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What are the first things that come to mind when you think of Halloween? Costumes and lots of sweet treats. Dressing up, playing a part, enjoying rewards – these are all parts of the Halloween experience. There’s no reason why your brand can’t join in on the fun.

When your eCommerce site dresses up and joins in on the spooky fun, you’ll be able to invite your customers into a fun, engaging experience that benefits you both. Make 13 your lucky number this Halloween with these ideas to spook up your site.

1. Add a Halloween twist to your logo.

When it comes to dressing up logos for the occasion, Google Doodles take the cake and are great examples of getting it right. ThinkGeek also dresses up their icon for different events and has found it offers a boost to social engagement. Incorporating different events and holidays into your logo can bring out and showcase the more human, playful side of your brand. It resonates with your customer and helps build buzz, especially on social media.

2. Don’t forget to tweak your social profiles with spooky effects.

Aside from decorating your profile pictures and banners with spooky images, you have some other options. If you’re on Pinterest, don’t be afraid to create seasonal boards. If it works for your products, create a board for each collection you create; you don’t want to overwhelm your account with billions of boards, but, if a few pieces or collections fall under a common theme, it makes sense to create a board featuring them. There are a lot of options for ecommerce on social media; it’s definitely worth exploring your options & taking advantage of the seasonal sentiments.

3. Create and promote themed product packages.

Take the Halloween mood and create your own spooky collections out of your products. You already have the theme, all you need to do is pull in related products, create a package out of them, & design a tempting offer that relates to your audience during Halloween. For example, if you offer home décor, create fall/Halloween-themed sets & setups (don’t forget to set up appropriate related products for upsell & cross-sell opportunities!).

If you sell apparel, pull together jeans, boots, & plaid to target a quick, DIY cowhand costume. Expand it and pull entire collections of clothes together that translate into costumes. Collections like that are great for social media, especially if you focus on the DIYers or the people who need to pull a last-minute costume together. Plus, they’re perfect for Pinterest.

4. Hold contests.

People like to get involved in causes and win things for minimal effort. That’s why offering more entries for likes/shares on social media works so well. If executed well, it takes minimal effort on the customer’s part for more chances to win something worthwhile or to make a difference for a particular cause. As far as contests are concerned, something that results in user-generated content (UGC) benefits everyone – it gives you fresh content for your site and it gives your customers a fun experience and potentially a prize.

Taking inspiration from the previous section, instead of you creating the collections, have customers create their own product packages and submit them for a prize. Depending on your products & audience, perhaps the person who creates the best product package gets it for free and gets to see it featured on the homepage? For a slightly simpler activity, host a costume contest where users submit costumed selfies incorporating your featured product or products. Award prizes for different categories to encourage variety & creativity (e.g. scariest, silliest, the one with the most products, the most creative incorporation, etc.). Pick featured products to narrow things down – choose a bestseller, launch a new product, or feature a collection to be used specifically for your contests.

5. Create a Halloween game or quiz.

People also love games & quizzes, even more so when there’s a reward for doing them. That’s why gamification works so well. Create a Halloween maze, crossword puzzle, survey, or even a virtual tour through a haunted house on your site. Give a coupon or other enticing offer upon completion to encourage engagement.

6. Edit email subject lines & offer text to include spooky language.

Including spooky language in your emails, offers, blog posts, & social posts, are fun ways for your brand to get involved in Halloween & communicate in a more relatable way with your customers. It helps to get people into the spirit of Halloween (or encourages it if they’re already there). Plus, if they’re already looking for Halloween stuff, they’ll be primed for it and matching your language to their expectations helps them move smoothly and ambivalently across platforms and through your marketing funnel.

7. Create Halloween related content.

Speaking of the marketing funnel, content helps you build that pathway. With search engines and mobile devices, consumers can enter your marketing funnel at any point they choose – they don’t necessarily go directly from the beginning to the end. Segment your audience and, when creating content for them, differentiate the depth and type of content based on their various entry points to ensure users have a clear path to conversion, no matter where they enter the journey.

So, if the marketing for your products takes on a Halloween theme, your content should too. Use blog posts to feature and tie together offers. Create gift-buying guides specifically for Halloween shoppers. If you have a Pinterest board for Halloween, promote it on social media & feature it in a blog post. Create a deck of slides or an infographic (or both) to break down a quick how-to; then, embed it in a blog post & promote accordingly. List posts, as long as they’re done well, are a popular, quick read:

• • Tip sheets for using “product x” for Halloween
  • How not to use “product x” for Halloween
  • The worst ways “x” has been used for Halloween
  • “X” tips to stay safe this Halloween
  • “X” ways “product x” makes your Halloween party to-die-for

And so on, and so forth. Choose whatever angles fit with your audience & your brand and go for it!

