Ever since Easter, Mother’s Day cards and gift sales have been strong. I think that the Royal Wedding has played a role. I have certainly seen some wedding magazines purchased as Mother’s Day gifts.
The Royal Wedding effect aside, the feel about Mother’s Day this year is more optimistic than in 2010. This is reflected in traffic as well as sales.
We have been running with cards and Mother’s Day books right across the front of the newsagency, facing into the mall. This prime space commitment has worked a treat. Sure there is far more browsing of cards and therefore work to tidy them – but the sales result is worth it.
With the big day now here, the challenge is … what’s next? It is months to Father’s Day. We are planning a series of promotions back to back, some we will advertise externally while others we will run using existing shop traffic.
So, while Mother’s Day is (almost) over for another year, the marketing calendar is full with activities to leverage the growing optimist we see and hear from shoppers.
Happy Mother’s day to all the mum newsagents.
With the mix of excitement this week from the rush on wedding magazines offset by the TV Guide drama, it is still great to enjoy the fun of dealing with customers. We run an adjoining gift shop. We have been displaying some specials all week that basically say “Mothers Day Special – 20% off) for a range of selected MUM type products. Yesterday, a regular elderly customer approached my wife and politely asked for a special favour – could she give us some money to hold and use to buy one of our specials for her on Sunday and she will then pick it up on Monday. When we asked why she wanted to do that she said “well I won’t be able to come in on Mothers Day and I don’t want to miss out on the special price”!! God love her! We were dleighted to assist her by telling her we could sell it to her a day early just becasue she is so special!!!
Did anyone else have disapointing Darrel Lea Mum’s Bag sales? We were down nearly 50% from previous years.
Yes – we think that it was too much chocolate on offer with Easter only two weeks ago.
We had a good last week of sales but this did not make up for the poor sales prior to the Easter/Anzac day break. We will keep our cards and gifts on sale for another couple of weeks hoping to get the customers that may have misjudged that Mother’s day followed so closely after Easter.
We have found of the past month a lot of people were holding off on purchases and instead spent the money on family activities over the super long weekend.
Now we get a clear run of trade until October we hope to get some of the missed sales back by doing a heap of little promos.
Mark, Nice display, the space is used well and makes a grand statement.