The pandemic brought many florists scores of new customers who wanted to connect with loved ones they couldn’t physically see. Can you count on their continued business? Not unless you follow up in a smart and meaningful way, says marketing expert Dan McManus, a featured speaker at SAF Orlando 2021.

“We’ve had a bumper crop,” says McManus, author of “Flower and Profits” and the founder of TeamFloral, a marketing service. “Most shops’ sales are up pretty dramatically. And you’d think, if they had a positive experience with you, they’d shop with you again. But if you look at the data, that doesn’t usually happen,” he told SAF CEO Kate Penn in a recent interview.

Loyalty is rare — only about 30 or 40 percent of new floral customers come back, McManus says. Why? “The average consumer only buys flowers once a year, and it’s easy to just hop on Google and search for a florist,” he says.

Marketing tactics have changed, too. Email blasts, which worked well in the past, may actually hurt your chance of encouraging repeat business.

Here’s a common scenario: A customer purchases flowers for his anniversary and gets added to the florist’s email list. Soon, he’s receiving multiple emails a week for advertising promotions and design workshops. By the time his next anniversary rolls around, “he’s exhausted with your message and doesn’t want your product anymore,” McManus says.

Another problem is getting past email hosts’ filters. “If a person doesn’t read your email message a few times, the service automatically sends it to their junk folder,” McManus says. “You might think you’re emailing 5,000 people, but really it’s only a fraction of that.” And if a subscriber changes his or her email address (which approximately 20 percent of people do annually, McManus says), you can be penalized. “When you send a lot of emails to accounts that have closed, you fall into a ‘high risk’ category and your messages are marked as spam,” he says.

In his presentation, “Post-Pandemic Remarketing: Turning New Customers into Repeat Buyers,” McManus will dive deeper into what doesn’t work, but moreover, what does. “I’ll give three different strategies that just depend on how sophisticated you want to get,” he says. “There are opportunities that will work whether you’re a small, medium, or large shop.”

For more information and to register for SAF Orlando 2021, visit https://staging.safnow.org/events-education/annual-convention/.

Katie Vincent is the senior contributing editor for the Society of American Florists.