Is your brand ready for Mother’s Day? (May 8th this year!)
Spring is here and before you know it it will be time for mother’s day across most of North America and Europe. As a non-denominational holiday that crosses cultural and religious barriers, Mother’s Day is an excellent opportunity for brands to deepen relationships with their existing audience as well as build authentic and emotional connections with new customers.
With a few simple strategies for making a great Mother’s Day campaign, your app can be a relief and a resource for shoppers looking to make mom’s day extra special. Try these ideas for building strong Mother’s Day promotions that will ensure your growing audience comes back for more even after the holiday is done.
Allow Opt-Outs for Your Mother’s Day Promotions
It may sound counterintuitive when planning your Mother’s Day marketing to give your audience the option to skip the campaign altogether, but more and more brands are seeing the value in letting their subscribers do just that. The trend started in 2020, when certain brands felt that sending a Mother’s Day message just months into the Covid-19 pandemic would be unkind to an audience who may be pained by social distancing, stuck in difficult family situations, or in mourning. The trend has continued as more brands recognize the value of allowing their audience to opt out of Mother’s Day campaigns, and other potentially sensitive holidays like Valentine’s Day and Father’s Day. Kate Muhl, marketing analyst at Gartner calls this strategy a “retention move” saying that it’s a good way to “stem the tide of people who are frustrated, hurt and triggered by your [campaign], and opt out altogether.” In other words, letting your audience skip sensitive campaigns can actually increase brand loyalty, and keep valuable customers from unsubscribing to your lists based on a single campaign.
To replicate this experience in your app your on your website, Storyly offers a labeling feature that allows you to send different stories to different users based on their needs and preferences. By connecting your CRM to the Storyly dashboard, it’s easy to keep users who’ve opted out of your campaign from getting the wrong message.
Inspire Shoppers with Just the Right Idea
Mother’s Day is the third biggest retail season of the year, with winter holidays topping the charts followed by back-to-school shopping. As of last year, flowers and cards are still the top searches for the holiday, but that doesn’t mean that shoppers aren’t also looking for inspiration to choose just the right gift. In fact, #4 on Google’s top “for mom” searches are unique gifts. One way to use your mother’s day marketing plan to help buyers choose the right gift is to offer lifestyle content that inspires your audience with aspirational ideas for making mom feel special. Flowers, jewelry, and brunch may seem generic at first glance but on closer examination, it’s clear that many shoppers want to add a personal touch or message to their Mother’s Day celebrations. Whether it’s by choosing her favorite flowers or colors, personalizing jewelry with initials or birthstones, spending quality time at a special restaurant, or cooking a homemade meal, shoppers want to make sure that any gift feels like it was chosen not just for any mom, but for their mom.
Gift bundles can be a great Mother’s Day strategy for mobile apps because they allow shoppers to accomplish multiple goals at once. With themed gift bundles, shoppers can give a “hand-selected” feel to what they buy for mom while minimizing the need to consider and evaluate a large number of products. A well-curated gift bundle can be a huge relief to shoppers who are thrilled for the opportunity to choose a gift that feels personal in just a few clicks. Consider adding a discount on gift bundles, to make the choice even easier. With customer journey smoothing tools like stories, you can show a full screen, distraction-free highlight of your best gift bundles and guide users towards completing their purchase with embedded CTAs.
This is also an excellent opportunity for lifestyle content that inspires the desired feel of a gift for Mother’s day. Publishing a series of blog posts with a personal focus on moms or mothering can help shoppers envision the sort of gift or experience they’d like to be able to gift while also keeping them engaged with your brand. Keeping your products and services top of mind while infusing them with a personal touch is a winning strategy for Mother’s Day marketing campaigns.
Create an Interactive Experience with Stories
Finding the right gift for mom can be overwhelming, and for many e-commerce apps, the challenge is to show users exactly the right amount of options to help them make choices quickly and confidently. While large product catalogs can be attractive to a wide array of potential shoppers, brands must be able to reduce the friction of the shopping experience in order to increase conversion. In fact, Marketing Tech News reported in 2019 that “42% of consumers admit to abandoning a planned purchase because of too many options and 54% have abandoned a particular site because it was too difficult to find the right product.” With an overall increase in e-commerce since these numbers were published, it stands to reason that choice paralysis (the tendency to choose nothing when given too many choices) poses an even greater threat to retailer profit.
By curating the type and amount of products seen by visitors, and using an omnichannel approach to amplify their Mother’s Day marketing, eCommerce apps can help shoppers find just the right gift quickly and easily. Integrating the same message or hashtag throughout email campaigns, push notifications, and paid ads will reduce decision fatigue and let shoppers know that they can rely on your brand for a great gift and a frictionless shopping experience.
In-app stories help facilitate this curation by grouping gift suggestions and eliminating distractions. Try using interactive stickers to ask shoppers about the moms they are shopping for and lead them to gift guides based on their answers. Not only will you be able to gather valuable insights about your audience, but you’ll offer customers a smaller selection of highly relevant products, helping them make decisions quickly and confidently.
