What do moms love the most? Aside from their children, they really love that their children are thinking of them. You can do this with a phone call once a week. Or, with Mother’s day just around the corner, why not impress her with your well thought out email marketing campaign? Just make sure you give her your own personal gift too.

Here are 6 tips that will make mom proud of your email marketing efforts:

1 – “M” is for Mom, May, and Mobile

Make sure your site and your email marketing campaigns are mobile optimized – test, and test again. Your message has to reach your consumer wherever they are and however they want to consume it.

If reading, browsing and shopping for your products is difficult, you’re probably going to leave money on the table. It should be easy for your potential customers to research and buy the items the way they want.

2 – Get Your Search Marketing Right

There are great opportunities for seasonal offers with a specialized landing page, a pay-per-click campaign, and a proactive reminder-style email campaign.

If you’re a merchant with a brick-and-mortar store, ensure consistency in your company details across your website, and your local SEO properties, like your Yelp profile and all social sites – especially Google+.

Most interactions with a company or brand on mobile is for research. If your store details and hours of operation aren’t in Google’s map results, that’s a lot of search traffic you could be losing.

There are two additional tools you can use to leverage search. The first is Google Trends, which compares search volume patterns across regions. If you’re going local, figure out what your potential customers are looking for.  The second is Google Correlate, which is essentially Google Trends in reverse. You can explore phrases with the same search volume as your target term, within a region, and discover what else your audiences are searching for.

3 – Timing and Context

Two weeks before is the magic number. That’s when you launch your Mother’s day campaign. But ten days before is when the rest of the retail world really kicks things into high gear.  The right subject line will determine if your message gets opened. Don’t be afraid to use guilt in your subject lines: “She Waited 9 Months for You. Don’t Make Her Wait For a Gift Too.”  That’s why we love this email campaign from retailer Kate Spade.

4 – Know Your Audience

According to the Statistic Brain Research Institute there are 85.4 million mothers in the United States with a total amount of $20.7 billion dollars to be spent on gifts for their big day. While “something homemade” is the most preferred gift, cards, dinner and flowers top the list of items most moms would like to receive.  If you’ve got something to sell, this is the holiday to sell it. Retailers report Mother’s Day as the second highest gift giving holiday in the United States. (Christmas is number one). So use these numbers to your advantage but segment your lists so you can target the right people.

5 – Data Capture & Responsible Use

Are you capturing that this purchase is a gift in your checkout process? Are you going on to cross-check whether it’s a Mother’s Day gift? If so, how are you then using that information? In an automation platform, such as OM3, you might enroll them into an ‘anniversary’ program, reminding them in a year to make another purchase, including a recommendation, or an upsell of items from your ecommerce site.

Consider using our program builder, to identify the behaviors most beneficial to the sale – opens, abandoned carts and past purchase value.

6 – Think Social

Social media is a great way to enrich your data lists – and visa-versa – your subscribers will power your social follow-ship.

Platforms such as Woobox,  ShortStack and Offerpop allow you to build webforms and ‘like-gated’ competition draws within Facebook, without breaking their terms and conditions. These forms allow you to build seasonal promotions like a Mother’s Day contest, that allow for engagement while allowing users to opt-in to email marketing.

The one and perhaps the only one thing that dads and moms have in common, is providing a great retail opportunity for marketers. There is no doubt Mother’s Day (Sunday May 15^th) represents an ever growing online retail sales opportunity. All online sales indicators are up this year so it’s time to get marketing.

If you need any help give us a holler.