We all know very well we should stock roses in advance for February 14th and be ready for a buying frenzy on Mother’s Day. The rest of the year, unfortunately, is not that easy to prepare for. As one of the most seasonally dependent industries, everyone in the flower business understands how supply and demand change dramatically throughout the year. Depending not only on calendar events and trends but also on climate, logistics, and cost fluctuations.
Very few retailers nowadays, regardless of industry, have no online presence or do not accommodate Internet orders, at least to some degree, and that includes flower shops. You may be running a ‘brick and mortar’ store with a limited online presence that tends to be secondary to your primary customer base of passing trade in your geographical vicinity and word of mouth. Or you may operate an exclusively online flower shop, relying on an outstanding eCommerce website, social-media activity & and just-in-time deliveries as your primary business model. In both cases, the two most important factors for business success remain:
Firstly, you have to sell products that your customers want. Secondly, it’s crucial to navigate the supply/demand and cost curves created by the seasonal availability of flowers and plants.
E-Commerce Versus Social Media
Many small florist shops rely solely on Facebook (FB) or other social media platforms instead of going into trouble with having a website built. After all, optimizing a site for search engines (SEO) is almost a full-time job in itself. Also, many florists know a lot about flowers but precious little about coding, keywords, latent semantic indexing (LSI), meta tags, and all that alchemy. Paying someone else to do all this stuff is also often ineffective and expensive.
At least on FB or Instagram, you have interest groups and local communities online, which offer a ready-made audience. As a result, many florists choose to use a website solely to support their primary physical shop business, merely paying lip service to the Internet.
But whatever route you choose, online marketing in one way or another can’t be ignored as an essential way to grow your customer base.
Draw up a Marketing Plan
In fact, it’s an even better idea to have a marketing plan as part of a comprehensive business plan. Business plan templates are available widely over the internet, whichever you choose is a matter of taste and practicality – but the very act of filling in the template blanks makes you think of things you might never have considered to improve your enterprise.
Maximizing flower sales throughout the year via an e-commerce website involves not just one but a combination of several marketing strategies.
Things to consider in no particular order might be customer engagement, assessing customer needs, the variety of your products to address those needs, and, perhaps most importantly, ensuring that any eCommerce website provides a friction-free customer experience.
Understanding Your Customers’ Requirements
Identifying key demographics is the first task. What are your various customers’ ages, genders, occupations, and preferences? An examination of buying habits might reveal the fact that some folks buy flowers for others as part of celebrating occasions, while some might just purchase flora and plants to brighten up their home every so often.
So how do you find out these things? This is where social media comes in. You can use open questions on Facebook, Twitter, and even LinkedIn polls to find out how often people might wish to buy flowers and for whom.
Never forget, when marketing on social media, very strong images are absolutely essential. In short, nobody will read a post about posies without a pleasing picture of some peonies and petunias! But this is where careful research on free image libraries comes in. Some very strong photos of super floral arrangements can be downloaded for free – sometimes you have to credit the photographer; more often you can donate a couple of dollars, pounds, or euros via the host website’s conduit.
Once you have identified the demographics of your potential customers, your marketing plan should then include segmenting those people in terms of, say, wedding planners, family gift buyers, corporate clients, etc. For corporate sales to company events and office parties, LinkedIn is the best conduit to use, as it allows you to identify corporate party planners, hoteliers, etc. at a granular level.
The Schlep of SEO
Unfortunately, some level of SEO is essential, despite it being hard work. There are really two aspects to this – the server-side technicalities of whether your site is ‘responsive’ (i.e. whether it works and looks good on a mobile phone), how quickly it loads, and the ease of User Experience (UX) so that people can find what they’re looking for without having to search for hours.
There can be little more frustrating than a poor keyword search facility on a website. We’ve all been there; for example, you might visit a DIY online store and type in the word ‘compost’ – only to be presented with hundreds of different plastic composting bins until you find the bags of compost you originally sought down near the bottom of page 12! By that time you’ve already moved onto a competitor’s site, where the UX has been more thoughtfully crafted.
