Web Podcast - Episode 30: 5 Mothers Day Marketing Ideas

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Hey guys, Episode 30 today, it's the big three-O and it's a pretty good landmark for us, hope you guys are still listening in or if you're just joining welcome, lots of good content on the channel. Feel free to go back and listen to some of our different podcasts but today's ones we're focusing on Mother's Day.

So Mother's Day here is in a week from now but basically with the website, if you're doing e-commerce or retail, you should be focusing on different ideas to get your business out there during things like Mother's Day, this can obviously apply to Father's Day as well and also other events like Christmas and stuff. So Mother's Day is, I believe, the second biggest shopping event, at least here in New Zealand before Christmas. So it's important that if you've got an e-commerce website that you are utilizing it the best way you can to get people to buy online, a lot of people just sit there with a website and they don't update it and keep it relevant, it's just the same products on there and maybe they'll put a product on special and that's it. That's not the way to do it, you need to keep it up to date, keep adding to it.

So I've got five quick ideas here on what you can do to promote your business this Mother's Day. The first one is create a cool Mother's Day gift box bundle of products. Now most of you guys will probably be doing products that aren't necessarily suited to mothers, hopefully you do. At the end of the day this is more for mothers, you guys selling to the mothers out there but if your products don't suit obviously there's other events throughout the year that you can utilize the same ideas and adapt them to suit. Number one, create a cool Mother's Day gift box. So what I mean by that is, you might have, let's say you're a cosmetic store, you can put together a cool special Mother's Day gift box of several different products and sell it at a fixed price that people can come and buy. It's pretty wrapped, it's ready to go. That's great for people like myself who are terrible at rapping or terrible at organizing gifts. I can just walk into your store, or I can go online, bang, there's a banner on the homepage advertising it, it's 50 bucks whatever it is, buy now, done, I've sorted Mother's Day. That's a good way to go and you see a lot of these things in shops, often but not necessarily online. So a good gift box bundle is a good way to go, especially if it's lots of little things because obviously, then you're like, okay, I'm sure some of this stuffs going to be relevant or something that she wants, rather than going and buying one item and then you're sort of taking a bit of a shot in the dark.

Number Two is email your customers a top five Mother's Day list or something along those lines. A subject line and an email, the five most picked presents by mothers in 2018, something like that, go and do some research and find out what's sort of in the moment now. I'm a bit bad for this because I don't have a clue what mothers are wanting at the moment but, you know, there might be some new product on the market that they like, or some sort of skincare product or some sort of clothing or a nice brand of home scent candles or something like that. Just go and find, in your product lineup, five different ideas that you can incorporate into what you sell. So you might be selling that product already or you might not but hopefully if you're in that business and you've got products that are related to you know, mothers, women in general, you can have some stuff that crosses over. So make a top five list and it could be a list that you pick. You could think well these products I think are really cool so I think my customers should be made aware of them and for each product just give a brief description of what it is and the price as well. And then just make it easy for people to click, buy now and they go straight to your site, pay online, done.

Number Three. So this one's a little different, this is offering a Mother's Day gift with any purchase over X amount of dollars. So let's say you're a online hardware store and you sell drills. So you think, okay, well, there's not a lot here mothers are going to want but you might be able to go, okay, well what we'll do is we'll go and bulk buy 50 or 100 of these, again, it could be a gift pack or it could be some sort of special sort of product but you're offering that product free if the customer purchases from you anything $100 or over for example. So someone might want to go on there and they can buy a drill but it's a week from Mother's Day, they haven't sorted out a Mother's Day gift it so they can go, well, I can go buy drill here and it's saying I get a free Mother's Day gift. Cool that's me sorted, I get what I want. A bit selfish. And I can get something for my mom straightaway, free. So it's a bit of a tricky one, that one, it's probably a little bit harder to sort of, I think to get to work properly. But it's a good way to do it if you don't necessarily sell directly to mothers or women. So you know, this, again, crosses over with Father's Day, same scenario, you might be a shop selling cosmetics or something. And same thing, you might go and say buy $100 worth of cosmetics and we'll chuck in a cool pocket knife or something for Father's Day, whatever. These products, guys I'm just sort of generalizing obviously but if you can think of something that's quite cool that you could adapt into your business then that's the way to go. I only recommend this option if you don't target directly to that audience.

