As is the case with all sales-driven holidays, Mother’s and Father’s Day each present a prime opportunity for ecommerce businesses to increase their sales. These two holidays are especially important because their gift giving traditions are not strictly tied to seasonal themes—they’re more about what the parent likes, which opens up marketing opportunities for online stores in a lot more industries. Below, we’ll walk through a few things you can do to prepare your ecommerce business for the upcoming Mother’s Day and Father’s Day holidays.
1. Set up a dedicated section of your site with Mother’s Day and Father’s Day gift ideas.
As with all holidays, it is wise to set up a dedicated category page or “Gift Guide” landing page on your ecommerce site that includes quicklinks to the most gift-worthy products sold in your store. This type of page helps customers find what they are looking for more quickly than they would just browsing your site as a whole, which they will appreciate. Think outside the box—for example, it may feel too odd to suggest car parts as a holiday gift, but a gift card that will help parental figures work on their prized automobile is a great option.
2. Offer sales and/or discounts specific to each holiday.
Slashing the list price in some way to encourage sales around the holidays is an expectation these days, the benefit for you being that it incentivizes people to buy from YOU instead of a competitor. For your discount strategy, consider again the products that might work well as gifts—do they make up most of your inventory, or a smaller portion?
If most of your items could be considered giftable, then offering a sitewide discount ($5 off your cart with the code MOTHERSDAY, 15% off a $50 purchase with the code FATHERSDAY, etc.) would be sensible. If you offer only a few gift-worthy items or feel gift cards are the best gift option, consider placing those specific items on sale or offering a freebie with a gift card purchase. Regardless, make sure your holiday discounts are mentioned clearly and prominently on your site leading up to each.
3. Create your Mother’s Day and Father’s Day campaigns.
Once you set up your “gifts” landing page and sale/discount information on your site, you’ll of course need to get the message out to potential customers. A couple of great ways to promote your holiday campaign are through PPC and Social Media—you can apply the suggestions from the posts linked above to any holiday! You may also benefit from sending out email campaigns to your existing customer list that reference your sale prices/discount and link directly to your gift guide landing page.
4. Leverage upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
The only thing better than making a sale is making an ever BIGGER sale. To achieve this, you can focus on creating upsell and cross-sell opportunities on your designated landing page and/or product pages. For you, of course, this can help increase your Average Order Value, resulting in more revenue. In the case of your customers, it allows them to consider offering a more complete—and therefore thoughtful-seeming—gift to their mother and/or father figures.
The best way to do this is by adding prominent links to related or higher-value items. As an example, if one of the gift items you’re focusing on is a mixer for baking, you could upsell by including suggestions to higher-priced mixers OR cross-sell by including suggestions to aprons, oven mitts, or other lower-priced/“add-on” items. If you’re recommending books to purchase, you could include links to bookmarks or portable reading lights that you sell as well.
5. Track success to inform next year’s Mother’s Day and Father’s Day initiatives.
Finally, make sure that you’re doing what you can to track how each of the initiatives you’ve put forth are performing so that you’ll know how to adjust and optimize your strategy for next year. Ask yourself: which initiatives are working/not working? Have you noticed anything other retailers are doing this year that might be good to try next year? Write out a summary of the results of your holiday campaign when it has concluded (and the experience is still fresh in your mind) so that you have something well-thought-out to reference next year.
In Conclusion
By following the suggestions listed above, you’ll be in a better position to maximize your business’s profits in May and June. Best of all, tailoring your approach to what customers are specifically looking for at the time—gifts for mom and dad—builds goodwill with shoppers (and their families!) and can work toward creating repeat customers.