How to Prepare Your Dropshipping Online Stores for Halloween 2022?

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It doesn’t matter what products you sell. What remains for sure is that you should run your holiday sales regularly. That being said, you have to know that the scary Halloween is first approaching. 31^st October is only a matter of days. It is time everybody gets extremely excited about the trick or treat, Jack-O’-Lantern, and candy bags.

However, for dropshipping entrepreneurs, it’s time to get super excited and equally worried at the same time because the highest sales peak of the year is knocking at an inpatient rate. If your planning strategies are not well executed, you will lose while everyone else wins big. You, therefore, need some damn healthy Halloween ideas to boost your store’s sales on Halloween and the subsequent holidays after that. As an online dropshipper, you have every opportunity to get ahead of the trend by discovering exactly what your target audience is planning for this season.

Therefore, what are people buying on Halloween? In other words, which trending products should you sell for Halloween? And, how best should you prepare for this highly coveted holiday?

Keep reading. You are assured of adequate inspiration from this article.

How Online dropshippers should have their heads held high in this coming Halloween Season

 It is needless to say that since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more people have turned to online shopping and as such, many people are engaged in dropshipping business.

According to research conducted by National Retail Federation through Proper Insights and analytics, the total Halloween Spending in 2022, is expected to reach a record of $10.6 billion, exceeding the last year’s record of 10.1 billion. Besides, Participation in Halloween- related activities will resume to pre-pandemic levels, with 69% of consumers planning to celebrate the holiday this year, up from 65% in 2021and comparable to 68% in 2019.

The survey also reveals that although all ages of shoppers plan to take part in Halloween festivities more this year than last year, the generation Z (18-24) year-olds have amped up their Halloween celebrations more than any other group. Unsurprisingly, these age groups get a good amount of their Halloween inspiration from Social media and are significantly more likely than the average consumer, to use TikTok and Pinterest as their inspiration for their Halloween costumes.  

Also important to note is that these younger, tech-savvy cohorts, pull inspiration from Social media more than other shoppers. They are also more likely than any other shoppers to get costume inspiration from friends and relatives or even be inspired by a retail store or costume shop. In addition, they are more likely to shop at these types of online stores than any other age group.

Some of the Trending products you Should sell during Halloween

• Halloween Costumes

Halloween costumes have always been a gem for customers during the festival. What makes Halloween enjoyable and lively is how people dress up in scary-looking garb to spook their unsuspecting neighbors or even do their superhero outfits. The costumes can be anything from scary, spooky, hideous, and funny to creative and heartfelt, all at the same time. While witches' and magicians’ dressing styles are always scary and unfancied by many people, Halloween costumes almost take similar shapes, but they are also looking to dress up like their favorite celebrities, television characters, and other pop culture references.

The most adorable Halloween costumes are those for children, adults, and pets. The image below shows some of the Halloween costumes you can go for.

• Halloween Party Masks

This forms our next highly trending Halloween product for our discussion, which is a party mask. The reason is, people like to dress up and wear masks to celebrate Halloween. They can be part of Halloween costumes or best fit for those unwilling to wear the whole set of heavy costumes, but don’t want to be left out of the party either. Want more ideas on the best product for this niche? Dive into Dropshipman's official page, and by only doing a quick research, you will be able to see the most trending masks for this year.

• Halloween Decoration items

In most cases, during this festival, people fancy decorating every corner of their houses. They believe that a house that is not decorated is impaired. Decoration makes them feel the true spirit of Halloween. The decorations go beyond just houses. Offices, parties, and cars just to mention a few, are also decorated. So, your next dropshipping products on the list should be Halloween decoration items.

• Halloween Accessories

These can vary from Headbands, legwarmer, baskets, artificial hair, and jewelry to fashionable items. There are thousands of accessories out there to catch your customers' eyes.

• Halloween Cosmetics

Having equipped yourself with all of the above-mentioned Halloween products, you now need to have makeup as a supplement. Of course, dressing up can’t be perfect and complete without make-up. Such products as Zombie make-up kits, Vampire make-up kits, contact lenses, face paints, and temporary tattoos just to mention a few, should miss your dropshipping list.

How to Prepare Your Dropshipping Store for Halloween

Now that I have taken you through some of the most outstanding products for Halloween, it is high time you get to know effective ways of preparing your dropshipping store for a successful sale during this highly celebrated holiday.

