Holiday Promotions on the Web

One way of keeping your e-commerce website fresh is to change things up for different holidays. Many websites will add something festive to the masthead at Christmas time and others might put something up for back to school or New Years.

The biggest “holiday” online is now Black Friday/Cyber Monday. While Cyber Monday is deeply ingrained in the American culture, most would be surprised to know that the Cyber Monday craze was started only in 2005 by Shop.org after they noticed that the Monday after Thanksgiving was one of the bigger online shopping days (12th at the time). In late November 2005, the New York Times reported that “The name Cyber Monday grew out of the observation that millions of otherwise productive working Americans, fresh off a Thanksgiving weekend of window shopping, were returning to high-speed Internet connections at work Monday and buying what they liked.”

So if a non-holiday can be turned into a marketing craze, can minor holidays be used to spice up online sales?

If you sell chocolate or flowers you will naturally be pushing Valentines Day, but what about eyeglasses?

I received the following clever marketing message a couple weeks before Valentines Day:

“Shopping for your loved one is not an easy task, especially when you’re trying to find the perfect Valentine’s Day gift. Why not put some extra thought into this Valentine’s Day and get the perfect gift? Zenni Optical provides gorgeous glasses for the Valentine’s Day. Give your lover a new vision in 2012. Cute and useful!”

Zenni is taking a chocolate and flowers holiday and using it to market eyeglasses as a gift – what a great idea.

So how can you take charge and link your product to an existing holiday in a non-traditional way?