5 Merchandising and Marketing Hacks to Boost Mother's Day Sales and Profits

This Mother’s Day, you have the opportunity to leverage both advanced merchandising and marketing strategies to boost sales and profits. The key is finding tactics and promotions that resonate with your target audience and give them exactly what they are looking for. 

In this post, we provide you with some multi-layered tips that you can use to stand out and maximize your sales over Mother’s Day. 

Let’s jump in.

1. Personalization at Scale

Personalization strategies harness the power of data analytics and AI to better deliver a more customized customer shopping experience and personalized marketing messaging. By taking a deep dive into past behaviors and preferences, you can better tailor your email marketing, product recommendation, and onsite merchandising to match each customer’s specific needs. AKA, 1:1 personalization. 

Let’s look at two tactics you can use this Mother’s Day. 

Leveraging AI and Data Analytics

Competing on any seasonal shopping day is impossible without the right eCommerce automation. Instead, you should use customer data to personalize as many digital touchpoints as possible, from email marketing campaigns and product recommendations to your retail website experiences. 

For example, let’s say a shopper has previously purchased or browsed your women’s dresses product category. Over Mother’s Day, you could include these products (and similar ones) in a Mother’s Day gift collection. However, you need the right AI that will enable you to customize not only your onsite product displays and recommendations but also your offsite product recommendations. 

As the only holistic eCommerce product sorting and recommendation tool, Kimonix is the perfect option to handle eCommerce merchandising like a retail expert. Here’s a short video on what features you can expect: 

Exploiting Dynamic Content 

Visual merchandising isn’t the only way AI can help you boost sales this Mother’s Day. You can also use it to display dynamic content. 

For instance, with the right AI technology, you can deliver highly personalized emails to your subscribers, whereby each email product collection is dynamically changed based on the person's specific behavior. 

You can also use dynamic content on your website to create personalized Mother's Day gift guides that change based on the visitor's browsing history or past purchases. Let’s say one of your customers has previously shown interest in skincare products; you could show them a gift guide focused on luxury skincare sets for Mother's Day.

2. Exclusive Bundles and Limited Editions

Another must-have Mother’s Day promotional game plan is “limited” or exclusive products and bundles. Both of these merchandising strategies involve offering specially curated products to create a sense of exclusivity or urgency. By providing season-specific products with unique value propositions, you can capitalize on the scarcity principle to make your product more desirable this Mother’s Day. 

Let’s look at two pathways you can take. 

Offering Limited Edition Products 

Limited-edition products that are available only during Mother’s Day can help create a sense of urgency and exclusivity. 

An excellent example of this would be a personalized jewelry collection specifically for Mother's Day, featuring customizable pendants or bracelets that can be engraved with initials or special messages. Brands like Pandora, Kay Jewelers, and Tiffany & Co. often feature customizable jewelry options that allow customers to add personal touches, such as engravings or a selection of specific charms, stones, or metals that resonate with individual preferences. 

Alternatively, you could offer a complimentary, limited-time engraving — something Fossil does. 

The trick is finding ways to offer exclusivity within your budget. Bundling, for instance, could be a more affordable option for your brand.

Curating Strategic Gift Bundles

Why not create exclusive Mother's Day bundles that combine complementary products at a special price? The right product bundle can significantly enhance the perceived value, with customers feeling like they are getting more for their money. It also allows you to use strategic cross-selling to increase your AOVs while eliminating excess inventory. 

These benefits will also help you improve customer satisfaction and grow retention — especially if you're taking an advanced approach that factors in marketing and retail KPIs as well as your customers’ personal preferences. You can read more about this strategy here.  

3. Interactive and Immersive Experiences

Interactive and immersive shopping experiences are designed to engage potential customers and shoppers in real-time. They also help create memorable brand experiences, helping you connect to your audiences on a more personal level and boosting long-term loyalty and profits.

You need the right technology-driven solutions to leverage more-interactive or immersive experiences, some more involved or expensive than others. Let’s look at two scenarios differing dramatically in terms of ease and price that you could implement this Mother’s Day. 

Hosting Live Shopping Events  

An excellent way to create interactive experiences is by leveraging the power of livestreaming. Social media live shopping events are becoming increasingly popular, with leading channels and marketplaces offering various marketing options. Here are a few Mother’s Day live shopping event ideas to get you started: 

1. Dive into Mother's Day with a special VIP live shopping event centered around giving moms and anyone in a parenting role a big virtual hug. This could be an hour packed with exclusive bundles, discounts, promo codes, etc. 

