13 Mother's Day Campaign Ideas (and How to Approach this Holiday Thoughtfully)

13 Mother's Day Campaign Ideas (and How to Approach this Holiday Thoughtfully)
Charlene Boutin Charlene Boutin Apr 19, 2023 —  8 min read

Mother’s Day is coming up fast, and if you’re looking for thoughtful ways to approach this holiday, look no further.

It’s easy to put together any old campaign to try and boost sales this Mother’s Day. But when you make an effort to show you care, you’ll gain more loyal customers who fall in love with your brand!

Below are 13 fun Mother’s Day campaign ideas that can work for any budget.


1. Be thoughtful first

While Mother’s Day is a beloved holiday for many people around the world, it’s also a difficult time for many others.

Those who have experienced loss may be sensitive to repetitive reminders about this holiday.

As a brand owner, you can take a thoughtful approach to your Mother’s Day promotions by handing more control over to your email subscribers.

How? By allowing them to opt out of Mother’s Day promos without leaving your list entirely.

For example, FERKO’S, sends this email before launching its Mother’s Day jewelry promo campaign:

Ferko’s allows their email subscribers to opt out of the mother’s day promo campaign

If you choose this route, you can tag subscribers who click on the opt-out link and segment them out of your promo list. By doing so, you show that you respect their boundaries around this holiday.

Keep in mind that you can do this for every promo you run via email. Permission-based email marketing does take some thought, but it can help you nurture a list of loyal subscribers that love and respect your brand.

2. Create a Mother’s Day gift guide

A gift guide can become a highly profitable resource for your store. It’s also a helpful tool for your customers to make purchasing decisions.

Any customer who’s rushing to find a last-minute gift for Mother’s Day will appreciate an appropriately-themed gift guide from their favorite online retailers. They reduce the overwhelm by curating a list of the best options to buy from you at this time.

You can share your Mother’s Day gift guide with your email list:

Example of a Mother’s Day gift guide from Poshmark

But you can also:

You can also feature the guide on the home page of your website with a promo popup:

To make the most of a Mother’s Day gift guide, craft it with thought — don’t just put a bunch of random products together. Your customers will appreciate it much more if you create the gift guide as a positive shopping experience.

3. Send meaningful Mother’s Day email campaigns

Several of these Mother’s Day promo ideas will work splendidly as an email promotion. So let’s fire off a few examples of promotions you can send right now.

First, you can keep it simple and share a discount code with your list:

Example of a Mother’s Day promo announcement, plus discount code from Oradina

But you don’t have to focus only on selling your products. For instance, you can educate your audience on topics surrounding your industry by sharing:

  • Helpful resources
  • Tips
  • Things to do for Mother’s Day (that may or may not involve your products)

For example, Etsy shares some breakfast-in-bed ideas with its subscribers:

Mother’s Day promo campaign from Etsy features breakfast-in-bed ideas

If you have the data available to do so, you can send an email that’s specifically for the moms on your email list. If you don’t have the segmentation data, you can still send an email like this, but consider that not everyone may open and/or click through to your website.

I love how this email from Ingrid + Isabel encourages moms to pamper themselves instead of waiting for someone else to do it for them:

Ingrid + Isabel Mother’s Day promo campaign

Finally, you can remind people if you have gift cards available for purchase!

Surge reminds its subscribers about gift cards for Mother’s Day via email campaign

Gift cards make a great gift for those customers who don’t know what else to get… or those who are buying for someone they don’t know a lot about yet.

4. Feature real mothers

Show your customers that you care about real mothers by featuring some of them in your content this month.

By letting mothers tell their stories, you can engage with your audience on a deeper level. It also allows you to show the human side of your brand.

For example, Lalo, a toddler and baby brand, asked moms in their audience what being a mother meant to them, which created a unique email newsletter:

Lalo features real mothers in their Mother’s Day promo campaign

You can use these types of showcases in your emails, but they also make for great social media content. In Lalo’s case, this was an Instagram takeover.

5. Offer a gift with a purchase

How about a gift for the gift-giver?

Mother’s Day is the perfect time to bundle a gift with all purchases above a certain amount. You can choose a specific product, or you can offer a gift card, just like Coco Village does in their email promo below:

Coco Village offers a gift card along with a purchase of a Mother’s Day gift

Gifts are especially interesting if you sell products designed for mothers. If this is the case, you can offer a gift designed specifically for them.

By doing this, you’ll be giving a Mother’s Day gift to all the mothers in your customer list.

6. Try a ‘BOGO’ offer

There are a handful of reasons to launch a Buy One Get One Free offer for Mother’s Day!

For example, people purchasing gifts for their mothers and mother-in-law will be able to complete their shopping in a single go.

But it’s also ideal for someone who wants to match their mother (or whomever they’re buying a gift for).

EyeBuyDirect, an online glasses store, shows a great example of how to position a BOGO offer for Mother’s Day:

Eyebuydirect features a BOGO offer in their Mother’s Day marketing campaign

What if you have a target audience made up of moms? In this case, you can create a BOGO offer that targets moms and their children (or other loved ones).

For example, Briar Baby launched this BOGO offer with bucket hats for baby and mama:

Example of a BOGO offer in a Mother’s Day promo campaign from Briar Baby

Your BOGO offer can be even better if you have matching products, just like Briar Baby. But if you’re not launching a new collection specifically for Mother’s Day, feel free to make curated suggestions for your online shoppers instead.