1. Offer freebies that are perfect gifts your customers will be lured to give to their friends or families

To have an edge over your competitors as a dropshipping supplier, offer generous discounts and freebies. Remember, a discount alone won’t work as everybody throws a discount during the holiday season. You, therefore, need to for anything else besides discounts that can attract your customers and make them purchase. Here is where freebies (items people give to their friends, family members, colleagues, etc. as Halloween gifts) come in handy.

Show the items right on the homepage to capture the customer’s attention. You can as well show it on the cart page as a last-minute offer to boost the checkout rate.

2. Design a spooky look for your storefront

Your dropshipping store should be kept festive with a scary outlook. Don’t make it too expensive by designing a totally new theme. Instead, focus on decorating flexible elements that are bewitching and catchy enough to get customers' impressions when visiting your store for the first time.

My recommendations for a decent store:

• Use the welcome coupon pop-up

Design a spooky welcome popup that appears when a customer first enters your store to captivate their attention and impress them with a catchy Halloween image and thrilling message copy. Take a look at the image below.

 

• Header bar + CTA

Sometimes, instead of an image, message and CTA copies can as well do the trick if they are strategically placed. For instance, instead of let’s say; “We offer free shipping on orders from $40”, change it to, “ Buy from $40+ to have the Vampire ship your order free to your window on Halloween night.”

Avoid making so many changes to your store theme just because of temporary holiday occasions. Instead, be meticulous and tactful in flexible elements and copies that you can take 100% control of. This is still enough for you to create a ghostly feeling that not only excites your customers but also motivates them to purchase from your store.

3. You can boost your sales promotion by sending Halloween gift cards to your prospective buyers

In case you are intending to run a special Halloween promotion, immediately go ahead and keep your customers aware at least 2-3 weeks earlier, that you are intending to have your big promotions, fun gifts, or good deals for them on a holiday week.

Tips for doing this

• Come up with the gift cards that you have designed by yourself if your budget is too low and fixed to have a designer or even purchase a gift card using  MailChimp templates. When they happen to have purchased at your store, attach the e-gift card to their receipt billing email.
• Offer a variety of gift cards with different values and widely promote them to make customers have a habit of coming back regularly to collect as many gift cards as possible.
• You can as well send an automated follow-up email to constantly remained your customers of the gift cards they have and encourage them to come back to your store on the promotion days to redeem them.

4. Get more traffic from Google with blog posts on “Halloween Gift Ideas”

Needless to say, many people such for gift ideas right before Halloween D-Day. The search volume for Halloween gift ideas Keyword and other relevant Keywords amounts to 10,000—which is a huge number.

In case you have a blog on your site for content marketing, always write a blog post targeting the Halloween gift ideas Keyword, then you can SEO it to the first page of Google when people search that Keyword.

5. You can well use user-generated content—to make your brand soar

This in essence is the creation of Marketing by customers for customers, and it is rapidly taking over the reign because customers are developing deaf ears to advertisements produced solely for the sake of the business behind them. Influencing customers to join actively in building up your content will not only enhance their love and loyalty to your brand but also spread your brand to a much wider pool of potential customers, who are inspired by the content's real users.

Here are a few tips for this

• You can host a Halloween gift design photo contest on your Facebook page.
• You can also host a Halloween costume photo contest on your Facebook page.
• Host a Halloween video contest on your YouTube Channel.
• Host a Halloween hashtag challenge on TikTok and use TikTok ads to leverage it.
• Finally, use social media content generation: Do this by giving away a favorite product your customer likes. If they happen to write a caption about their ideas of how to turn that product into a Halloween gift, share it on Facebook and get at least 30 likes from their friends.

Conclusion

There may be volumes of Halloween Marketing ideas out there to advertise your sales campaigns. Nonetheless, not all are practical, easy to easy accomplish, and generally effective in the short term. You should remember that this holiday is still a very crucial event in the whole year for many dropshipping business doers. That is why making a clear plan with strategic preparation for your online store for the upcoming Halloween is very important to help you acquire more customers as well as to make them increase their shopping experience at your store for more transactions in the future. Hope this guide with this detailed analysis and suggested tools, will be of ideal use to you this Halloween and the rest of the holidays to come.