07 proven halloween marketing ideas to boost sales for online stores

07 Proven Halloween Marketing Ideas to Boost Sales for Online Stores

The scary Halloween is coming close, once every year on the 31st of October. It’s time everybody gets really excited about trick or treat, Jack-O’Lantern and candy bags.

But for eCommerce entrepreneurs, it’s time to get super excited and worried at the same time because the highest sales peak of the year officially starts then.

You’re gonna lose a lot while everybody wins big sales if you stand still…

Yes. You need some damn good Halloween marketing ideas to boost your store’s sales on Halloween and the following holidays after that.

This blog post dedicates 07 Halloween Marketing Ideas to help S&M business owners make a big fortune this year. These 07 ideas are not generic. They are detailed, actionable, proven-effective, and easy to execute without hiring any tech guy (because we’re referring the helpful tools for you).

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07 Halloween Marketing Ideas to hack your sales growth this holiday: 1) Offer freebies that are perfect Halloween gifts your customers can give to their friends or family: Everybody throws discounts on holiday seasons. It’s so commonplace that people are not motivated enough to shop on your store even with a discount offer because they feel like they can find discounts on any single store during the holidays.

Anything else besides discounts that can attract your customers and make them purchase? What most people look for when Halloween approaches? Gift ideas to surprise their friends and family.

Ideas: Instead of discounts, you can prepare freebies that are items people can give to their friends, family members, colleagues as Halloween gifts.

Show the items right on the homepage to capture customer’s attention, or show it on the cart page as a last-minute offer to boost checkout rate here:

Suggested Tool: Checkout Boost app

2) Create a spooky look for your storefront: This is probably one of the most popular things store owners would think of during the preparation for holiday sales: decorating the store so that it has the look & feel of each coming holidays.

However, it’s not advisable to design a totally new theme (which would be beautiful but very costly and may be troublesome to your back-end, especially when it is only temporary for a couple of days) Instead, you can focus on decorating flexible elements that are catchy enough to get customers’ impression when first visiting your store.

Our recommendations for decorating your store: 

Welcome coupon pop-up: design a spooky welcome popup that appears when a customer first enters your store to catch their attention, impress them with a catchy Halloween image and captivating message copy.

Suggested Tool: Better Coupon Box app

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Banner on homepage slider: If your homepage has a slider, make a Halloween banner and add it to the slider. It is also a good position to promote any promotions, contest or giveaway for Halloween too because 90% new visitors will lay eyes on your banner to grasp the first

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impression about offerings on the store.

Header bar + CTA: You don’t always have to use images to decorate your store. Message and CTA copies can also do the trick when putting in the right place. Instead of the normal “We offer free shipping on orders from $50”, change it to, for example, “Buy from $50+ to have the Vampire ships your order FREE to your window on Halloween night”.

Avoid making major changes to your store theme just for temporary holiday occasions. Instead, by being meticulous in flexible elements and copies that you can take 100% control of, you can still create a ghostly feeling that excites your customers and motivates them to purchase on your store.

3) Send Halloween giftcards to customers to promote your Halloween sales promotion: If you’re going to run special promotions on Halloween, make sure you go ahead and keep your customers aware at least 2-3 weeks earlier, that you’re gonna have big promotions, fun gifts or good deals for them on the holiday week. Here’s how by using giftcards: Idea: about 2-3 weeks before Halloween sales, send to whoever buying on your store a special giftcard (could be value or percentage discounts, free gifts, free shipping…) which will become valid on the Halloween week (or whenever you want to run your promotion sales campaign).

Tips: 

You can design a giftcard yourself using Canva tool if your budget is too tight to hire a designer, or e-giftcard using MailChimp templates. When customers purchase on your store,

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attach the giftcard on the delivery package or attach the e-giftcard in receipt billing email.

Offer giftcards of different values and promote them all widely to make customers come back regularly to collect as many giftcards as possible.

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Send automated follow-up email (suggested tool: MailBot) to remind your customers of the gift cards they have and encourage them to come back on the promotion days to redeem them.

Gift cards will encourage customers to come back to your store on the sales week to purchase, because they know beforehand they can save a lot of money if shopping with you instead of shopping somewhere else.

