By Corrina Keefe
Halloween is now worth more than nine billion dollars each year. Consumers are spending more money than ever on Halloween costumes, candy, decorations, and events. So you can’t afford to miss out! Learn how to get leads and increase revenue with these Halloween sales ideas, promotions and contests.
Four big holidays dominate the sales calendar in the second half of the year: Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Christmas season. If you can start with an effective Halloween promotion, you’ll be set up for the rest of the holiday season! Let’s take a look at 4 Halloween sales ideas to get you started – plus some tips to make your Halloween marketing ideas even more effective.
Define your Halloween sales goals
The first step is defining your goals. What do you want to achieve with your Halloween sales contest?
- If you want to increase followers and engagement, start with Halloween social media giveaways.
- To build an active online community, try Halloween contests such as photo competitions and hashtag contests.
- If you want to get leads and increase sales, then you should focus on quizzes, surveys, recruitment, and rewards. And this is what we focus on today.
When you want to increase sales, then you should give the customer what they want. That means listening to their feedback, in the form of quizzes and surveys. It means advertizing your brand through reliable sources, such as a word-of-mouth recruitment contest. And it means rewarding customers who join or stay loyal to your brand.
In the sections below, we explain these Halloween sales strategies in more detail.
Get free promotion templates, case studies, practical tips, and Halloween sales ideas at our Halloween campaign hub.
Halloween sales contest ideas: the creepy quiz
Let’s start with our Halloween marketing ideas. Quizzes are quick, fun, and easy for consumers. Ask some hair-raising Halloween questions – then run a prize draw for everyone who participates. If you want to make the promotion more exclusive, you can limit the prize draw to people who get all the answers right.
Everyone who joins the quiz has to fill in a registration form. Customize that form to get the lead info you need, from email addresses to location and even shopping habits. Once the promotion is over, feed all that information back into your CRM, and follow up with participants who seem like good sales prospects. However, don’t ask for too much information, as every registration form field is a new participation barrier.
You can also use quizzes to boost sales more directly. Ask questions about your products and services, to educate consumers about your brand. Remember to offer a prize that’s in proportion to the difficulty of the quiz. If you ask more than three or four questions, then you’ll need a generous reward!
Building a Halloween quiz is easier than you think! Try the DEMO – then copy the template for an instant Halloween promotion.
Halloween sales contest ideas: the spooky survey
Just like quizzes, you can create a survey to celebrate Halloween and educate consumers.
But since a survey is based on customer opinions, you can also learn more about their shopping habits, preferences, and motivations. Ask your followers where they like to shop, their favorite thing about Halloween, their costume ideas for this year… The possibilities are endless!
Here’s a great example from Walmart. They ran a survey with a creative twist. Instead of asking formal questions, they asked customers to fill a bucket with their choice of candy.
This was a great way to inform customers about products available, and learn which products they liked best. In return, participants could win a $500 pack of Halloween treats.
Halloween sales contest ideas: refer a frightful friend
What’s your most valuable asset for marketing? Current customers.
Happy customers will come back for more, talk about your brand online, and recommend you to their friends. Not everyone in your audience trust s advertizing or traditional campaigns… but they do trust their friends. That’s why recruitment is such a powerful tool.
With a recruiters contest, you can run a classic prize draw with a twist. For every new participant that users recruit, they gain one more entry in the prize draw. That’s one more chance to win – and one more sales lead for you.
Halloween sales contest ideas: gruesome codes
Coupons and codes are underrated methods to increase sales, on Halloween and all year round. They encourage purchases, reward customers, and highlight offers or events. And most importantly of all, coupons and codes convert customers from online to offline.
You could offer a Halloween discount for everyone who registers their details. Incentivize purchases with a special reward for paying customers. Other good prizes are free gifts or free shipping.
Remember, Halloween marks the start of the holiday shopping season – so consumers are looking for value!
Barefoot Venus wanted to reward their paying customers for choosing their brand. They organized a promotion – right in time for Halloween – in which they gave away awesome prizes to only those that have previously purchased one of their products, as the promotion could be accessed just by the users who obtained a valid code from the product packagings.
The coupon format meant that the tickets could be verified at point of use. But there were other benefits, too!
The promotion advertized the event to other followers, and encouraged them to purchase tickets. The results of the contest were published on Facebook, increasing the brands’ reach on social media.
5 quick tips to increase sales on Halloween
- Optimize your promotion for mobile users. Increasingly, consumers use mobiles and tablets to research purchases and search online. Make sure your quiz, survey, or contest looks good on a range of devices.
- Set up your promotion a few weeks in advance. When do you start planning your Halloween costume? If you want to increase sales on Halloween, your campaign should actually be up and running for a few weeks before Halloween.
- Tailor prizes to your target audience. Choose competition prizes that showcase your brand and are relevant to Halloween. They should be attractive to customers, but still in proportion to the contest.
- Coordinate your branding with the Halloween theme. Use the Easypromos design tools to make your promotion look smart, on-brand… and spooky!
- Share on social media. Spread the word about your Halloween-themed contests on all your social networks, as well as your website and email newsletter.
from: easypromosapp.com
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