7. Promote a free shipping offer

If you don’t normally offer free shipping with all orders, consider running a free shipping campaign around the same period as Mother’s Day.

People who are on the fence about ordering from your website due to shipping fees may finally pull the trigger on that purchase once those fees disappear.

How important is free shipping? In The State of Shipping Report from 2022, researchers found that 56% of abandoned carts are caused by shipping concerns — including shipping fees.

Recent stats featuring the reasons for abandoned shopping carts

The best way to let shoppers know you’re offering free shipping? Creating a free shipping bar that will display the minimum order requirement. However, don’t forget to include a mention of free shipping in every email you send out during your promotion.

8. Create a product bundle mothers will love

Go one step above the gift guide and create a product bundle that’s curated specifically for mothers.

A Mother’s Day bundle can help you increase average order value while also taking the work out of finding the perfect gift.

One example of a bundle that’s perfect for Mother’s Day is a gift box, as you can see from Winterfold:

Winterfold creates a product bundle specially for the Mother’s Day promotion

You can also bundle products that complement each other. For example, if you sell women’s razors, you can bundle a razor with hydrating cream.

Feel free to pair product bundles with other promotions. For instance, you can offer free shipping to all bundle buyers. Or you can offer an extra gift with every bundle.

9. Launch a charitable campaign

Want to show your customers you care about mothers and their children — and that Mother’s Day isn’t just another opportunity to make a quick sale for your brand? Consider launching a charitable campaign that supports a nonprofit organization specifically dedicated to a relevant cause.

Some examples of nonprofit organizations you could support include (but aren’t limited to):

  • Family shelters and women’s shelters
  • Organizations that help new moms care for their newborns
  • Midwife organizations
  • Organizations that help moms go back to school
  • Nonprofits dedicated to pregnancy and/or infant loss
  • Orphanages and organizations that support orphans

Choose a nonprofit organization that makes sense for your brand. For example, if you and your customers value local businesses, make sure to choose an organization that’s local to you and most of your customer base.

To launch a charitable campaign, you can contribute a portion of all proceeds to the organization of your choice. Alternatively, you can include your customers by creating a poll for their favorite organization.

10. Try a Mother’s Day quiz

There’s no better way to help an overwhelmed customer than to guide them through their Mother’s Day purchase with a quiz.

Ecommerce quizzes are fun, engaging, and helpful for your website visitors. For Mother’s Day, you can create a quiz that helps your customers narrow down the perfect gift for their moms.

For instance, you can create a personality-driven quiz. Or you can use your quiz to pinpoint a problem one of your products could solve for your customers’ mothers.

When you create a Mother’s Day quiz, make sure to make the most of it.

Quizzes are highly sharable, so the more you promote the quiz to your audience, the more they’ll be likely to share it with other people, too.

Send it to your email list, add a promo popup to your website, mention it on social media… or, if you have a paid ads budget, launch a new campaign specifically for the quiz.

11. Launch a new collection

Have an upcoming collection launch? Why not save it for Mother’s Day — or design a new collection specifically for this holiday?

Launching a new product collection is a great opportunity to create products specifically catered to mothers (or their loved ones).

Queen’s Park Sleepwear launched a new Mother’s Day collection, including mini versions to help moms match with their kids:

Queen’s Park Sleepwear launches a special collection dedicated to Mother’s Day

Remember that you can combine this idea with other Mother’s Day promo ideas from this list — for instance, you can:

  • Announce your new collection to your email list
  • Ask real mothers to be featured using your new product collection
  • Match your new collection with a gift

12. Host a live sale event

There’s no better way to engage with your customers than to host a live sale event. But instead of creating a generic live sale, you can theme your event around Mother’s Day.

Live sales are promotional events during which you (or someone from your brand’s team) host a video live stream to show your products.

If you’ve launched a new Mother’s Day collection, consider showing it in real time via a live sale! Make sure to have enough stock on hand to demonstrate them to your audience.

13. Promote a Mother’s Day giveaway

Finally, consider throwing a Mother’s Day giveaway as a way to give back to your loyal customers.

Giveaways aren’t just fun for your audience and customers — they’re also an effective way to expand your audience and gain new social media followers (or email subscribers). You get to choose how people enter your giveaway — so you can prioritize what you’d prefer.

You can start announcing your giveaway before it begins to build up some hype, just like Baked PZ does below:

Bakedpz launches a giveaway as their Mother’s Day promo campaign

Once the giveaway is live, you can use both your social media and your website visitors to participate via a direct link to the giveaway page.

Remember to look up the laws and regulations for giveaways in your country or region. These vary depending on the location, so there’s no one-size-fits-all process everyone can follow.

Host a Mother’s Day campaign your customers will love

Whether you decide to go with something simple or plan a huge campaign, remember to keep a customer-first approach when planning your Mother’s Day campaign for your store. When you can provide a positive experience for every customer, you’ll be more likely to cultivate a loyal customer base that keeps coming back.

Charlene Boutin is a freelance content writer & email marketing strategist for hire specializing in helping Ecommerce and SaaS businesses increase conversions by growing authentic relationships with their audience. She loves helping business owners tell their unique stories to capture the hearts of more customers.

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