4) Promote & Remind your customers of your promotion campaigns by email marketing.

For sure, email marketing cannot stay out of the list of potential Halloween marketing ideas you should focus on.

Following a search, email is the second most effective channel to acquire customers, accounting for 7% of user acquisition in e-Commerce.

Amazon, Mango, Uniqlo, The Body Shop, Sephora sends numerous newsletters to their list when their promotions start, during campaigns, and a day or hours before campaigns end.

People hate promotional emails, but not on holidays season because promotion emails coming during the holidays bring discounts, freebies, free shipping, very good deals that they’ve been waiting the whole year to spend ~2/3 their annual shopping budget.

Tips to optimize your email automation strategy during holidays season: 

When promotion starts: send a captivating email to introduce your promotion, with a code to apply and a clear CTA that redirects to your store so customers can start shopping right

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away During promotions: o Send product recommendations email to customers every day, highlight the discount o

and count down to when your promotion ends To those who abandon carts even when you give them discounts: send cart recovery emails with an additional bonus (as long as it does not hurt your profit margin) to get

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them back to finish purchase Before promotion ends: o Send a reminder (and try to create a sense of urgency, such as “Last 12 hours to o

grab 50% OFF all items”) to get customers back Consider giving additional bonuses/discounts/free shipping if you want to sell out quickly on the last day

5) Get more traffic from Google with a blog post on “Halloween Gift Ideas” As previously mentioned, what most people search on the Internet right before Halloween are gift ideas. During the holiday season, search volume for “Halloween gift ideas” keyword and other relevant keywords amount to 10,000 – which is an enormous number.

If you have a blog on your site for content marketing, write a blog post targeting “Halloween gift ideas” keyword, then SEO it to the first page of Google (Suggested guide & tool: Moz) when people search that keyword.

When your blog post is reached by people who have the demand, they will become your organic traffic and probably buy a lot of stuff from your store, thanks to your suggestions on the blog post.

6) User generated content – make your brand soar Another Halloween marketing idea you should consider to build a stronger brand for your business is using User-Generated Content (UGC).

Marketing created by customers for customers is taking over the reign because customers are becoming numb to advertisements produced solely for the sake of the businesses behind them.

Getting customers to join actively in building up your content will not only fuel their love and trust in your brand (because they feel themselves a part of it) but also spread your brand to a much wider pool of potential customers, who are inspired by content real users create for you.

For this Halloween, consider these UGC marketing ideas:  

Host a Halloween costume photo contest on your Facebook page Host a Halloween gift design photo contest on your Facebook page

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Social media content generation: Give away a favorite product your customer likes, if they write a caption about their idea how to turn that product into a Halloween gift, share it on

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Facebook and get at least 30 likes from their friends.

Host a Halloween video contest on your Youtube channel

Consider the nature of your product/service to design the most suitable UGC campaign, but make sure it can be viewed and shared on social media easily, and become viral so that you can reach potential traffic from social platforms.

7) Take advantage of Upselling & Cross Selling, make your customers buy more at once Halloween is the third-largest holiday for shopping after Christmas and Easter, people Are Bigger Spenders at this time of the year. It never gets easier to make the most of consumers’ behavior like in such holiday because they are not likely to buy just one piece of a costume. They’ll need the whole works: dresses, shoes, accessory, etc.

Suggested tool: Boost Sales app The rule with Upselling and Cross Selling is relevance. By offering more relevant products to your customers, and selling them at a lower price than what they would be sold individually, it encourages customers to buy in a bundle. If you’re looking for quick wins, then Upselling and Cross Selling are always the best sales techniques that you should seriously consider.

Conclusion: There are hundreds of Halloween marketing ideas out there to promote your sales campaign on the big day, but not all are practical, easy to complete and effective in short-term. We hope this guide, with detailed instructions and suggested tools, will be of great use to you this Halloween and the whole holiday season.

For more Holiday sales tips (of course, with instructions how you can execute to achieve success) written by our marketing experts, take a look at this guide The 20-Point Checklist to Prepare Your Store for The Holiday Season.

Happy Halloween!

Beeketing