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The Data Doesn’t Lie: We Still Love Mama Best

Mother’s Day purchase data hints that we tend to spoil our mothers on their special day more than we do our lovers or our fathers

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So, how much do we love our mothers? According to new Optimove research, the answer is: a lot. On the heels of Mother’s Day, Optimove parsed gift buying data to glean consumer behavior surrounding this date. We looked at data from quintessential online gift outlets: Flower shops, providers of gift baskets, chocolate sellers, and high-end healthy snacks crates. Our research spanned millions of transactions on the week leading up to Mother’s Day, across the U.S.

For gift businesses, Mother’s Day is a huge occasion. Across the board, the week before Mother’s Day sees an average increase of 3.5X in all significant KPIs: a 375% increase in the number of daily orders, a 390% in the number of daily purchasers, and a 340% increase in total daily payment amount. A lot of people buy gifts for their mothers, and it also seems that we’ve all been brought up to really show our appreciation on that day: 45% of consumers send their mothers high-end merchandise, 35% prefer middle-range gifts, and only 24% send gifts from the low end of the spectrum.

Procrastinators try to ease their conscience with more expensive gifts: 60% of all orders are made two to four days before the event, but the 8% who save their gift shopping for the last minute typically pay 13% more on their gift if they buy it the day before, and 25% more for those who really needed a wake-up call and ordered the gift on the day itself.

But who do we love more? Our mothers? Our lovers? Our fathers? While love has many manifestations, if we consider it through the prism of special-day gift giving, mothers come out on top. Although the average order value on Valentines is 20% higher than the average order value on Mother’s Day, the number of gift orders on Mother’s Day is significantly higher. In 2016, the number of orders on Mother’s Day was a staggering 70% higher than on Valentine’s. This year, which saw a much stronger Valentine’s Day overall from a commercial perspective, Mother’s Day orders were still 16%.

It seems that gift givers do play favorites: among gift buyers on both Mother’s Day and Valentine’s there’s only a very small overlap. The data shows that out of all the customers who made a purchase on V-day and M-day, only 5.6% purchased on both events. The same goes for Father’s Day, only more so:  out of all customers who purchased both on Father’s Day and Mother’s Day, only 1.7% purchased on both events. The data shows that while we love our fathers and our lovers, we still love mama best.

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