The 4 Mother’s Day Trends That Should Impact Your Father’s Day Preparation

Are you trying to figure out exactly how to put the finishing touches on your Father’s Day preparation? Or optimizing those campaigns based on some early A/B testing results? 

While any good child knows that mom and dad certainly have their preferences and their two holidays are far from the same, there are still some significant learnings that your commerce-driving team can take advantage of from Mother’s Day 2023. 

So as your merchandising team begins to optimize for Father’s Day, check out these four Mother’s Day trends compiled from our Bloomreach Commerce Pulse data that should definitely be considered when putting together your Father’s Day prep. 

Top Mother’s Day Searches

Again, we know that most of your customers won’t be buying the same things for their mothers that they would for their fathers. But that doesn’t mean the learnings surrounding the top Mother’s Day searches aren’t scalable and can’t teach us a few things about this upcoming Father’s Day. 

According to our Bloomreach data, top keyword searches around Mother’s Day were “flowers”, “chocolates”, “rose/roses”, and “wine”. Compared to last year, 2023’s customers are making significantly more “pointed searches” than generic ones. 

What does that mean? Rather than searching for just “Mother’s Day” or “Mother’s Day Gifts”, customers sought out exactly what they were looking for from brands. 

Additionally, the percentage of top categories for Mother’s Day-related searches dropped and the accessories category gained traction. This applies particularly to watches, Apple Watches, and perfumes. 

What does this mean for Father’s Day? This means that customers are shopping cross-category. Ensuring that your Father’s Day landing pages showcase the breadth of your assortment is important. 

The Timing of Mother’s Day Searches

Mother’s Day-related traffic surged beginning about five weeks before Mother’s Day. We saw a 124% increase in traffic week-over-week in our Bloomreach Commerce Pulse data. It gained even more traction two weeks before Mother’s Day, where we saw a 64% increase week-over-week in search traffic. 

Interestingly, customers started browsing early this year for Mother’s Day ideas as we saw a traffic spike about two weeks before Mother’s Day. Around 56% of the total traffic was equally distributed amongst the two weeks leading up to Mother’s Day. 

The highest individual traffic day was May 8, 2023 — the Monday before Mother’s Day. That indicates that most shoppers were about six days early in beginning their search for their gifts. This is in contrast to what we observed in years past when the data indicated that customers were much more last minute in shopping for their moms. 

The lesson to be learned here? Don’t assume that Father’s Day shoppers are waiting until the last minute to get the perfect gift for dad.

Mother’s Day Products That Were Purchased

Per usual, greeting cards were an extremely popular Mother’s Day purchase. More specifically, 3D pop-up cards were very popular this Mother’s Day as well as flower bouquets and arrangement 3D pop-up cards. 

Similar to last year, we saw customers purchase a wide variety of Mother’s Day-related cards. This includes cards for mom, grandma, aunts, mother-in-laws, nanas, first-time mothers, and sisters. This is proof that Mother’s Day is more than just a holiday for mothers, it is a day that customers are using to celebrate many different significant women in their lives. 

The most popular gifts and gift sets were related to chocolates, perfumes, makeup and other beauty-related products. Wine and champagne products were also very popular amongst Mother’s Day shoppers, particularly Prosecco. 

What from here can be applied to Father’s Day? Just like Mother’s Day, this holiday can be used to celebrate all sorts of different men in your customers’ lives. We anticipate similar trends will be observed for Father’s Day where customers are shopping for their dad, husband, brother, grandfather, or other men in their life. 

Customers Engaging With Mother’s Day Content Also Engaged With…

Believe it or not, Mother’s Day customers were already thinking about Father’s Day. 

Several customers who engaged with a Mother’s Day-related page or that made a similar search also ended up landing on a Father’s Day-related page or making a search that was related to Father’s Day. These searches included “gifts for him”, “gifts for dad”, and even just “Father’s Day”. 

Our data told us that customers browsed to category pages more often after engaging with Mother’s Day-related content or category pages. 

So even during Mother’s Day, shoppers still had dear ol’ dad on the mind! 

Optimize Product Discovery With Bloomreach

The overarching lesson here? Don’t just compartmentalize your Mother’s Day data and save it for 2024. There are many valuable lessons that can be learned from our Bloomreach Commerce Pulse data and from your own individual search-related data that can be applied to your Father’s Day preparations. 

If you’re looking to learn more about optimizing your site search with Bloomreach, make plans to attend our Discovery Best Practices monthly webinars. Each month, our product experts host a 45-minute live webinar focused on helping customers get the most out of Bloomreach Discovery. To keep the conversation going, you can also join our Merchandising Community on Linkedin. Don’t miss it!