Number Four is offer free gift wrapping with any purchase for Mother's Day. So this is quite common in shops you'll go into and mainly you'll go into gift shops and you'll go buy something and they'll offer gift wrapping usually free or for a very small charge. So, I think personally, if you are a gift shop, you should already be offering gift wrapping as an extra up-sell to sort of increase your revenue but for Mother's Day, just include it free of charge perhaps and you can use that as an advertising point on your social media or your advertising, so you can say free gift wrapping and even a free card for Mother's Day with any purchase. So, in that sense then, you get the people buying products, again, it's done for them, they just pick something, buy it, it's wrapped, it's delivered, done. Furthermore, from that you could even offer a free shipping and such to your mother. Let's say you live out of town or you're overseas, same thing, you can write the card, gift-wrap it for the customer and post it straight to their mother, all free. At the end of the day, when I say free, you are missing out on that little bit of extra revenue and shipping costs but you could set, again, a price margin as a sort of threshold where they've got to meet, they've got to spend $100 or they've got to spend $50 to get that. I suppose it's important especially if you're selling really low priced items as well and you got someone spending $5 on a product and you're shipping it for free and gift wrapping it it's not really going to be worth it. So you're going to take a little bit of a hit there but at the end of the day if you can get new customers from it then you can get them on board and they'll be comfortable to come in and repurchase from you next time, so next time they might be happy to go and spend a bit extra and you've sort of retain them as a customer, a lot going forward. So there's never a downside to it as such apart from the initially, cutting a bit of your margin out.

The Final One, Number Five is offer an unique, funky Mother's Day gift voucher. So, I think vouchers are very popular nowadays and we all love them because we can go and sort of have the freedom to pick what we want but a lot of online shops we find still don't offer gift vouchers and they don't do them in the right way if they do offer them. So if you're not already, make sure you give customers the ability to buy a gift voucher on your website at a preset value, so you might have like a $10, $20, $50, $100, $200, $500 gift voucher card that people can buy. So give people the ability to select that online and when I say cool and funky, Gallon Design get a professional designer to design a gift card for you or a gift voucher for you that you can sell and package and post, we're all about technology here but at the end of the day, there's nothing better than a tangible piece of card that's put in an envelope and sent out. So perhaps do a cool unique Mother's Day themed voucher or just a generic voucher that you can sell as part of Mother's Day and chuck in a card with a handwritten note on it and printed properly with the coupon number on it, it's going to go a lot better than an email with a code on it. Even if your email looks cool, it's still not the same, do it the old fashioned way, print some cards out, write out the coupon number on them so that the mother can then go into your shop or she can go online and put the code in and redeem it online. So, that's probably an important one to include, regardless on any website, I believe it's a good gift voucher tool and yeah, offer the ability that it's tangible printed card just as if you're going into a shop. So at the end of the day, I think the best way to go is to implement some of these ideas over offering a 20% percent to 30% discount. People like having different options and the ideas I've just given you are lots of different options and different ways to get people to buy stuff at something that suits them, they're going to take it up whereas if you're just offering this gift here for 30% off then you've still gotta pay shipping and you've got to gift wrap it and you've got to put the card in it. You know, those people that don't want to do that, aren't going to buy from you, so adapt the whole thing so that it matches every possible person and every possible situation. The people that are doing it months out, the people are doing it the day before Mother's Day, well, probably the day before, but on the Friday before Mother's Day.

Anyway guys, that's some good marketing ideas you can use for Mother's Day and obviously you can apply these to other things like Father's Day, for example and Christmas and Labor Day and Easter. Hope you found that helpful and feel free to visit our website or read some articles we've got on our website also that relate to this, it sums up basically what I've talked through here, plus some other helpful articles on there as well. So that's Matt from RAZOR Web Design Wire Podcast and join us again next time. Cheers.