Increase Investment with Personalization
For Mother’s Day, it’s especially important to emphasize a personal connection. Plants and fresh flowers are traditional; personalized Mother’s Day gifts, such as framed photos and engravable keepsakes are also incredibly popular.
Extending the personal touch to the in-app shopping experience can drive conversion by increasing brand trust and consumer confidence. Leanplum advises personalization as a year-round strategy for retail apps, noting that “Impersonal app experiences that fall short of meeting modern users’ expectations significantly impact customer retention. It’s integral to offer content and experiences that continually resonate with your users’ needs to stay relevant. “
Messaging that addresses users by name in push notifications, emails, and stories are a great start to building that relationship. If your brand offers customizable gifts for Mother’s Day, be sure to emphasize that possibility to help capture user attention, perhaps with a tool that lets them see the gift options with their chosen text or images.
Gamification Keeps Shopping Fun and Engaging
Help relieve the stress of finding the right gift with gamified experiences for your app or website. Adding elements of fun, chance, and reward to e-commerce apps is a proven way to capitalize on the human love of games to increase engagement and drive conversion. Gamified elements for shopping apps can look like spin-to-win wheels with different discounts available, loyalty programs that create leaderboard-like levels, or rewards programs where shoppers can earn discounts and special offers.
With stories, it’s easy to create gamified experiences that get your audience excited about upcoming sales and holidays. Try engaging your users in a scavenger hunt for a special discount code with a series of stories at a certain time. (Check out Dolap’s success with this strategy!) Or encourage users to check in daily with interactive emoji sliders for contest entries or special deals like free shipping.
Giveaways and contests are another great way to engage users and add excitement to a campaign. Try asking users to share their favorite memories of their mom, her best advice, or a recipe that always makes them think of her for entry into the giveaway and share responses via stories or have users vote on the funniest pictures taken with their mom. Gamification is easy with stories and increases customer loyalty.
Countdowns Create Urgency and FOMO
A classic technique for boosting sales is a limited-time deal or sale, but countdowns can help you take it even further and help your audience complete their transactions quickly. Fear of missing out, or FOMO, can be a strong motivator for shoppers, and it’s even more important with a holiday coming up. Adding a countdown sticker to in-app stories can keep the holiday top of mind for visitors while embedded links to gift guides or saved carts can drive conversion.
Rather than simply counting down to the date itself (though that can be helpful too since the date of Mother’s Day changes year to year) try a countdown to the last day to order personalized gifts, or to have them arrive with different shipping methods. Or, you could run a week of special one-day-only discounts to keep users engaging with the app daily to see new deals.
Think Beyond Your Mother’s Day Campaign
A successful Mother’s Day campaign is certainly a reason to celebrate, but don’t forget to think about long-term retention as well. After all, you’ve invested into making the shopping experience simple, fun, and personal, you’ll want to make sure to give your audience (especially new users!) reasons to stick around.
One of the benefits of interactive stories is that they provide first-party data on user interactions. By analyzing your campaign in the Storyly dashboard, it’s easy to see which strategies work best for your audience, which products were most popular, and which stories were the most engaging. Turn this insight into action in your next campaign and as part of your yearly strategy.
User acquisition is generally much more expensive than customer retention and especially considering Apple and Google’s recent privacy changes. Consider your existing customers as your most valuable customers means investing in a customer journey and brand relationship that keeps them coming back for more. In their guide for post-holiday retention, Cartloop cautions against overutilizing special deals and discounts as customers can become reliant on them to make a purchase, and instead focus on tools that facilitate brand communications so that through “website, emails, SMS, and other channels, it’s possible for brands to build customer loyalty at scale.”
“To get higher returns on customer acquisition cost, marketers need to think beyond the app install: it’s about connecting with a customer throughout its whole journey – from onboarding to retention and customer loyalty.
Show your first-time customers that you really care about them: welcome them with a personal discount or a special offer (free shipping, for example) in a mobile push notification or an in-app message. To live up to your users’ expectations and to grow their LTV, make use of customer-centric omnichannel communications: send personalized product offers, based on your customer’s search or previous shopping experience, by email or push notifications.
Provide an additional value to your subscribers by sending them useful content: if you are a home decor store, why not delight your subscribers with some interior design tips or how-to tutorials?
You’ll see that cohesive and value-added communications with your shoppers make magic expressed in business revenue.”
Julia Zakharova – Marketing and Partnership Manager at Pushwoosh
Mother’s Day Marketing Should Support Your Year-Round Strategy
Just like any marketing strategy, building a great Mother’s Day campaign is based on a keen understanding of your audience and an ability to make the customer journey as simple and seamless as possible. Tools like Storyly can help personalize and unify your brand experience helping customers understand the value of your offerings during special events as well as year round. By investing in great campaigns throughout the year, holiday marketing can be a strong strategy for increasing your brand reach and building a customer base that is excited to spread the word to friends and family.
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