8. “Spookify” a playlist & promote.

Include songs from the “Spookify” Spotify playlist on your social media profiles or on your site to add an extra element for engagement. Or, create a customized Halloween playlist to include on site & to share across your social media profiles. Take it a step further and embed it in a blog post to help your customers complete their Halloween experience, whether they’re hosting a party, creating a trick-or-treat experience, or just in the mood for something spooky & fun (it’s a major bonus if some of your products fall into these themes as well).

9. Incorporate current trends.

There are always a ton of things happening around Halloween – take advantage of them. Did a new vampire movie come out that everyone is talking about? What about werewolves? Did the new season of “The Walking Dead” premiere? Whatever it is, use it to your advantage. Guardian Packaging put together a list of 50 Halloween Promotional Ideas. In it, they mention a hardware store in Omaha, Nebraska that created a “Zombie Preparedness Center” on their website to help people “zombie-proof” their homes. Incorporation of current trends done right can show huge returns.

10. Add monster hands/claws creeping over the edges of your contact form & subscription boxes.

Aside from just updating pictures on your profiles and around your website, decorate your contact forms & subscription boxes for Halloween too. Some monster hands or claws creeping over the edges, pointing to your buttons & checkboxes, would add a little fun to your site, while drawing attention to your lead generation forms and encouraging interaction with them.

11. Implement pop-up monsters with funny text on your site.

You know those pop-up call-to-action (CTA) boxes you see on sites either every time you visit a page or are about to leave? Here’s the thing, they’re annoying and disruptive, but they often work (as long the offer is worth it). Now, imagine that instead of a standard subscription form, your users see an awesome visual of a monster with entertaining text. It’s an attractive visual, one of a series, and if they happen to see every one of the series, they could win a $100 gift card (or something more desirable for your target audience). That’s easy enough, right? All they have to do is explore the site to find the different monsters. Even more, if they share the contest with their friends, they get even more entries to win.

Having different versions increases engagement, and creating a journey with a worthwhile prize at the end makes it irresistible. If that doesn’t fit your style, but you still want to increase engagement with repeat visitors, have different monster visuals that are randomized (or even personalized!) pop up. If the visual is engaging and attractive enough, visitors will try to see all the different versions out of curiosity. You’ve offered them a fun experience and they want to see what else you have; add share buttons to each of the images & you’ll make it easier for them to share the fun experience with their friends (especially if you take the personalization route).

Sometimes those pop-ups are only triggered by hovering near the back or exit button and are an attempt to re-engage the visitor. To keep it simple and try your hand at re-engagement tactics, you simply have the monster visual pop up upon attempted exit. Tag it, “Leaving so soon?,” pair it with an offer, and see what happens.

12. Host a haunted house.

If you have a physical location, turn it into a haunted house. Choose a night to include late-night shopping hours and make an event out of it. If this idea fits right in with your branding and your audience, but you don’t have a physical location, a pop up shop, renting a space, or teaming up with a local business are all options. Set up the haunted house so that it opens up into a product showroom, where customers can drink apple cider, eat candy, and check out your products.

If the physical route isn’t your thing, keep it all online instead! Make your website the haunted house – put your users on a track to explore the different rooms (your product categories) and have related monsters & “challenges” present themselves throughout. If they make it to the end safely, they get whatever offer you’ve created for the occasion. Offer them more entries for sharing & encouraging their friends to take the journey too. If you want to add a competitive layer, give them a percentage score at the end, “You lasted longer than ‘x%’ of the people in your group,” or, “You’re ’x%’ scaredy-cat…this time.”

13. Create a directory of local places who are hosting Halloween parties.

When it comes to digital marketing & content creation, the best advice you hear is to focus on quality over quantity and to be a resource, instead of just listing information. With this in mind, you can become party central for your area – literally. Create a directory of all the local places who are hosting Halloween parties and separate them into categories by type of business, industry, specific location within the region, etc. If it makes sense to include it, show how your product/s fit into those atmospheres. If it’s a good resource, it may be able to earn you a few links as well.

Halloween is coming up fast, so it might be too late to successfully implement some of these for this year. But, next year is still on the table. Gain some inspiration from this list, brainstorm, and plan ahead for a flawless implementation and a fun experience that you and your visitors will love. Happy haunting!