Like the day itself, Mother’s Day marketing is an occasion one should forget at your peril. Despite the gloomy economic outlook and contracted spending in many areas, consumers continue to prioritize red-letter days and are less than frugal when it comes to celebrating the impactful women in their lives. Over the last decade, Mother’s Day consumer spending has risen annually, in the U.S. topping a staggering $35.7BN in 2023 — a 12.6% surge on the previous year.
Irrespective of stretched household budgets, forecasters expect consumers to make Mother’s Day extra special in 2024, with increasing spend on flowers, gifting, beauty and skincare. The challenge as always is rising above the marketing noise and being top-of-mind when a consumer decides they are ready to purchase. Here are five digital marketing tips to boost sales and deliver campaigns your mother would be proud of.
Early preparation is the key to capturing both organized and last-minute shoppers
With every retailer competing for attention and market share, it can be tough to stand out in the oftentimes protracted purchasing process. Generally, you can seldom start too early, so launching in late March/early April establishes a strong presence from the outset and helps you gain momentum as Mother’s Day edges closer. Simultaneously, catering to last-minute shoppers, who become more active in the days leading up to Mothering Sunday, puts your brand front-and-center during their more hasty decision-making process.
Send the right message, at the right time with email
When it comes to driving sales, email has always been the preeminent digital channel with its ability for personalization and delivering a verifiable ROI. To make sure your email marketing efforts are converting and driving value, highlight your value proposition early — what specific products are perfect for Mother’s Day and why they should purchase them from you.
An average email drives only $0.04 in revenue compared to $0.95 from Wunderkind. The difference is personalized messaging triggered by real-time user behavior. “Send to all” no longer cuts it from a customer or brand perspective. Wunderkind empowers brands to send more triggered emails to customers automatically, at moments in the shopping journey that indicate that they are open to brand interaction. High engagement equals higher sales.
Deliver added value
This is the one time consumers wont have their mother to remind them the day is approaching, so it’s a good idea to step into the all-encompassing nurturing, guiding, quarterback role. Highlighting last shipping days, offers and options for shoppers that have left it too late adds value here. For the stragglers, this is an opportune time to sell experiences or gift cards that don’t need to be delivered physically.
If you accrue a sale, you’ll be sending a confirmation email anyway, so this is a great opportunity to go for an upsell. Mum is worth it, and chocolates are a great accompaniment for flowers.
While we’re here it’s worth noting that Mother’s Day isn’t a happy day for everyone. Giving recipients the option to opt out of Mother’s Day marketing is not only the right thing to do, but a great way of fostering better brand / consumer relationships and not bombarding them with well-meaning, but upsetting content.
Don’t forget about text
Like email, text is an owned channel so it offers unparalleled ROI compared to display, paid social and CPC. Where it supersedes email is its relevancy and immediacy. To make the most of text messaging capabilities for driving revenue, rather than merely mimic email campaigns, retailers should leverage text capabilities for real-time engagement and use it to deliver time-sensitive deals, reminders, discounts, order progress and tracking.
When retailers work with Wunderkind to trigger text campaigns, we account for 5-10% of total digital revenue, so if you’re not leveraging text, you’re leaving a huge amount of sales on the table.
Don’t be reliant on cookies
The lifeblood of the digital marketing ecosystem for decades, but by the end of this year Google will have finally fully curtailed the use of third-party tracking cookies to power advertising (Safari and Firefox already have). Cookies have always been a profligate tactic for driving sales and with its continuing depreciation, coupled with limited ad inventory during the Mother’s Day uptick in activity it’s an inefficient solution.
Brands partnering with performance marketing solutions this Mother’s Day that have an identity graph can go beyond the constraints of cookies. They will greatly increase the number of opportunities to re-engage consumers by identifying large percentages of unknown traffic using first-party data and can lean on higher-performing owned channels like email and SMS to close deals.
By recognizing online shoppers regardless of cookie or login status and across multiple devices, browsers and sessions, Wunderkind is driving 6-11% of all digital revenue for its clients and outperforming competitors by 6x.
Scaling your Mother’s Day revenue
84% of U.S. adults celebrate Mother’s Day and forward-thinking retail brands are turning to Wunderkind to identify this surge in website traffic and use it to intelligently trigger the best offer in real-time to a given visitor across multiple channels. This is the key to not only scaling revenue, but delivering guaranteed revenue-as-a-service on your owned properties.
Last year, Wunderkind recognized over 9 billion consumer devices (roughly double the amount of active global consumers), equating to trillions of browsing events and crucially, $5BN in revenue for our clients.
So begin early, personalize and be thoughtful. Appeal to as many people as you can, do as much of the legwork and provide gifts or experiences that can be purchased with just the click of a button. And remember what works, or doesn’t work can also be applied to Father’s Day, Back to School, Black Friday weekend and beyond.