#Halloween2020

The wags among you might be tempted to joke that we’ve had a scary enough year already – but even in the strangest years, some things don’t really change. One of those is our love for all things Halloween – and you can bet that even in these relatively straitened times, plenty of your target customers will be in the mood for the accessible escapism this celebration offers.  Halloween has, after all, long established itself as one of the key retail events of the year – and judging by recent trends, a larger proportion of related shopping is likely to be done online rather than at brick-and-mortar outlets in 2020. Plus, Halloween simply isn’t as stressfully expensive or high-profile as Christmas. In some ways, that might make it the celebration we all need right now.  So, how can your own store unlock the potential that Halloween offers? Here are some of our favourite tips that you can start to implement immediately to help bolster sales.  Incorporate themed elements into your site  We’re all familiar with the notion of high-street retailers redecorating their frontages to mark key holidays, and Halloween should be little different for many online stores – even those where there may not be the most obvious link between Halloween and their core business.  In your case, you might make merely subtle visual changes to your site and social media profiles to acknowledge Halloween and draw attention to your related products and deals.  We wouldn’t encourage you to necessarily revamp your entire theme or do something else that might be complicated or expensive to reverse once 31st October has passed. Indeed, simply a spooky popup drawing attention to what your store is offering this Halloween, or some suitably themed images, colours and calls to action (CTA) might be more than sufficient.  Launch a Halloween email marketing campaign  With Halloween falling nicely between the summer and the festive season, it can make an excellent focal point for a Shopify email marketing campaign.  Begin putting together and sending out those emails now, drawing attention to products and special offers that you may be able to connect to Halloween in some way, and you will be able to gradually build up hype and excitement in the run-up to 31st October.  Many of the usual rules for successful email marketing will, of course, continue to apply for Halloween. Those include the importance of allowing for plenty of white space and breaking up the text so that your emails are easy to ‘scan’ for time-pressed recipients.  But don’t forget to blend in some suitably eerie imagery, too, as well as to consider what Halloween-centric promotions you could be showcasing in your emails, right up to the end of October.  Create a Halloween landing page  We touched above on the importance of not comprehensively overhauling your site just for Halloween, if this might present problems for you after 31st October when attempting to put everything back to how it was. Well, a landing page can be one way to sidestep such worries.  Separate themed landing pages can be ideal for highlighting all of your store’s Halloween-related products and deals in one place. Plus, the lessons that you learn when assembling and optimising this page could be invaluable for the festive season, when it really will be crucial for your store to avoid any ‘rookie errors’.  Drum up the hype on social media  The middle of October is an excellent time for merchants to begin to incorporate Halloween themes into their social media content. Hopefully by this stage, you will be in a position to hint at Halloween-related products or deals that you might then elaborate on in the hours and days to come, and through your Shopify email marketing.  Your online store may be the fulcrum for your Halloween promotions, but your social media pages will be crucial supporting players. Your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram profiles could be the perfect places to run contests and quizzes, alternating with event and sales promotions that encourage your target customers to engage more directly with your brand’s online store and products.  Oh, and don’t forget to wrap it all up with relevant hashtags like #halloween, #halloween2020, #halloweendecor, or whatever is a good match to the offerings of your ecommerce site.  Run a post-Halloween promo campaign  Don’t allow all of your seasonal efforts to immediately go to waste once 31st October becomes 1st November. Indeed, what’s wrong with an ‘after-Halloween’ sale, backed up with social media and email marketing messaging that draws attention to the opportunity to save money on items certain followers of yours may have hesitated to buy in the lead-up to the big event?  Even if the products that you discount are specifically related to Halloween, customers will still likely appreciate the opportunity to reduce the cost of purchases for Halloween 2021. It’s little different to the practice of snapping up cheaper Christmas gift wrapping in the January sales.  In some ways, getting your Halloween marketing right as an ecommerce store is much like getting your marketing right at any other time of year. But this special season also represents a sometimes unsung opportunity to drive sales at a time when some retailers may be focusing the bulk of their efforts on the festive period.  Indeed, doing well with the former may even place you in a better position to excel with the latter. Contact the Underwaterpistol team now, and we’ll talk you through the ways we could assist your business in its efforts to get the best out of Halloween from a sales perspective.