Mother’s Day shoppers have a tendency to procrastinate so even though the holiday is just a few days away, it’s not too late for your messages to reach people.
Mother’s Day is on Sunday so you might think that it’s too late; your marketing has done what it can do and maybe you’ll act earlier next year. But luckily for you, Mother’s Day shoppers procrastinate a lot.
While one-third of holiday shoppers get started as early as October, Mother’s Day doesn’t quite work that way. According to Yahoo search data, last year, dinner reservation search queries started to pick up toward the end of April, but ultimately peaked the day before Mother’s Day last year.
Additionally, the highest volume of search queries for “flowers” happened on Mother’s Day itself. The day with the second-highest number of search queries was May 6, which was four days prior to the holiday.
Four days before Mother’s Day 2016 is today. Here are three last-minute marketing tips for the home stretch.
1. Use succinct subject lines
Examining more than 12,000 subject lines over the past two Mother’s Days, email marketing company YesMail and cognitive content provider Persado found that mentioning “Mother’s Day” up front, rather than later in the subject line, increases open rate by an average of 2 percent. It’s even higher on mobile; because of the limited screen space, emails with subject lines referencing Mother’s Day sooner are opened at an increased rate of nearly 38 percent.
Conveying emotion is also something that can boost your open rate, by up to 10 percent. Encouragement, curiosity and anxiety was found to be the emotion that has the most positive impact on email subject lines. On the flip side, safety and urgency were among the least effective emotion, so don’t bother telling customers that “time is running out! (Read more...)
Surprisingly, one thing that doesn’t affect open rates much is discounts. While two-thirds of Mother’s Day emails included a reference to a promotion in the subject line, that didn’t have nearly the impact as referring to Mother’s Day earlier.
2. Know what’s trending
According to a Yahoo report on consumer search insights, 1 in 6 shoppers plan to spend more money on their moms than they did last year. A lot of those people plan to spend more effort on her, too, as evidenced by the frequency of DIY-related search terms. Top keywords include “quotes,” “poems,” and “images,” as people figure out how to make their own cards and what to write in them.
Hitwise, a division of Connexity that measures consumer behavior, analyzed search data to determine the gifts millennial moms would most like to see on Sunday. Common wishes include essential oils, Amazon echos and yoga classes.
Digital subscriptions are also quite popular, with some of the top-searched services including ClassPass, Blue Apron and MistoBox, a personalized coffee subscription that’s been touted by Forbes as one of this year’s hottest Mother’s Day gifts. Additionally, millennial moms are 79 percent more likely to search for “Spotify Premium” than “Pandora One.”
3. Catch the comparison shoppers
More than half the shoppers surveyed by Yahoo plan to compare prices from multiple retailers before making a purchase. Only 16 percent of people are loyal to a particular online flower retailer, for instance.
In other words, people are open to new brands. Be sure to take utilize search ads and competitive bids, since search engines like Google and Bing are the primary form of discovery for most consumers. Retargeting past customers with native ads is another solid strategy for capturing people’s attention before they defect to one of your competitors.
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