Last-Minute Mother’s Day Sales Strategies for Subscription Box Owners
In this livestream, subscription‑box coach Sarah Williams walks her audience through a rapid‑action plan to capture Mother’s Day (and other May) sales despite the short timeline. She first frames May as a holiday‑heavy month and emphasizes that there are still two weeks to generate revenue. Sarah then outlines three concrete product ideas that can be launched immediately: (1) curated gift bundles assembled from existing inventory, (2) non‑recurring 3‑ or 6‑month gift subscriptions sold as a one‑time purchase, and (3) printable digital gift cards with promotional incentives. For each idea she explains why it works, how to price it, and how to position it to a primarily women‑focused audience. Next, she details a four‑step promotion framework: go live on video (her “Home Shopping Network”), run a daily email campaign for the promotion week, post daily on social feeds, and supplement organic reach with paid ads. She quantifies typical website conversion rates (1‑3 %) and shows how to calculate ad spend based on product inventory and revenue goals (e.g., $100 ad spend for a $1,000 bundle goal). Sarah uses a fire‑analogy—organic tactics are logs, paid ads are lighter fluid—to stress the need for both. She ends with a call‑to‑action, urging participants to pick the easiest strategy, launch it, and share their results, reinforcing that any sale (bundle, subscription, or card) creates future subscribers. The session blends practical tactics, budgeting math, audience psychology, and motivational coaching to help subscription‑box owners turn a last‑minute holiday into immediate cash flow and longer‑term subscriber growth.
Chapters
Good morning, happy Monday! Welcome to Monday Momentum. I'm Sarah Williams, and today we're going to talk about how to maximize sales for Mother's Day. Even if you haven't done anything yet, even if you feel like you're late to the party, there is still some things that we can do. And what we need right now in our shops, um, is to make some money, and we have a great opportunity to do this May is always— actually, April's a really big month for me because of all the holidays that we have in May. We have Mother's Day, we have graduations, we have Teacher Appreciation, Nurse Appreciation. Like, there's just a lot of holidays that are gift-giving, and so we can really maximize that with our audiences. So that's what we're going to talk about today. I'm going to give you some things that you can put into place right now to make some sales, even if you haven't done anything for Mother's Day yet. So I've got some ideas, I've got some marketing tips for you. Um, we're not late, we still have 2 weeks to really sell some things for Mother's Day or any of the holidays in this month and really kind of add some revenue to our books this month. All right, okay, so let's come over to the chat. Let me say hi this morning. I am streaming on YouTube and my Facebook page, How to Start a Subscription Box. On YouTube, I am— you can find me under Sarah Williams, Subscription Box Business Coach. Um, but the YouTube page is lightning fast. We crossed 10,000 subscribers last week or 2 weeks ago. We're now over 12,000 subscribers on YouTube. So if you're not over on YouTube, we're growing like crazy. If you're watching from YouTube, thank you so much for subscribing to the page. Thank you so much for just commenting and sharing, because growth is growth, and we're growing at a rapid pace on YouTube, which feels really, really good in a world where social media growth is kind of hard right now. So, um, Dana says, I remember when you hit 1,000, right? Now we're over 12,000. My goal is to get to 50,000 YouTube subscribers by the end of this year, and I'm on my way to do that. So, um, that's the goal. Good morning, everybody. Uh, good morning, Rebecca. Good to see you. Hey, Victoria and Jonica. Hi, Louise. Good to see you this morning. Nikki said good morning from Colorado. So glad you had fun and success while visiting our state. Oh my gosh, I had the best weekend. In Colorado Springs. I met this wonderful woman named Mindy Lipscomb, Linscomb, last month when I was speaking at an event in Nashville, and I had just gotten engaged, and she owns a beautiful bridal boutique in Colorado Springs, and she offered me a full VIP day. The store was closed for me. We had this beautiful VIP, like the Kleinfeld Say Yes to the Dress in New York City, like drinks, food, mountain views, red carpets, like you name it, it was amazing. And she gifted me a wedding dress of my choice from her shop. It was the most magical experience. So I came home with a wedding dress yesterday. It was really awesome. Good morning, Beth. Hey Christina. Hey everybody, good morning. Good morning. So here's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about how to maximize your sale, your sales for Mother's Day. And it's not too late because let's just be honest, um, raise your hand in the chat if you've not purchased Mother's Day gifts yet, because I haven't either. So, um, while we've sold out of our Mother's Day gift boxes, we now have