2. Use your live event as a Mother's Day gift guide. Here, you could walk followers through top picks that are sure to make any mom smile, combining the ease of a guide with the allure of exclusive deals.

3. Rebrand any planned event with a Mother's Day twist, like "Self-care night with mom." This could be an effortless way to make your products the go-to for those looking to pamper themselves or spend quality time with mom.

4. Use a live event to cater to the last-minute crowd — one that is all about snagging the perfect gift just in time. You could then take it a step further and offer a special shipping code during the event to ensure gifts land on doorsteps on time. 

Investing in AR for Try-Ons and Visualizers

For those of you looking for a longer-term investment, Mother’s Day could be the perfect time to invest in AR (augmented reality). eCommerce AR features enable you to offer customers real-time product visualization. Two examples of strategies you can use with AR technology are virtual try-ons and AR-enabled greeting cards. 

Virtual try-ons let your customers virtually try on products in real-time. This creates a more immersive shopping experience, allowing customers to actually see what a product would look like on themselves or in their homes. And you don’t need to build your own AR tool to do it, you can use existing tools that most social media platforms offer. This is something that brands like Farfetch and Prada did in 2021 when they teamed up with Snapchat. 

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4. Strategic Social Media Campaigns

Strategic social media campaigns are vital for any seasonal shopping peaks. With the right channel, collaboration, or influencer partnership, you can amplify brand visibility and engagement and drive more-authentic interactions while boosting offsite product merchandising.  

Here are two social media action plans to adopt this Mother’s Day. 

Allocating Resources to Influencer Marketing 

For this seasonal shopping day, you want to partner with influencers who are mothers or who have a significant following of mothers. 

Let’s say you are an online cosmetics retailer. By partnering with a popular mommy blogger or Instagram influencer, you could capitalize on their personal motherhood stories to build authentic tutorials using your products. You can then boost these videos with sponsored posts, product reviews, and personalized in-store product recommendations.

Another example would be a wellness or fitness brand partnering with mothers who can help show how your products fit into a mom’s busy lifestyle. 

The possibilities are endless — the trick is finding the right influencers. 

Using Brand Collaborations to Drive Social Reach  

For Mother's Day promotions, teaming up with another brand opens the door to a treasure trove of opportunities. By pooling your audiences, you not only broaden your reach but also introduce your loyal followers to another brand's charm, and vice versa. 

These collaborations are more than just a cross-promotion; they're a chance to combine strengths and create exclusive, value-packed products or experiences. Such unique offerings not only attract attention — they captivate it, driving more interest and sales than you might achieve on your own.

5. Enhanced Loyalty Programs

Seasonal shopping moments such as Mother's Day present the ideal opportunity to thank customers for their ongoing support of your retail brand. Additionally, you can leverage these benefits and value-enhancing rewards to significantly uplift sales during over-specialized shopping events. This not only strengthens customer loyalty but also encourages more frequent and enthusiastic shopping behavior around these key dates.

Here are two loyalty-boosting tactics worth testing this Mother’s Day. 

Offering a Mother’s Day Points Boost 

One way to enhance your loyalty programs this Mother’s Day is by offering double points. 

This could be double loyalty points for all products made on Mother’s Day (if you are, say, an online flower or food shop) or before, with all purchases made from your Mother’s Day gift collections. This not only boosts perceived value to encourage new customers to sign up but drives loyalty needed to improve retention.   

Here’s an example of a straightforward Instagram campaign from Senita Athletics offering double points. 

Presenting Exclusive Sales Access

Another way to reward loyal customers this Mother's Day is to offer them exclusive access to Mother's Day sales, exclusive products, or special bundles.

Offer loyalty program members first dibs to Mother’s Day deals or exclusive bundles as a way to show appreciation and strengthen their connection to your brand. This approach not only reinforces customer loyalty but also entices new shoppers to sign up, enhancing engagement and elevating the long-term value of your customer base.

Wrap Up 

There you have it, five merchandising and marketing hacks you can use to boost Mother’s Day sales and profits. 

Still have merchandising questions? Reach out to our online retail merchandising experts here.

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