Trick or treat, costumes, jack o’ lanterns; Halloween is a fun and exciting time of year. Extra exciting for e-commerce entrepreneurs because Halloween is the start of the holiday sales period.

A well thought out Halloween marketing campaign can make for a great start to what’s the busiest period of any retailer’s year.

Here are 5 preperation points for growing sales this Halloween.

Give Gifts

The holiday season is discount season. Discounts can get so commonplace that people are no longer motivated by discount offers. They start to feel like they can find discounts on any store during the holidays. Sometimes gifting an extra product or sample is more of an incentive to buy. A tangible gift, something free that customers can hold is often more compelling than a discount. Even when the discount is a higher value.

Gifts are a great way to introduce new products to existing customers. Let them try a luxury sample size or full size for free with this purchase, and increase average basket value for the future.

Send Emails

Halloween being at the start of the holiday period means that customers are not yet suffering from offer email fatigue.

Segment your lists and target them with appropriate messaging. For example, using Halloween could be a great way of re-engaging with lapsed customers, offering them a unique discount or offer, to turn them back into active shoppers.

Take the opportunity to reach out to add character to your email copy.

• Bow down witches – it’s 3 for 2 on Halloween!
• Not to scare you, but you don’t have much time left
• Halloween inspo playing tricks on you? – We gotcha!

Store Design

Avoid making major changes to your store theme just for temporary holiday occasions. Instead, by being creative with 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.

Create Halloween theme banners, promotional boxes and pop-ups to give your site a professional Halloween makeover.

For sellers on eBay, a custom branded Halloween listing design like the one below can be applied to listings with a click of a button in Frooition’s eBay listing software.

Embrace Cross-Selling

Halloween is the third largest holiday for shopping after Christmas and Easter. People are more willing to spend at this time of year. Halloween is the perfect time for cross-selling, as people don’t just want the costume, they want to wig and other accessories to go with it.

If your store doesn’t currently have cross-selling on product pages, this is a quick way to increase your average basket value. If you are selling on eBay, cross-selling is probably the single most powerful design element for increasing sales and basket value. Frooition is the only design company to offer dynamic cross-selling functionality within eBay listings. Dynamic cross promotion scans through your live listings, and automatically shows related products, based on the rules you set. The rules could be size, color, any relevant feature. It will only connect listings which are relevant and live.</p>

Let Users Generate Content

Marketing created by customers for customers is powerful 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.

During Halloween season, 30% more customers enter contests. Facebook is the perfect place for content sharing. Why not consider these user generated content marketing ideas for your Facebook page this Halloween:

• Halloween pet costume competition
• Pumpkin carving competition
• Halloween recipe competition

Consider the nature of your product to design the most suitable UGC campaign. Make sure that the entries are visually engaging social content for your page and the kind of thing that people will want to share. Make it fun for customers by setting them a task that requires creativity and involves things they enjoy. If you sell craft supplies, host a homemade costume competition with a crafting bundle as a prize. For pet supplies sellers, a pet costume competition is perfect (who doesn’t love sharing pictures of their cute pets) and offer a voucher as a prize. Your products do not need to be directly related to Halloween.