentine’s Day, including love-themed social media campaigns, shoppable gift guides, email and SMS marketing plans and more.
Not sure where to start? We’ve rounded up 12 Valentine’s Day marketing ideas to try in the lead-up to Cupid’s arrival.
1. Build the hype early with a cadenced email marketing plan
The lead-up to a holiday is arguably as important as the day itself, especially for marketers. Milk the days or weeks before Valentine’s Day with an email marketing campaign designed to build hype and inspire purchases or bookings.
As with any email marketing campaign, timing is everything. Be sure not to overwhelm by slating too many emails – but don’t let go of the reins, either! Depending on how far out from V-Day you begin your communication, a cadence of 1 to 2 emails per week is likely bang-on.
If you need a little inspiration for the content of your emails, here are a few ideas:
- Tell Valentine’s Day stories from your staff or customers
- Celebrate all kinds of love with a spotlight on Galentine’s Day
- Share top product picks for different gift-giving scenarios
- Encourage shopping ahead of time with exclusive early purchase discounts
2. Engage ambassadors to share the love on social media
Working with ambassadors is a great way to ‘show, not tell’ the benefits of your brand. They’re the ultimate form of social proof, building your business’s credibility with buyers who fit your ideal customer profile.
In the lead-up to Valentine’s Day, why not enlist one or a few ambassadors to shout out your best deals or product recommendations? It could be as simple as an Instagram Stories campaign with an exclusive discount code or as complex as a multi-platform content strategy designed to capture various audiences and offer them deals ‘til they hit ‘add to cart’.
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If you haven’t worked with brand ambassadors before, now’s a better time than ever to get your feet wet. Go into negotiations with brand ambassadors with an open mind and always ask to see stats to back up their prices or requirements. If you can, give each ambassador you work with a unique code so you can pinpoint exactly how many leads they’ve brought in and calculate your return on investment (ROI).
Keep Reading: Check out our comprehensive guide to calculating the ROI of your social media marketing activity.
3. Give your audience a chance to win with a Valentine’s Day competition
Everyone loves a competition – perhaps Valentine’s Day is the right time to share the love! Strengthen your ties to your existing audience and attract new followers by running a giveaway or competition on your social media accounts.
We suggest selecting one platform (e.g., Instagram) and cross-promoting the competition using a link in bio tool, like Linktree. This will help you grow your audience on your chosen platform and keep things tidy when running the competition, with all the eligible entries in one place.
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While what to give away is entirely up to you, don’t skip the chance to make it Valentine’s Day-themed! If your budget is on the lower side, consider a love-themed pack of your brand’s best gifting options. For those with more coin to spend, a romantic activity or even a vacation giveaway will pique lots of interest and help you attract more followers.
4. Create product categories to cater to different kinds of buyers
Sometimes shoppers need a little help figuring out what to buy for occasions like birthdays and holidays, which is why product categories come in handy! By grouping must-haves together into easy categories, you’re handing customers – both new and seasoned – a go-to guide to finding the perfect buys for Valentine’s Day.
Product categories are also an essential website marketing tool. You’ve got ample placements across your site, including homepage banners, pop-ups and tickers that you could use to promote your Valentine’s Day categories. Don’t forget to hyperlink your categories in any blog posts, social media posts, and emails you create whenever the opportunity arises.
5. Offer a limited-time gift with purchase to drive holiday urgency
A little ‘surprise and delight’ never goes astray in the world of marketing, especially when you’re trying to retain customers and grow brand loyalty. We’ve seen it work for big brands all over the world – think Adore Beauty packing a chocolatey treat with every order, or Volkswagen’s history-making ‘Pods Unite’ campaign, which saw every new car owner drive away with an iPod as well as their vehicle.
Now, you don’t have to swing as big as Volkswagen did, but we’re certain a gift with purchase will entice shoppers this Valentine’s Day. You might choose to throw in a little something sweet with every order, or to reward purchases over a specific dollar amount with a free gift – this tactic can also drive up your average order value (AOV).
6. Run a Valentine’s Day rewards campaign for returning shoppers
Many marketing campaigns these days are geared in favor of new customers – but incentivizing past shoppers to make a repeat purchase is just as crucial. This Valentine’s Day, celebrate your returning customers with a carefully crafted rewards program that offers exclusive gifts or discounts to those who’ve shown ongoing brand loyalty.