an opportunity to capitalize on some more people that haven't that didn't get one of those boxes, and I can put together some really great gift sets for them. It's really right around the corner. It's May 11th, so it's in 2 weeks. It's Sunday, May 11th, and there's still just a lot of time to do that. And today I'm going to give you some quick actionable steps, um, to take so that we can implement. We can implement something today, put it out and sell it today. We can add to our sales goals for April. We can add to our sales goals for May with just quick little action. Okay, so what I love, and it's perfect if you have a, a women-focused audience because women buy the gifts, right? Women's— but women buy gifts for their mothers. They typically buy for their mothers-in-law. They may buy for other people in their family. They may even buy for their adult children who are mothers. So there's an opportunity if you have a woman-based audience to really capitalize on this. So let's talk about 3— let's talk about 3 strategies. I'm going to give you 3 strategies that you could put into place right now. So the first one that I go to, and this is something that I can put together, is I can put together some gift bundles. So we're working on this right now. We're putting together several different gift bundles. It's from past subscription products, so it's product I already have laying around, mixing and matching some pieces so it doesn't feel like the box. Um, but putting together some gift bundles from your shop. You can call them Mother's Day gift bundles, you could call them spring gift bundles, um, you could call them whatever you want, and we can get them out there. They'd be great for graduation, they'd be great for Mother's Day, they'd be great for teacher gifts. So let's get some gift bundles out there. Um, let's just put something together. And I— when I do bundles, I typically do 3 or 4 products. A lot of times it's 3 pieces. It's one hero piece and a couple accessories to go with the hero piece. So take a look at what you have in inventory. Even if you hadn't planned to do a Mother's Day sale or you feel like you're behind, you can put together something that you already have in stock and you can start shipping it immediately. Okay, so number 1 is put together, um, some gift bundles that you already have in your shop. Number 2, we could create a gift subscription. We could do a 3-month, we could do a 6-month, gift subscription. So this could be a special Mother's Day gift subscription. Maybe your subscription numbers are down right now and you've got some spots, you've got extra product hanging around, you have the opportunity to sell a gift subscription, which is great because you could start it in June. It's the same way that we do at the holidays where I do a gift subscription, we sell it to them in November or December, and then their first box comes in January. You can do that right now. It's a, it's a one-time product listing on your website. It's not a subscription listing. So you can sell a one-time gift subscription, 3 months or 6 months is a great way to just get a gift and then they can get June, July, or August, or then September, October, November. So it can be 3 months or 6 months, they pay in full, it is not a recurring charge. And we do that with a pay in full and they also pay shipping in full for all the months that are included. So you could definitely do a gift subscription, it's an easy one-time product listing on your website and then we've gotta promote it. The other thing that we can do right now is we could do digital gift cards, printable gift cards to your shop. Those kind of fall a little less, I'm gonna put those on the last of your list and maybe push those more towards the few days before Mother's Day because it's kind of the last minute ditch effort, I don't have time to get anything in the mail. But you could totally do gift cards and do a promotion around a gift card, maybe it's, buy a $50 gift card, get $10 free on that. So they're getting a $50 gift card and a $10 gift card. You could do some kind of promotion around gift cards. We're doing a promotion at the salon, we're starting at May 1st with where it's a blowout package where they get 5 blowouts for a special discounted price. And so we're not even selling that until May 1st because it's typically local sales. And so they'll get they'll get a certificate and it gets added to their account. So there's 3 ideas that you could implement literally right now. So one, let's do some gift bundles of product we already have in stock curated for Mother's Day. Let's do a gift subscription, 3 to 6 months, or let's promote a digital gift card or printable, you know, a printable gift card or something like that on your site as we get closer to May 11th. So those are 3 very good ideas that you can implement and And maybe you already did a Mother's Day gift box like me. We already did it, we sold out, they're ready to ship. I can now do some gift bundles, a product I already have. Hey, did you miss our Mother's Day box? Here's, here's a, here's a gift bundle that we put together today. I