14th of February. It is one of the days of the year when everyone celebrate and remember to shower their beloved ones with care and meaningful gifts. In the streets, you see guys stopping by the corner florist to purchase a bouquet of roses. Downtown, shops at every corner are offering valentine discounts for every item possible. Even online stores are jumping on the bandwagon.

As a matter of fact, it is the ecommerce cousins that fare better, especially in tough economic times like now. This is because customers tend to get bigger discounts online. Just in 2008 alone, online Valentine’s Day sales revenue reaches the $1 billion mark.

So, if you were planning to start an online ecommerce store, this could be the perfect time for you to market your products!

Anything that Sell Well…

You can sell apparels, photo frames, poetic gift cards, photo-printed mugs, lovely gift boxes, and many more!… But don’t just stop with the traditional ones. Electronic gadgets such as PDA, pink iPods (and its accessories), digital cameras, MP3 players, laptops, and the ever increasingly popular netbooks are top choices too.

Promoting Your Online Presence

You need to get the word out! And there are various methods to do just that.

Search Engine Optimization

Optimize your online ecommerce store by researching the appropriate keywords to use. When your website is search engine ready, update your e-commerce site by placing your best offers at the home page. Also provide clear important information on every page such as the last shipping dateline. You also need to update about available and unavailable items. It will be even better to customize a search tool for visitors to browse and narrow their search results by gift recipient, personality, price, or category so they will find exactly what they really want.

Email Marketing

If you already have your customer based, this can be the easiest way to spread the word. You should improve your email marketing words to create urgency of the benefits of getting things done far before the last minutes. Send reminder emails until the Valentine’s Day itself to recipients who might haven’t read the previous messages. To help your marketing, cooperate with affiliates and inform them for products or banners in their websites. Two people working are always better than one. The heaviest Valentine’s sales days will be around one week before February 14. Include the latest dates possible for shipping to ensure that they won’t receive their gift items late.

Social Media

Another option to campaign your Valentine’s offers can be done through the most famous social networking site nowadays, Facebook. Facebook enables you to have simple advertisements for online marketing. You can customize your targets’ gender, location, age, relationship status, or interests. You can feel relieved as the advertisement delivery is accurate. And just for additional information, Facebook users navigate from newsfeed to profile to applications.

Advertising on applications is also effective in Facebook. Some of the most popular applications for males include SuperPoke, iLike, Texas Hold ‘Em Poker, PetrolHead, Vampires, Slayers and Werewolves, are you interested, meet new people, hot cute or okay, or hot bids.

Of course with so many items to sell, you may want to start early so that your customers have enough time to choose the appropriate gift. So start it now don’t wait to the last minutes!

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