Valentine’s Day is more than just an excuse to tell your significant other how much you love them. For brands, it’s an opportunity to increase sales, engage new customers and tap into a day that is top of mind with consumers. Aparna Gray, head of marketing APAC at e-commerce acceleration provider SLI Systems shares how to target last minute Valentine’s lovers.

For any business, regardless of industry, focusing on timely days provides a unique opportunity to reach your target audience and sell products you know consumers will be looking for – especially on mobile. Increasingly, the pathway to purchase is on mobile and year-on-year there is an increase in m-commerce due to the flexibility, fast delivery and overall convenience it offers consumers. For brands, the opportunity is to meet consumers head-on with mobile and reach them 24/7.

With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, here are four tips for brands to maximise their reach and engagement online and on mobile – Ensuring that purchasing a rose won’t be a thorn in your customers’ side:

1: Autocomplete sentences

Having an autocomplete feature is a great way to increase the speed at which customers navigate your site. This is because it means that users only have to type in a few letters to find the search term they want. With holidays such as Valentine’s Day, shoppers tend to be looking for specific gifts, making this easy to implement. SLI analysis around Valentine’s Day last year found 64 per cent of shoppers were searching for roses over any other flower with almost half (47 per cent) looking for red roses.

2: Give shoppers what they want

Due to the smaller screens, mobile shoppers need to see what they want in the first three to five results, or they’ll bounce off your website. It is crucial to make sure your search results are always accurate and relevant and use images where possible to highlight particular results.

3: Refine your refinements

For dropdowns options, use large, tap friendly buttons that list only the most popular refinements. This makes it easier for shoppers to narrow down to the perfect product they are looking to buy their loved one.

4: Make it personal

It is a smart idea to use site search data to inform your merchandising. As part of this you can watch for common searches and fast growing trends. Once you have mined this data, you can use it to create merchandising banners for the most popular products.

Timely shopping days are a major opportunity for e-retailers to optimise their mobile functionality and capitalise on the sales potential. By making these simple changes quickly and testing them, e-retailers can take full advantage and see return of investment in sales.