have 20 of them only, and we'll ship it. We could ship it in one of our subscription boxes, we could not put it in a box. You just have to make it clear of how it's going to come for them, okay? 3 ideas. Tell me which one feels easiest for you to implement right now in the chat. Gift bundles, gift subscriptions, or, um, discounted— or, or gift cards. Gift bundles, gift subscriptions, gift cards. Tell me in the chat which one works for you. Brandy says, do you discount gift subscriptions? No, I don't give— I don't discount gift subscriptions at all. Um, in— when I do the holiday ones, if they buy a year, I usually give them a free month. Like, if they buy 11— I know they buy 10 months, I give them 2 months free. Um, but for these, I wouldn't. I would do shorter amount of time, a smaller dollar amount. Um, and I, I wouldn't do a discount on that. Dana says she could do a gift subscription. Nikki says a gift bundle. Victoria says gift bundles. So these are something we can all do. We can do 1, 2, or 3. Now let's talk a little bit about how to promote them. Because it's all fine and dandy to put together an offer, but we've got to promote it. And that's where a lot of, a lot of our community I see fall short in the promotion part of it. We have these amazing subscription boxes, we have these amazing ideas, but where we fall short is we just don't know how to promote it to get the best bang for our buck. So there's a couple of things that we can really do that I would do for every promotion that I do. So if I'm going to go put gift bundles together today, these are all the things I'm going to do for that. The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to go live. I know I sound like a broken record, but there is no better sales tactic than going live. My sweet fiancé calls it the Home Shopping Network, Sarah's Home Shopping Network, because I'm selling, I'm selling live. They have to see that. The energy, they have to see the excitement, they have to know all the details. So first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to go live, I'm going to put it on my website, I'm going to go live, I'm going to talk about it, and then I'm going to start an email campaign. And email campaigns need to be consistent, and there needs to be several of them. You cannot send one email and be done with it. You have to make a campaign. So if I'm going to promote my gift bundles all of this week, because that gives me a whole week to promote them, sell them, and get them shipped out so that they have them in time for Mother's Day. I'm going to email every single day this week about a gift bundle. Okay, so I need you to— when you're promoting something, it's not one and done. It's not one live. It's not one email. Okay, we have to go live to build the excitement and the knowledge around it. And then we have to send an email consistently. If you're going to promote longer than a week, you may not want to send an email every single day, but maybe it's every every other day. But if I'm going to promote it all this week, if I've got gift bundles or if I've got gift subscriptions, I'm going to send an email every single day and give them a reason to buy. Okay, so you've got to email your list, you've got to go live. I'm going to post about it every single day. So in my feed, there's going to be at least one post a day about whatever this is, if it's a gift bundle or a gift subscription. Okay. And then I'm going to run some ads. I've got to get traffic to my sales page. I got to get it over there. I've got to get traffic to our sales page. And the biggest problem is not our conversion rate. It's our traffic. We're not getting enough people to hit our sales page to get the conversion. Remember, remember, typical conversion for someone going to your website is 1 to 3%. So that means for every 100 people that you get over to your website, you're only going to get 1 to 3 purchases. So if I want more than 3 purchases, I need to get 1,000 people to that sales page. And organically, that's just really tough for even for someone like me to get 1,000 people organically to a sales page from a live and an email and a social post. It won't happen. I may get a few hundred organically. But if I want to get 1,000 people or more over to my sales page, I have to run an ad. Okay, it doesn't cost a ton of money to run ads either. But if you're not running ads and then you're like, I only got 3 sales for my gift bundle, that's why organically it's just really hard to get enough traffic to our sales page. So we can have a great bundle, we can have a great product listing, we can send out the best email and have all the social posts that may generate a few sales for us, but what we really need is the traffic. So unless you have a giant audience that's super engaged and flooding your website on a regular basis, you're probably going to need to run ads. And it's okay to admit that. I run ads all the time. I need the traffic over to my website. And so I'm gonna go live, I'm gonna do social posts every day, I'm gonna do an email every day. That's my organic strategy, and then I'm going to run some ads for that time period. And that combination, that 4-step marketing combination is going to generate sales for me and I'm going to get some product off my shelf or I'm going to sell some gift subscriptions. And I'm going to feel good about it and I'm going to make, I'm going to generate some revenue in my business with those 4 steps, 3 organic, 1 paid. And that's the combination. We cannot just rely on the paid marketing all the time. If we do, it's really gonna be costly for us. And we can't just rely on our organic strategies because that only gets us so far. We need the combination of both of these so that it can really fuel our businesses. And until we accept that, and until we understand that, we're gonna feel defeated all the time. We're gonna, because you can only do so much. It only works so far. Organically, you can do a lot of things, but it only gets us so far. I call our organic, traffic, the logs on the fire. Okay, so we're building the fire and we are starting with the wood and that's our organic traffic, that's our emails, that's our log, that's our Facebook Live, that's another log, that's our social post, that's another log. That gets the fire burning, but what really gets a powerful fire is the gas. So if we're throwing lighter fluid on that fire, that is our ads. And so if we want to have a healthy, robust fire burning, we have to have all of those things. We can't just have lighter fluid on grass. That's not good. I mean, that's going to burn, but it's going to burn out and cause a mess. We need to put those logs in place so that it burns beautifully. We need all of those things together to really make it a long-term sustainable business. We need the organic traffic, we need the paid ads. And so it's, and it's simple. Once you start doing that with every promotion, it's going to be like second nature to you and it's just a rinse and repeat for you. Okay. We can spend as much or as little as you want to. Okay. So if I'm doing ads for, say, if I was going to do gift bundles, I'd probably, and I was only going to do it for a week, I would think, okay, How many bundles do I have? How much do I want to spend? How much do I want to make? How much do I want to spend? So I'm doing the math in my head. If I'm just doing one-time products, um, maybe I have 20 bundles at $50. Let's— let me do some math here and I'll help you with the budget. Okay, um, 20 times 50. Okay, so that's $1,000. Okay, so if I want to do $1,000, I'm going to take 10% of my goal and I'm going to run that with ads. So I'm going to do $100 for my ad spend. So if that is 5 days, I'm going to spend $20 a day. This is how I compute this. Okay, if I want to spend $5,000, if I want to make $5,000, I'm going to spend $500 on my ad spend. Depending on how much product I have, you could do— I wouldn't do an ad less than $10 a day. I typically run $30 to $50 a day if that helps you when I'm doing a substantial promotion that I have enough product for. And if you have a little, little amount of product, maybe you only have 10 boxes, send it out organically, see if they get purchased. And if not, then run an ad, do a live, do an email, do a text, do social posts. And if you didn't sell all 10 of them, then run an ad the next day. So you just have to work it around your audience and your budget. It if that helps you. Okay, so here's what I want you to do. I want you to take action. There's still an opportunity for us to make some sales right now, and I don't want you to miss the opportunity because you feel like it's too late. Gift bundles, gift subscriptions, gift cards. The closer we get to this holiday— this is a big holiday, Mother's Day is a big holiday— but there's also some little holidays throughout this month that could Graduation gifts, teacher gifts, nurse gifts. There's all kinds of things happening in May that we can really capitalize. I want you to get it out there and don't be afraid to get it out there. What's worst case scenario? I put gift subscriptions out there, I sell 3. Okay, I got 3 subscribers for the next 3 months. Great. Put it out there. I hope I get 30 subscribers for the next 3 months. I hope I get 100 subscribers for the next 3 months. That's going to take some of the excess that I have and really build something from that. So I want you to do that and, and just realize that every gift subscription, gift bundle, or gift card is a potential subscriber in our future. We need to send them something. They need to be happy with their purchase. They need to love their stuff. This is also a potential subscriber for our future. So let's go make some sales. It's not hard. Put together a promotion, do the organic, do the paid, and let's make some sales right now. All right, y'all have a great rest of your Monday. And let me know, let me know in the group, let me know in the chat what you put together today and drop a link. Some of us are still shopping for Mother's Day. We would love to— I'd love for you to share links on our post on Facebook so that we can shop together. All right, y'all have a great day. I'll see you soon.
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