International Women’s Day is often seen as a day of celebrating women and their achievements, raising awareness and highlighting important issues.
Rarely do we talk about promoting products and services on International Women’s Day. However, that may be a huge missed opportunity, as both international recognition and sales during the day are on the rise.
Omnisend analysis showed that Women’s Day sales are increasing year-over-year, as more brands (and consumers) use this day to celebrate the women in their lives.
We analyzed campaigns sent up to one week before Women’s Day to see the popularity of Women’s Day campaigns, and how consumers responded to these campaigns.
Email campaigns
International Women’s Day was the most profitable day during the first three weeks of March 2023 and businesses made 26% more sales on March 8th compared to the average day in March.
When looking at the data over the last three years, we see that March 8, the actual Women’s Day, actually has one of the highest orders for the entire period:
What does it all mean?
Two things. First of all, it hints at the possibility that International Women’s Day is not like Valentine’s Day — when you’re giving gifts for others in your life — but could be a day of self-gifting. This can help explain why we see a spike in orders on March 8.
Secondly: that multi-part campaign is always recommended: instead of sending a one-off campaign for events like Women’s Day, you should send multiple emails.
The first email should go out one or even two weeks before the event. After that, you can send a follow up email a few days before Women’s Day (especially if you sent out the first email two weeks in advance). Finally, you absolutely need to send out the final email on the actual Women’s Day on March 8.
Orders and total emails sent gives us one side of the picture, but what’s the other side? Which days are your best chance of getting great sales? For that we need to look at the click-to-conversion rate, which looks at the rate of orders from people who clicked on an email.
For that, each year tells a slightly different story:
- 2021: the highest conversion rate was on March 1
- 2022: the highest conversion rate was on March 4
- 2023: the highest conversion rate was on March 8
What does it all mean? Don’t try to predict which days will be the best day to send out your Women’s Day campaigns. Send out multiple messages, at least one week in advance of Women’s Day.
SMS & push notifications
SMS campaigns had similar results. The most popular sending days in our analysis were March 5 (2021), March 4 (2022), and March 8 (2023). In terms of sales, the highest sending day was also the highest order day: March 5 (2021) and March 8 (2023). However, in 2022, the highest order day was not March 4, but instead March 8.
Web push notifications continue to convince us that a lot more brands need to use it to promote their products.
When it comes to email marketing, the click-to-conversion rate hovers in the 5-9% range. For SMS, that’s a bit lower at roughly 2%. But for web push notifications, we’re consistently seeing 6-50% ranges. Bigger range, bigger opportunities.
However, as more people use push notifications, we should see that range come down to compete with email’s conversion range.
Automations
If you’ve read Omnisend’s performance reports, you can probably guess which automation workflows bring in the best results overall: welcome and abandoned cart.
For Women’s Day, that’s no different.
The highest orders on every day came from the abandoned cart workflow, with a click-to-conversion rate of at least 45%. This is true for every single year (and probably won’t change for the upcoming years).
The second most popular automation workflow is the welcome emails, also every single year. Also true every year: the welcome email has the highest click-to-conversion rate, often ranging above 55%.
Best performing industries on Women’s Day
By far the most popular industry for ecommerce is apparel (clothing, fashion, etc.). Therefore, Apparel brands not only sent out the most messages in the week leading up to Women’s Day, but naturally also had the most orders. That is true for every single year.
What is more insightful, however, is looking at the click-to-conversion rate — the rate of sales from people who clicked on a message. This shows interest and excitement for a type of product or service.
The top five industries for each year has some recurring themes:
In 2022 and 2023, the Health industry and Smoking/Vaping/CBD came out on top as the two best performing ecommerce industries. However, Healthy was not in the top 5 in 2021, and Apparel is nowhere to be found. In fact, in all three years, it landed somewhere low in the top 15 or top 20 list.
International Women’s Day promotion ideas
There are a few great ways you can promote your products for IWD:
- Self-gifting: make sure to emphasize — as our research shows — that International Women’s Day is a great time for women to treat themselves
- Time-sensitive promotions: you can provide a discount, free shipping, or other offer that expires after IWD (on March 9)
- Product recommendations: this is a great time to recommend products either for your customers or the women in their lives.
- Specially designed landing pages: make it a bigger campaign and create a landing page that goes more into more detail. You can highlight how your products are made for celebrating women. Or go deeper and discuss more serious IWD topics.
One important thing to remember is that International Women’s Day is not like Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day.
It’s a day for all women; for that reason, the products or gifts don’t need to be romantic or family-themed. Colleagues or managers can also send their female employees gifts to mark the occasion.
That means it’s also a good time to use segmentation to personalize your content. For example, if you have gender information, you can send an email directly for women to celebrate themselves or the women in their lives.
On the other hand, you can send a separate email for men to celebrate the women to show their appreciation. Depending on what kind of information you have about your customers, you can also tailor the message for employers, colleagues, etc.
International Women’s Day branding ideas
You can also take a larger, more serious approach to your IWD campaigns. Instead of promoting your products (or in addition to that), you can support IWD’s larger goals:
- Remind your audiences about IWD: without promoting any product, remind your customers about IWD and that they should take a moment to appreciate women
- Feature women’s stories from their business to inspire others: if you’re a woman or have women in your company, you can highlight their stories
- Raising funds for charities or awareness of their contributions: you can also take this time to ask customers to donate to relevant charities, or even offer a 1-for-1 matching donation
It’s possible to combine both branding and promotional ideas into a larger campaign, but you should consider how to do it in a balanced way.
Source from Omnisend
Disclaimer: The information set forth above is provided by omnisend.com independently of Alibaba.com. Alibaba.com makes no representation and warranties as to the quality and reliability of the seller and products.
