Seasonal holidays, particularly Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, are fundamental to any florist’s success and often account for a large portion of your business’s annual revenue.
While these holidays always bring plenty of excitement, you’ll also have to prepare for an increase in competition and your bandwidth being stretched by a serious jump in demand.
High-demand periods like this can certainly be challenging. However, meeting them with forward-thinking preparation and the right mix of marketing techniques can help you get an edge over your close competitors and ride demand spikes to stronger margins.
In this post, we’ll explore four effective ways you can better prepare for seasonal holidays, delight your customers, and help your business flourish.
Start Planning Earlier Than You Think You Need To
A big part of why many florists fail to meet seasonal demand effectively is a simple lack of preparation and a tendency to squeeze too much work into too short a time.
Successful planning for seasonal holidays like Valentine’s and Mother’s Day should ideally begin months in advance, and consider the crucial elements that are likely to be most affected by these holidays. These include inventory, marketing, and logistics - let’s take a look at each one in a bit more detail.
Inventory and Supplier Coordination
Getting a strong handle on your inventory and supply chain will not only help you avoid stock-outs during high-demand periods but also save you from having to pay for the supplier price surges that occur near holidays.
Blooms like roses, carnations, and lilies will all be in high demand, so place bulk pre-orders to give your business a safety net.
Marketing Timeline
The timing of your marketing campaigns is another key factor in how successful your business will be during high-demand holidays like Valentine’s and Mother’s Day.
Aim to launch your promotions around 4-6 weeks before the holiday to get the attention of early shoppers, rolling out email campaigns, short-form social media content, and physical signage at your store in phases.
Logistics Staffing
Order fulfillment is often strained around high-demand holidays, and it’s crucial to make sure your customers get their orders in time.
Consider finding temporary staffing solutions to cover the need for additional delivery drivers and extended hours.
Optimize Your Flower Shop Website for Traffic Spikes
Valentine’s and Mother’s Day are going to send you a huge influx of website traffic. If you don’t have a website that can handle this uptick in traffic, it could result in slow-loading pages or your whole site crashing, potentially costing you thousands in sales.
To maximize profits from seasonal holidays, you need to ensure your online shopping experience is just as well-curated as your physical store. These are some of the key areas you should look at in preparation.
Speed and Responsiveness
Site speed is one of the biggest predictors of your customers’ experience, so it’s essential to make sure your site is optimized for fast, hassle-free loading.
Compressing images to reduce their strain on the browser, enabling caching, and investing in autoscaling hosting for high-traffic website demand can all be effective ways to ensure site visitors have a smooth experience.
Mobile-Friendly Purchases
The majority of your customer base is likely to browse your site on mobile at some point in their shopping journey.
Make sure your site has a responsive design that makes it easy to navigate on any device, and you’ll eliminate the risk of frustration and cart abandonment.
Seasonal Messaging
Highlight deadlines that customers need to be aware of (e.g., order by [date] for guaranteed delivery by Mother’s Day.
Payment Methods
Though modern payment portals are pretty reliable, a technical failure at the wrong time can be catastrophic.
Setting up backup options like PayPal or Google Pay can save a lot of sales if there are any technical mishaps.
Upselling and Cross-Selling
Traffic spikes are a huge opportunity for boosting your sales that you shouldn’t let pass you by.
Try to find prominent, but non-intrusive ways to feature add-ons like greeting cards, chocolates, or vases at some stage in the checkout process to increase your average order value during high-demand periods.
Leverage Proven Marketing Strategies
While most people buy flowers for Valentine’s and Mother’s Day, not everyone will shop the same way.
If you want to get the most value possible from these occasions, you need to deploy a diverse mix of digital and traditional marketing strategies that adapt to your customers’ preferences.
Here’s a look at some of the channels you should exploit in the run-up to seasonal holidays to get ahead of the competition and sell more products.
Digital Marketing Channels
- PPC and SEO for florists' campaigns, optimizing pages for “Valentine’s Day flowers near me” and running targeted ads to capture last-minute buyers.
- Social media posts that showcase your best arrangements, bouquet-making process, and paid campaigns that target couples and other gift-givers.
- Segmented email marketing campaigns that ramp up as you close in on the holiday you’re preparing for, e.g., early-bird discounts and last-minute reminders.
In-Store and Traditional Channels
- Eye-catching, holiday-themed arrangements for window displays that draw in foot traffic and remind local customers about the holidays approaching.
- Local partnerships, collaborating with local gift shops, chocolatiers, bakers, and any other businesses that may be a good match for yours.
- A loyalty program offers to encourage your customers to come back, e.g., extra points for Valentine’s Day purchases.
- Bouquet-arranging workshops to engage your local audience and upsell your core products.
Develop a Post-holiday Strategy for Customer Retention and Feedback
With a big event like Valentine’s or Mother’s Day, the days after the holiday can be just as crucial as the lead-up for your business.
After all your hard work, you may want to slow your marketing down. However, if you want to maximize the value of these holidays, you should use this time to:
- Gather insights on your business.
- Strengthen customer relationships.
- Work to encourage repeat business.
Here’s some of the most effective follow-up activities to consider in your post-holiday marketing.
Personalized Thank-Yous
A simple “thank you” with a little touch of personalization can go a long way in showcasing your brand identity and building a loyal customer base.
Encouraging and Leveraging Customer Reviews
Positive customer reviews are crucial for building trust with your target audience, and Google Business reviews in particular can enhance your local SEO. Automated review requests attached to orders and incentivized reviews can make it easier to build a large volume of reviews in a short space of time.
Sales Analysis for Next Year’s Planning
The days after a nationwide holiday are ideal for reviewing your recent promotional efforts and finding out what worked and what didn’t. Your top-selling products, demographic information about your customers, and any delivery issues you ran into can all provide valuable insights for improving performance next year.
Making Holidays Work for You
High-demand points in the calendar can be a stressful topic for any florist. However, with enough preparation and a forward-thinking approach, you can turn sources of stress into tangible benefits and learn powerful lessons for next year’s events.
We hope this guide has provided a strong starting point for preparing for upcoming events and developing your long-term marketing for florists. For more inspiration, be sure to check out our other blog posts or explore our great range of cut flowers, plants, and accessories here.