In short, poor UX, unresponsive sites, and such issues are a surefire way of getting search engines like Google and Bing to demote your home page link to the bottom of page 20!
The flip side of that coin is the power of local marketing, which can be achieved through Google My Business, Google Maps, and other such facilities. Remember, there are some businesses that are nowadays naturally location independent – such as accountants and lawyers, who can provide their services by phone and internet.
Then there are those enterprises that need a physical nearby presence, like plumbers, electricians, car washes, and, of course, florists. It would be expensive and impractical to deliver flowers several hundred miles across the country. And after all, you can’t email an Easter Lily!
Given the necessity of local search engine optimization, it’s still a good idea to call your business (or at least its domain name) using a phrase that someone would search for on the internet.
Back in the early days of SEO, search engines used to look at the content of the domain name as a primary search criterion. Hence a floral business located in Hicktown, wherever, might call itself ‘hicktownflorist.com’.
Things have changed now as search engine algorithms have become much smarter, but there’s still a lot to be said for having the word ‘florist’ at least in your chosen domain name. After all, who is going to type the search phrase “Acme flowers” into Google unless they already knew that specific business existed?
If you build an eCommerce site from one of the popular platforms such as Wix, they usually offer ready-made SEO facilities and tools built in for ease of use.
Finally, as regards online marketing tips, there’s still a lot to be said for quite simply having your business’s phone number prominently displayed at the top right-hand corner of your home page. The amount of people who just want to find your phone number and simply call you still counts for a lot.
Email Lists
Sending regular newsletters to existing and previous customers can be a strong strategy. Promotions, news items, and floral care tips can be a great way of making sure that a floristry business website remains uppermost in people’s minds. But whatever email-sending platform you might use, it’s important under privacy laws to provide one-click unsubscribe facilities. This is particularly important in Europe, where the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) can be used to levy hefty fines against companies that misuse customer data.
Deep Tech
There might be an argument for using deep tech facilities on an ‘all bells and whistles’ website; but beware, tech is great when it works properly. When it doesn’t, it’s the easiest way ever to lose customers. Chatbots, third-party help platforms, and AI are all well and good – but a large part of your customer demographic might well involve older people, the Boomer generation, who usually find such things a deeply annoying hindrance.
A Shop for All Seasons
It goes without saying that floristry businesses should stock flowers that are in season. For example, it’s pretty obvious that poinsettias are popular during the Christmas season, along with holly and ivy. There’s a reason for this, just as poppies and honeysuckle are so popular in the summer months.
Of course, industrial flower production from giant greenhouses over in places like The Netherlands is nothing new, but like bananas, shipping organic produce out of season represents significant challenges to distributors. Increased costs of out-of-season flowers and plants reflect this.
Making Arrangements and Adding Accessories
Occasion-based flower arrangements for specific occasions like Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, anniversaries, and birthdays are often the bread-and-butter business model of any floristry business.
But some entrepreneurial owners even offer subscription plans for regular deliveries – thus saving the customer money and helping to ensure regular business for the florist.
It might also be an idea to Implement a loyalty program, rewarding repeat customers with a stamp card or maybe even an app that gives discounts after they have made so many purchases within a fixed period of weeks or months. Again, the difficulty is administering these things, but the simplest way is probably the best – a printed A6 card and a rubber stamp by the cash register or a token included with a delivery means that the customer can effectively self-administer any loyalty bonus.
Then there are the sales of related accessories. Items such as vases, oil diffusers, and little romantic gifts might well put the icing on the cake when buying a loved one a dozen red roses. Indeed, the markup on such items, if you know where to source them, can be like a license to print money!
In Summary
Maximizing flower sales throughout the year needs to involve a lot of discovery; finding out about potential customers’ desires and preferences, together with your ability to source and offer the correct products to the market segments you’ve identified.
The above SEO tips and in particular use of local search via the internet is a good start, but in the final analysis, there’s a lot to be said for good old-fashioned customer service. A winning smile, a quality product, and a reliable service get your business on the map through word of mouth – for many, that’s a step beyond relying on the internet – it’s called human intuition, and it shouldn’t be underestimated.
