Although Mother’s Day is less than two months away, there are things your brand can do to spark customer engagement and capture those special moments.
Offering an incentive appeals to consumer emotion and can positively impact customer engagement.
Incentivized promotions can help any brand achieve its marketing and business objectives because they’re fun, entertaining, and engaging. They are strategically designed to impact behaviors more effectively throughout the customer journey.
Consider 81% of consumers say they’re more likely to engage with a brand if it offers an incentive. They’re also great tools for acquiring key consumer data for your brand.
Here are five types of Mother’s Day promotions that your brand can use now to drive elevated customer engagement.
1. User-Generated Content Contests
With any promotion to impact engagement at Mother’s Day, think about your customers to determine what type of incentive may motivate them. And offer something compelling like a getaway or spa experience.
A UGC contest is designed to expand brand conversations to consumers, allowing participants to create and share original content through online engagements or social media networks.
UGC contests are quite impactful considering user-generated content (text, videos, reviews, images) showcases original content on social media channels like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Your brand could run a UGC contest around Mother’s Day to recognize, honor, and extend well wishes to all mothers. For example, you could have entrants post photos of mothers in their lives, asking them to say why they’re wonderful. If they use a specific hashtag they could win a great prize or experience.
Rather than having it be just about Mother’s Day itself, you can extend the promotion by starting it a month early so it gathers momentum and elevates engagement.
2. Instant Win
Use your products as prizes to increase product exposure and the idea of sampling.
An instant win is a game of chance where participants find out if they’ve won or lost instantly. These digital experiences can take many forms, including scratch-off reveals, slot machines, match-games, spin-to-wins, and other custom gamified experiences all designed to drive engagement and participation frequency.
Instant wins can be used as a stand-alone, or in conjunction with a sweepstakes or other promotion type. You can also gate the experience so that participants must make a purchase to play the game.
The instant gratification element here magnifies engagement levels.
You could combine an instant win and a sweepstakes in this promotion. You could offer a game where consumers erase three chalkboards and if all three boards match they instantly win a prize.
Coupled with this instant win scenario, entrants could earn entries into a weekly sweepstakes with each play.
3. Sweepstakes
A sweepstakes is a game of chance where consumers register for the chance to win a prize. Winners are selected, at random, either at the end of the promotion period or throughout the promotion.
A sweepstakes captures consumer attention, drives brand engagement, and increases customer acquisition with a chance-to-win solution that can also include the ability for winners to pick their prizes.
Forty-five percent of consumers have made a first-time purchase because of participating in a sweepstakes campaign. And 72% of consumers would share personal information to participate in a sweepstakes.
These types of promotions can be very effective when connected to a holiday like Mother’s Day. A sweepstakes is a type of contest where a prize or prizes may be awarded to a winner or winners to reward existing consumers and draw attention to a product.
Sweepstakes are very popular because your brand can also collect valuable first-party data.
For example, we worked with The Home Edit on The Reset 2021 Sweepstakes in collaboration with Honeysuckle White and Hickory Farms. Entrants had the chance to win a virtual consultation from The Home Edit.
Your brand could use the month of May to release content and educate consumers about your products via a sweepstakes.
4. Gift With Purchase Offers
Gifts With Purchase (GWP) are free or discounted items that are conditional upon the purchase of one or more other products. They can be guaranteed rewards, cash, offers, or in some cases, charitable donations.
This type of promotion will attract shoppers, especially connected to a holiday like Mother’s Day.
You know consumers will be in stores during this time, so why not offer a gift with purchase or coupon to be redeemed later.
Sweepstakes overlays are a great way to encourage participation during GWP programs. Not only are they traffic drivers, but they give consumers a reason to keep coming back in between purchases and help drive program conversion and participation.
We worked with Sephora on its “15 Days of Beauty Thrills” promotion, which involved a GWP element.
A unique prize was revealed each day during the promotion and rewarded to one lucky Sephora fan for 15 days. Prizes included extravagant trips overseas, makeovers by well-known artists, celebrity swag, and exclusive opportunities provided by Sephora’s high-profile, luxury brands.
Also, daily prizes were awarded that ranged from deluxe samples to full-sized products after any online purchase.
5. Social Sweepstakes
If your brand includes loyal customers who spend a lot of time on social media, this promotion could be for you at Mother’s Day.
A social sweepstakes extends your reach and reputation and is a great way to increase customer engagement and your number of followers. Hashtag promotions stimulate social advocacy. Hashtag sweepstakes on Twitter and Instagram are low-cost and highly effective solutions to stimulate social advocacy for your brand, products, and/or services.
Each time a participant publishes a post containing the brand’s promotional hashtag, he or she is automatically entered into the promotion.
For example, we worked on a social sweepstakes with Varo Bank called Varo For Tomorrow $100,000 Giveaway.
The entire promotion lived on Twitter/Instagram. To enter, participants had to follow @VaroBank on Twitter, post a photo or video answering the question, “What are your 2021 money goals?”, and include #VaroForTomorrow and #Sweepstakes, and tag @VaroBank.
Our Mother’s Day quick poll showed that 55% of consumers would engage with a brand on social media in exchange for an incentive (discount code, gift card, free item, or chance to win a sweepstakes) by either following a brand on its social pages or commenting on a brand’s social media posts.
Think Beyond Mother’s Day
We’ve talked a lot about how to improve customer engagement for Mother’s Day, and that’s great. But you should also think outside of just a motivation to purchase.
Listen to your customers and learn what would be special to them to reward and honor their mothers and build promotions around that. The key here is to think about a promotion that can be tied to a longer term, rather than just focusing on Mother’s Day.
More than one-third (37%) of consumers agree that they would join a loyalty program to receive perks for Mother’s Day shopping. So, using promotions leading up to Mother’s Day is a great opportunity to get consumers to join your loyalty program.
You could extend your promotion well past Mother’s Day (May 8) for the rest of May. This would be a good way of further incentivizing your customers and building long-term loyalty.
Think about releasing new content daily or weekly to engage customers regularly to keep your brand top of mind on Mother’s Day and beyond.
If you’d like to chat about any of your customer engagement efforts, please feel free to contact us here.
ebbo
ebbo helps brands achieve their customer loyalty goals with full-service, end-to-end solutions and also creates original educational content straight from the experts to help loyalty marketers stay on the cutting edge of customer engagement.