Valentine’s Day 2024
In 2024, Waitrose’s Valentine’s Day campaign was elevated from silver to gold status, following the success of the previous year’s meal deal launch. As rising inflation made consumers more price-conscious, the popularity of the affordable Valentine’s Day meal deal grew, prompting increased investment and visibility for the campaign.
As the digital designer leading the campaign, my role was to highlight the Valentine’s Day meal deal as a compelling date-night alternative by bringing awareness to the offer and ultimately driving sales. To support the uplift in the campaign's scale, I led its digital rollout by translating the seasonal toolkit into cohesive, user-focused designs across Waitrose’s website, app, email, and social channels. The goal was to create a seamless and engaging experience for customers that balanced the visual campaign messaging with functional design, making it easy for them to discover, trust, and act on offers across all digital platforms.
To optimise for digital screens, I carefully adjusted toolkit colours. For example, I deepened the cream tone to improve legibility and provide sufficient contrast against the brighter pattern elements, enhancing accessibility without
compromising visual integrity.
Beyond the value messaging, a key part of the campaign was emphasising the Good Housekeeping award the meal deal received. This trust signal was integrated thoughtfully into the design to communicate quality and reinforce its affordability, helping to drive sales.
Using the Valentine’s Day toolkit, I curated a cohesive and seamless user journey from homepage to checkout, ensuring customers could easily discover and engage with the offers surrounding the campaign. I developed multiple iterations and variations to effectively showcase different campaign offers as they launched over time, adapting the design to incorporate ‘coming soon’ messaging which built anticipation and excitement for the meal deal release.
On the website, Google Analytics revealed that the Valentine’s Day landing page saw an 87% engagement rate, compared to 74% the previous year, while the banner featuring the meal deal achieved a 21% click-through rate, up from 12% in 2023. These results suggest that my approach to visual consistency and user flow across digital touchpoints resonated with customers, leading to a sizeable increase in website traffic and conversions.
Social media assets
The Valentine’s Day email marked the first deployment of a redesigned campaign email template developed collaboratively with the team. Previously, our campaign emails embraced a minimalistic and understated style. The new design fully utilises the campaign toolkit to create a bold, immersive experience that ensures a consistent and fluid visual identity across all digital platforms. Even with static imagery, the refreshed design delivers a more engaging and visually compelling experience for customers, helping to capture attention and reinforce visual identity throughout the campaign.
The Valentine’s Day campaign email achieved an engagement rate of 3.95%, outperforming the average benchmark of 2.64% and ranking in the top 3 performing emails of the year. As part of the design, I introduced dynamic motion through GIFs, which enhanced visual engagement, particularly on mobile, where movement draws attention and improves scannability.
This performance uplift reflects the impact of the redesign of our email template, which I helped implement. By integrating the seasonal toolkits into email layouts, we created a more visually cohesive and campaign-aligned experience across platforms. The success of this approach has led to it becoming a core part of the team’s ongoing email design strategy.
The meal deal itself exceeded expectations, selling out online with customers being led to purchase the remaining stock in stores. This success revealed a clear customer demand for affordable, high-quality ready meals, leading to the launch of several new offers such as the £12 No.1 Dine-In for 2 and the £12 Indian Meal Deal for 4. These follow-up offers were directly informed by the insights gathered through campaign performance and user engagement metrics.