8 eCommerce Marketing Secrets to a Successful Father's Day Promotion 2021

16th August 2020, 2:02am in Business by Cassie Puah

We're about less than a month out from Father's Day. For consumers, this means finding the perfect gift to celebrate the dads in their lives. Father's Day is becoming more and more popular within consumers every year with 80% of shoppers saying that celebrating Father's Day during Covid has become more important than ever.

For e-retailers, this means it's time to start planning if you want to run a successful eCommerce Father's Day promotion. We've created this article to give you some marketing tips on how to run a successful promotion to win over your customers and boost your conversions, at this time of year.

1. It's all about the timing

Before we jump into the Father's Day marketing tips, we need to talk about the elephant in the room - when should you start to implement these tips? When should things actually be launched? As a general rule of thumb for any marketing campaign, you should start at least two weeks in advance. Since we've got les than a month to play with, we recommend you organize your strategy in this way:

Three weeks: Start to theme your social media posts and launch targeted ads for any offers or bundles you have
Two weeks: Launch competition or giveaway
One week: Retarget based on engagements from your previous Father's Day ads and posts
On the day: Launch last-minute or express shipping offers for your products

2. Curate a bespoke Father's Day section on your store

If there's one thing that's consistent across all gift-giving holidays, it's that customers never really know what to get. There is such thing as too many options syndrome. Curating a selection of products specifically for Father's Day, and creating a landing page out of it is one way to weed out the junk. This is a page that you can also direct any social media traffic in order to boost conversion.

Bundling products is also an effective promotional strategy during Father's Day. This is an obvious one, but this strategy has the added benefit of getting rid of any surplus inventory and selling volume at the same time.

3. Triggered pop-up reminders to remind shoppers

Especially now, with all the craziness surrounding the pandemic, it can be easy for Father's Day to get lost in all the commotion. Start by setting up an exit pop-up on your website to allow you to direct shoppers to a dedicated Father's Day landing page with product suggestions and a discount voucher. This can easily be set up using a tool like ConvertFlow. By providing a gentle nudge to customers, you can remind them in advance of this upcoming holiday and boost order value and conversion.

4. Take cues from your customer data

Not all dads will be interested in the same thing. Some dads will be interested in cards, while others might be gamers or computer enthusiasts. Make sure you look at your customer data and segment your male audience based on their interests. You can use these segments to create highly targeted marketing campaigns that promote certain products to specific segments.

5. Create wish lists and gift guides

Shopping for gifts can be challenging. A gift guide can break down all the different types of dads there are, to make finding a gift easier for your customers. Either your dad is the "athletic dad" or the "techie dad", a gift guide can help shoppers buy gifts for their dads when they don't know what to buy them.

Publish this gift guide on your blog, and link to it on your home page and in your navigation for extra exposure. You can also use these guides on your social media channels as well.

Tip: Strong engagement keywords for each type of dad:

Techie Dad: Online, Gadget, Gift
Fashion Dad: Outfit, Wear, Socks
Athletic Dad: Sportswear, Sports equipment, Athleisure, Fan Gear

6. Use the power of social media

As a business owner, you know that social media can really boost your marketing campaign and if done right, in a cost-efficient manner with some big returns. In addition to themeing your social media posts, you could go one step further, and run a social media contest. Contests and giveaway's are a great way to engage with your customers. Putting some ad spend behind this type of post is a great way to boost engagement. You can then, follow this up with a retargeting adset closer to Father's Day.

Tip: Try building a viral campaign using a tool like Gleam.io to increase the amount of entries you collect and the amount of awareness you build with new potential customers.

7. Create a sense of urgency

When you're selling online, you need to be very clear when the cut-off date is to be able to ship orders and still make the delivery by Father's Day. Make regular call-outs for free express shipping for last minute orders. You can create a sense of urgency with subject lines that instill a sense of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) in your shopper. Some examples would be limited time offer or low-in-stock items.

8. Segment before you send

To boost your Father's Day sales, consider creating targeted promotional offers to your customers. For example, we spoke about Gift Guides earlier. This is where savvy e-retailers can use marketing automation to segment and create well-designed profile-based gift guides for their consumers. You could create segments for dads who are: