How to Create Irresistible Mother’s Day Offers and Market Your Salons Promotions

26 Apr

Following Christmas and ahead of Black Friday, Mother's Day is the second biggest marketing event in the calendar year for any beauty business. Around 62% of Australians will buy gifts this Mother's Day, spending $102 on average – that's equivalent to $1.2 billion nationwide.

What does this mean for you as a salon-business owner? An almost infinite pool of potential customers you can market to. There are partners looking for ways to appreciate the mother of their children, adult children seeking ways to acknowledge the women who raised them, and mums themselves who are looking to indulge in some self-care and self-appreciation for the accomplishment, and endless effort, of raising their kids.

Whether a Mother's Day promotion or otherwise, the best marketing ideas come when you spend a few moments sketching out the details of what you’ll offer, who your target audience is and defining your objectives. Now, the easy place to start might be with deciding what you’ll offer – but without a clear business objective in mind, you might be creating the wrong offer all together. Once you’ve determined this, you can set about creating your marketing plan – all the things you’ll do to create, promote and sell your irresistible Mother’s Day gift ideas.

What is the objective?

When it comes to crafting great offers, you must always, always, always create promotions for profit. Having a lot of customers coming in and paying you next-to-nothing is not a winning promotion. The same as failing to plan is planning to fail – if you fail to know your numbers, your numbers will fail you.

So how do you determine a great Mother’s Day marketing campaign objective?
Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to this.

It’s important to think about what you want this campaign to do for your business. Yes, bringing in more money is a good start – but it’s good to get a little more specific. Do you need more cash flow, to help afford some equipment upgrades? Gift Vouchers or larger package deal investments could be a great promo for you. Are you wanting to attract more new customers to your salon? An introductory offer, or special pamper package could be just what mum needs. Have your returning client numbers been down? Offer your clients a special deal only available during the Mother’s Day promotional period to get them back in the clinic. Or perhaps you’re overloaded with products, you could bundle your products with treatments for a special package option, or create gift packs of bundles to move more stock in each transaction.

Before deciding what your Mother’s Day offers are going to be – you need to know your numbers. You are setting out for destruction from the start if you don't know how much a campaign will cost, how many units you need to sell and what the margins are.

What should you offer?

Now that you know the end-goal, it’s time to consider the services and products you want to promote for Mother’s Day. Perhaps, you'd like to offer a pamper package that includes a massage, mani-pedi or facial. Or suppose you have a range of Mother's Day promotional product packs from your skincare supplier.

If you’ve run Mother’s Day promotions before, look at your most popular promotions from the past. Magic happens when you stick to a formula, not pull something out of thin air. If customers have liked something previously, they likely will again. Don’t gamble on what may work when you have something that’s already proven. This is not to say don't try new things but consider first which basket you want to place your proverbial eggs: the untested or tested?

If you go with a campaign you have used before and wish to change something, try to only change one thing at a time. This allows you to test what works against what doesn't. You can easily change it back if it is not working. Chances are though, that if people loved it in the past, they would be looking for it again in the future.

If you’re new to running a Mother’s Day promotion, or don't have any existing data from years-gone-by there are still plenty of options for you. Entry-level treatments are a great way to bring new clients into the clinic. Try combining it with another therapy, to add to the purchase value. This can also entice existing clients to try something new! For example, if you offer LED this is an excellent, economical and profitable add-on to most facials; not only is it quick and easy, the treatment results are amplified.

Whatever you decide, you must have a clear message that captures your audience's attention and presents in a way that helps the information to stick in your customer's mind, coupled with a strong call-to-action to move them to act swiftly.

How to Write Compelling Marketing Copy for Your Mother’s Day Promotions

First, you need to know your audience. Are you talking to mums who need to send a not-so-subtle hint to their loved-ones that they don’t want yet another gadget for the kitchen. Or are you talking to partners, children or dads that are looking for a simple, but special gift that will wow their recipient. Everyone might have a mother, but you need to narrow your message and talk directly to each type of buyer – one at a time.

Suppose you are marketing towards father's purchasing for partners on behalf of their kids. In that case, you should think about what might be going through a dad's mind regarding Mother's Day and purchasing a gift. Dad wants convenience, but he also wants to make the correct choice. He wants to surprise his partner, showing that he knows what she would like, acknowledges her hard work and the load she carries, while still making it all about the kids.

You could write something like this:

Their handmade cards will melt her heart.

Your massage gift card will melt her muscles.

By choosing only one item to focus your campaign around, you have solved the problem of him being at the shops in the land of overwhelm. He wants to see it, select it, wrap it up and walk out with it, all in under ten-minutes.

