Ways you can maximize your Mother’s Day sales

You take great pride in offering a wide selection of floral products and taking care to make each floral arrangement and design unique. This isn't always optimal—or possible—when customer demand is high.

During busy periods such as Mother's Day and Easter, consider offering a more limited selection of products. Benefits of a slimmed down inventory include:

• Saving time: Offering fewer products takes less time to create, display, and promote your floral arrangements.

• Meeting demand in a timely fashion: Your staff can craft pre-determined arrangements and have them ready for customers, as opposed to creating them on-demand.

• Reducing costs: With less inventory, you can save money by reducing the need for supplies and temporary equipment, such as coolers.

Offer designer choice selections as part of your strategy to follow a pre-determined inventory. With increased demand for flowers and ongoing impacts from COVID-19, our industry has shortages of specific types of flowers. Use the best and most available product you have in stock to produce marquee arrangements.

Bringing newly hired staff up to speed or training temporary workers is much more difficult during busy periods. By having a limited menu of floral products, you narrow the focus to a select group of items to memorize and handle.

When configuring your Mother's Day product lineup, don't forget supplies and accessories. COVID-19 isn't only impacting how we interact, but it's also causing supply chain disruptions leading to shortages of glassware, baskets, and other floral supplies.

Order these items now, as they'll be much harder to obtain the closer we get to Mother's Day.

During busy times, you probably have extra staff on hand to get orders out the door. More staff costs more money. However, there are ways to get some of that money back.

Goodman shares a pricing practice that more florists are starting to use. When ordering products online, you've probably seen you can pay different shipping costs depending on how quickly you want your order to arrive. For instance, you pay more to get items in two days versus waiting for standard shipping times. Your business can adopt that strategy, adjusting delivery costs based on customer preference instead of just having a flat fee.

Reward customers who book their deliveries in advance with a lower delivery price. Goodman suggests providing customers additional savings if they're flexible on when they receive the delivery (e.g., a day or two before Mother's Day instead of the day itself).

Make this delivery pricing structure visible on your website. On calls with customers, Goodman recommends simply stating what the total cost is for the order, including taxes and delivery. You can provide additional detail when asked, but you don't need to break down your pricing structure unprompted with every customer interaction.

“Florists who have gone to this approach say they have had little or no negative feedback,” Goodman shares.

Use celebrations like Mother's Day to move more inventory by upselling.

For in-person sales, ask your customers if they'd like to include balloons, cards, or stuffed animals with their flowers.

In your online store, offer the option to add related products before customers complete their orders. This might take a little work in developing your website, but it may pay off with additional sales.

You want these holiday customers to be repeat customers. Don't forget to use leave-behinds. Include your business card, a flier, or coupons with each order. Some customers keep such items to remember who they shopped with.

You can find other creative ways to promote your floral retail store here.

Mother's Day shouldn't be a check-the-box holiday for your business. You have too much riding on its outcome. With foresight and planning, you can make this a unique experience for your customers that will have them coming through your doors to buy again.

For more business tips during busy seasons, check out our prepping for Valentine’s Day article, where we cover what you need to do when hiring temporary workers, enhancing your delivery service, or adding temporary equipment.

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