Father’s Day Marketing Strategies for eCommerce Brands

Gift giving can be a challenge, especially when it’s for someone you really care about. As a consumer, there’s always pressure to get it right, and eCommerce brands face the dual challenge of intense competition coupled with the inability for shoppers to experience the product IRL.

Father’s Day presents an opportunity to acquire new customers, bring back ones that haven’t shopped since last year, and strengthen relationships with the ones they already have.  And if brands can deliver on helping customers find the perfect item, there’s also the chance to turn both the gifter and the giftee into loyal customers. These marketing strategies will help you get started.

Create a gift guide or collection

Make it easy for your customers to find what they’re looking for. Curating your products and organizing them in a way that helps shoppers zero in on the right gifts for the dads in their lives will help boost conversion.

Strategy in action:

• Curate a collection of your top-selling products for men. (Bonus: this is a heavily searched term year-round too!)
• Organize your gift guide by price, the recipient’s interests or personality, or product category.
• Bundle inexpensive items together to create gift sets.

Promote gift subscriptions

Do you have products that you sell as subscriptions that would be appropriate for Father’s Day? If so, promote them as gifts for anyone who might be shopping for Dad. Whether it’s skincare products, hot sauce, or socks, convey how excited the recipient will be to have the holiday extended for weeks or months.

Strategy in action:

• Add subscription products or a category to your gift guides or collections.
• Clearly communicate the cancellation policy to the gift giver so they can end the subscription at the right time.

Win back customers from last year

Have shoppers that bought from you last Father’s Day but haven’t since? Re-engage them so they’ll shop with you again this year.

Strategy in action:

• Identify your customers who purchased from you in the run-up to Father’s Day last year but haven’t returned.
• Recommend products based on their past purchases.
• Offer a discount to sweeten the deal.

Adjust the messaging of your ongoing promotions to make them Father’s Day-focused

If you have standard offers that you use to engage shoppers, adjust the copy to make it relevant to Father’s Day. This will make them seem more timely and will make customers feel like they’re getting something special.

Strategy in action:

• Create Father’s Day messaging for on-site pop-ups promoting offers for signing up for email or SMS marketing messages.
• Use exit intent pop-ups to promote a Father’s Day discount or drive traffic to your gift guide.

Create an emotionally driven social campaign or giveaway

Father’s Day is meaningful to many shoppers — if it wasn’t, many of them wouldn’t be shopping at all. Appeal to customers’ emotions around Father’s Day with campaigns from the heart.

Strategy in action:

• Feature photos and videos of happy dads and children using your products.
• Ask your audience to share stories, photos, or videos of their dads on social with a hashtag for a chance to win a prize or be featured.
• Make sure your campaigns are inclusive. There are lots of different types of dads — show as many of them as possible in your marketing both on-site and off.

Market with empathy

Father’s Day is a time to celebrate, but for those who have lost their fathers or don’t have a good relationship with them, it may be painful. Letting customers know that you recognize that reality will go a long way toward building brand trust and loyalty.

Strategy in action:

• Create a Father’s Day opt-out campaign. Give customers the ability to opt out of emails and texts related to Father’s Day promotions. Here’s an example from Passion Planner related to Mother’s Day:

Promote gift cards

What do shoppers get for the dad who has everything? Gift cards. Make it easy for customers to find and purchase gift cards for Father’s Day gifts.

Strategy in action:

• Add gift cards to your Father’s Day gift guide or collection.
• Promote digital gift cards as last-minute Father’s Day gifts.
• Use SMS to inform customers about gift card options — it gives them a quick and easy way to purchase since it’s right at their fingertips.

Build urgency and FOMO around Father’s Day

Supply chain and delivery woes continue to be an issue for many brands (and customers). Convincing customers to buy early with time-sensitive offers and promotions will nudge them to an earlier purchase.

Strategy in action:

• Let customers know when the last day to buy Father’s Day gifts for on-time delivery is.
• Offer double loyalty points for a certain period of time tied to Father’s Day purchases.
• Promote limited-time offers to convince shoppers to buy earlier.
• The immediacy of SMS makes it the perfect channel for building urgency. Try one of these Yotpo SMS & Email Father’s Day templates to generate FOMO.

Leverage UGC to help shoppers find the perfect gift

Buying something for yourself online is hard enough, but buying for someone else can seem downright impossible at times, especially when you have to factor in things like fit, skin type, and personality. Customers trust other customers more than brands, so make sure their voices are heard.

Strategy in action:

• Collect high-quality reviews that contain information about sizing or other attributes that are crucial to helping customers make informed purchases.
• Syndicate your reviews to Google Shopping, Facebook, and anywhere else you sell to boost brand discovery.
• Incentivize customers to share photos and videos in reviews through your loyalty program to help gift givers visualize the product in real life.
• Use UGC to create an ad campaign geared toward gift givers showcasing positive feedback from real men about your products.

Yotpo can help your brand build better customer experiences with SMS marketing, loyalty programs, reviews, and user-generated content — any time of the year. Learn more.