Customers crave emotional connection and authenticity from brands. They want to feel understood. By tapping into the emotion and story they have in their heads, you are able to provide this connection, and it is one of the most powerful drivers of Mother's Day ad campaigns. So use it.

Here is another example:

When… "I don't want anything for Mother's Day."

Really Means… "Surprise Me!"

Knock her socks off!

[ add your offer ]

How to Share Your Marketing Message and Promote Your Mother's Day Offers

When it comes to promoting your offers, you want to make sure you’re heard and seen in as many places as possible, and as many times as possible before Mother’s Day. It is said that a buyer needs to see your marketing message at least 7 times before it really sinks in. And when the market will be flooded with an array of Mother’s Day messages, you can’t afford not to be seen and heard by the right people.

That’s why you’ll want to share your message in as many places as possible, including your website, to your email subscribers, on your social media platforms and within your salon or clinic using flyers and posters.

You can tell different stories in different ways across all these platforms. But focus these stories around a common theme by defining who you are targeting and the big idea you wish to communicate.

For example, if your target audience is adult children (sons or daughters) purchasing a gift for their mums, you could use the example above and expand upon this story of mums not meaning what they say and write an email something like the example below.

Here’s an example
There's no-one quite like your Mum.
She taught you to walk, talk, drive and keep yourself alive.

You taught her to text, tweet and ‘ctrl+alt+delete’.

But we all know that what Mum says and what Mum means remains to be seen.

Remember when she said things like...

"Don't make me have to get up and come over there." It really means…
I've just sat down and don't want to have to deal with whatever you're doing, so for the love of God, be good.

"I'm going to count to 5, and you had better be doing what I asked".
It really means…

You've got around 10-15 seconds as I count super slowly to five, so that you can do whatever you're supposed to be doing because, after that, I've got nothing.

Or this pearl:

"Unless there's blood or fire, I don't want to know." It really means…
I'm tapping out of parenting life for half an hour, only disturb me if someone is dying.

So when Mum says

"I don't want anything for Mother's Day."

It really means: "Surprise Me"

Knock her socks off and show her how much you love and appreciate all she does for you… And that not listening to your Mum sometimes does pay off.

[ add your offer ]

Positioning your product as the ideal solution makes your customer the hero of this story, and it's a win-win for all.

You could also use this example and take a different angle on social media by asking your audience what things their Mum's would always say but mean something completely different.

Create Your Mother’s Day Marketing Plan

Your marketing plan is like a checklist on how to execute your campaign from start to finish. Clearly defining your marketing tasks helps you organise how the campaign will be rolled out; think marketing copy and poster design, website promotion pages and social media posts. Don’t forget to talk with your team about how to share your offers with clients, and keep track of sales to record and measure your results.

A successful Mother’s Day marketing plan might look something like this:

Write a blog post about the best Mother's Day gift ideas for 2023 (including your offer, of course).
Print your in-salon promotional posters or flyers - don’t forget to display them when they arrive.
Create a specific promotional page that highlights all your Mother’s Day offers in one place.
Add your Mother’s Day promotion to your website homepage and announcement bar to advertise Mother's Day and link to your promotions page.
Add a website pop-up that appears as someone clicks away from a page on your website, linking it to your promotions page.
Update your website products and treatments, with your Mother’s Day offers – be sure to note the dates your promotions will run.
Create and schedule your email marketing campaigns.
Create and schedule your Mother’s Day social media promotional posts.
Identify your sales goals for each offer, and determine how your team will need to share this with clients in the clinic.
Educate your team on what the promotion includes and involves.
Setup a system to measure your results to track the campaign's success.
Monitor the campaign – use online tools such as website analytics and social media metrics to gauge the progress and interaction of the digital campaign.
On completion of the campaign, analyse the online data and meet with your team to find out what worked well, what you need to do differently, or how to improve it for next year.

By following these steps you can be confident that your salon or clinic is primed and ready for an unforgettable Mother's Day sales season. If you would like help with your Mother's Day marketing preparation and need help figuring out what to promote and how to promote it, book a free call with us.

Ready to promote your Mother’s Day offers?

Bring your campaigns to life today, with our Mother’s Day Marketing Bundles, where you can see your ideas come to life, in a matter of minutes. We’ve taken all the hard work out pulling together a Mother's Day marketing campaign with our easy-to-edit Canva and Mailchimp templates, created specifically for salons and clinics. It’s as simple as editing the colours and font, popping in your promotional images and adding what your offer includes.

You could waste hours trying to design it all yourself, or pay big-bucks to a designer to do it for you (who may not even have the time). Or you can feel the satisfaction of hitting ‘print’, ‘schedule’ and ‘publish’ on your Mother’s Day marketing materials today!

Grab your Mother’s Day Marketing Materials today.