You could do this across any medium with the right tools, as long as you have access to customer data and can separate past shoppers from new customers. Popular methods for rewarding existing customers include email marketing campaigns, remarketing with paid ads on Facebook or Instagram and in-app or email-based loyalty programs.
7. Introduce targeted social media ads to improve the shopping experience
Social media is saturated with ads these days, which has rendered most platforms ‘pay to play’. Consequently, every brand worth its salt should have a paid advertising strategy designed to complement and amplify its organic efforts.
One of the key benefits of social media advertising is the ability to not just deliver ads to new audiences likely to buy, but to intelligently ‘remarket’ to existing customers using their purchase and search history. The result is an extremely tailored, clever browsing experience that will enhance the likelihood of a sale.
As part of your Valentine’s Day campaigns, run a series of targeted social media ads to new and existing audiences promoting your best deals or top products. You can be as creative as you like here, using static tiles, shoppable carousels or even videos as your ad assets. Don’t forget to set up A/B testing to determine what resonates with your audiences!
8. Entertain audiences with a series of themed social media videos
Driving sales is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to holiday marketing – the other crucial element is creating valuable content to engage and entertain potential customers. We all know content is your subtle sales secret, as it builds brand recognition and creates positive ties between you and your target audience.
As well as exhausting other content avenues like your blog and email newsletter, we suggest running a social media campaign to inspire love in the lead-up to Valentine’s Day.
The world is your oyster, here – you might go the heartfelt route, sharing love stories from your staff and customers. Or, you might play up Valentine’s Day stereotypes with a series of funny, tongue-in-cheek videos. Whatever you do, ensure the content you create reflects your brand’s unique value proposition!
Keep Reading: Discover 7 successful social media campaigns you can learn from.
9. Promote a Valentine’s Day gift guide across your platforms
The gift guide is an essential tool in your marketing arsenal if you want to decrease decision fatigue and boost sales. In the same vein as product categories, gift guides do all the thinking for your customers by offering up top picks for the occasion on a silver platter.
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While gift guides used to be offered up in print, nowadays, they’re best presented in an email marketing campaign, on social media, or both. Once you’ve collected all your must-buy products into a list, have fun with how you share it. Get creative – perhaps you could design a series of shoppable branded tiles for your Instagram feed or make a TikTok or Reel explaining each of the items in your guide.
10. Provide last-minute purchase reminders with an SMS campaign
Despite competing with a crowd of different social media platforms, SMS is still an extremely effective marketing channel in 2025 – just ask the 72% of people who have made a purchase after receiving a text message from a brand. To accompany your other Valentine’s Day marketing
efforts, consider implementing an SMS plan that commences a few weeks before the holiday, and ends in line with your sales or offerings.
If you’ve never run an SMS campaign before, this is the perfect time to master the art of text marketing. Tiny character limits (160 standard characters, or 70 if you’re using Unicode symbols) and no rich media mean you need to know your offerings inside and out to communicate them to customers. It’s a great exercise in sharp, succinct marketing without surrendering your brand’s personality or voice.
11. Celebrate all kinds of love with inclusive messaging
There’s more to Valentine’s Day than just romantic love, which we’ve seen come to the fore in recent years with the popularity of Galentine’s Day (thank you, Parks and Recreation!). Create an inclusive, well-rounded marketing strategy by considering and celebrating other kinds of love, like friendship, family and even love for your pets!
There are so many ways to put this into action, either as your ‘hero’ campaign or to complement a more traditional Valentine’s Day approach.
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Not sure where to start? Try these ideas:
- Run a Galentine’s Day-themed giveaway and ask your followers to tag their besties to win
- Curate a ‘gifts for friends’ category on your site or socials
- Offer a buy one, get one sale with Galentine’s Day messaging
- Sharing mini gift guides for family and friends on social media
Keep Reading: Discover our complete guide to Valentine’s Day Instagram caption starters you can use and personalize for your brand.
12. Launch an exclusive sale on Valentine’s Day itself
While most shoppers are looking for gifts to give their loved ones on Valentine’s Day itself, who said all the fun has to stop when the big event rolls around? To keep the love going, think about running a sale on Valentine’s Day itself. You’ll capture late shoppers, tap into that ‘treat yourself’ mentality and tie up your campaign with a nice, neat bow.
There are endless opportunities to inject your brand’s personality into this, from the messaging you choose to the products you put on sale. A post-Valentine’s Day sale is also a great way to move end-season stock or give your numbers an extra boost in a notoriously slow sales period.
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