Holidays are just around the corner and e-commerce experts like you are preparing to launch promotional activities. Do you already have them all planned out or search for some good Christmas marketing ideas? Either way, we’re sure our post will come at the right moment.
Check out our Christmas marketing campaign ideas below for some inspiration. See how a couple of seemingly minor features can help you set up a whopping 25 different X-mas promotions, boosting your sales.
3 Key Christmas Advertising and Promotion Elements
Effective online promotions aren’t a gamble – there is always science behind virality. And once you know the key elements, you can assemble a killer campaign.
To make your Christmas marketing a real success, you need just three sturdy functional elements:
1. Promotion mechanisms
Buy X Get Y, Discount X after Y Spent, Each product after N th – none of these typical models would exist in e-commerce without smart automation. Your promotion mechanisms have to be flexible and powerful enough to drive the most diverse promotional activities. At the very least, they should be able to enable tiered and bulk discounts, personalized offers based on customer attributes, and custom rules for your creative campaigns.
2. Visual signals to raise awareness
In e-commerce catalogs, the responsibility for catching the eye of the customers often lies with product labels. Their functionality has to provide a rich package of ready-made labels as well as give you the freedom to customize templates and even create new labels from scratch. Helping to effectively draw attention to exclusive offers and personalized discounts, this feature helps not only you – with spreading the word about your promotions – but also your visitors – in easily filtering or noticing products that qualify for promotions.
3. Push to conversion
To invest in the success of your campaign and get impactful results, you need to offer something in return first: a discount or a product for free. For that, you need a feature that would automatically add such a pleasant bonus item to customers' carts or profiles once specific set conditions are met. Even better if the feature provides transparency by displaying a progress bar toward earning a gift or drives urgency by showing a live countdown timer till the end of the campaign.
If you’re using Magento, Amasty's discounted Ultimate Sales Booster is at your service! Assembled specifically for festive marketing, it includes Special Promotions Pro, Product Labels, and Free Gift Pro extensions that cover the three major elements and have all the features we’ve described above. Collectively, these extensions will help you craft powerful, dynamic, and effective Christmas marketing.
But even if you’re using other e-commerce platforms, what matters is that you have the functionality of promotion mechanisms, product labels, and automatic gifts in place. Provided out-of-the-box or not, these features will help you implement dynamic festive campaigns and increase your Christmas sales.
2023 Holiday Sales Stats PDF: Key Figures and Facts for Your Christmas Marketing Campaign
Did you know that 66% of consumers prioritized specific factors during the 2023 holiday shopping season, according to data from McKinsey and the NRF? We've assembled all the key figures and statistics on marketing aspects that helped stores boost revenue last year. Get our free PDF in your inbox to use data-backed predictions and recommendations in your 2024 Christmas campaigns!
15 Best Christmas Marketing Ideas
Now, we’d love to share with you 15 different Christmas marketing promotion ideas that you can easily run with just these three features.
1. Santa’s Surprise Gift
Christmas is the time when your customers expect presents from the closest and dearest people, who genuinely care about them. How about joining the ranks and making the first step towards earning your customers’ loyalty? Consider offering your clients a gift for meeting certain easy conditions – and strengthen your bond with them.
Campaign Tips:
- Personalize your gifts based on customer attributes. You don’t want to make your surprise disappointing.
- Use a gift bar feature to display the number of purchases or spending left until the gift. You can even create several gift tiers – and show how to unlock each next level.
- Don’t make the conditions too tough to meet and your gift – too tough to get. This will defeat the purpose of the campaign.
2. Santa's Picks
Finding a good Christmas gift is a challenge for more people than you think. But e-commerce stores like you have the privilege of knowing exactly what your customers want for Christmas: you have the answers in the customers’ Carts and Wishlists. If you responsibly share this information, your customers will be grateful for the data-driven tips.
Campaign Tips:
- Use conditions to apply labels to all the popular items – those that have high add-to-cart, purchase, or add-to-wishlist rates in your system.
- Design catchy labels with festive shapes featuring "Popular Gift", "Santa's Top Picks" or other Christmas slogans to draw buyers’ attention.
- Create gift collections based on the categories of products the items belong to.
3. Christmas Discounts on Wishlist Items
Another way to take advantage of access to customers’ desired items in your Christmas advertising campaign is to simply play Santa. Offer automated individual discounts on the products that your customers had set aside but would be absolutely willing to buy.
Campaign Tips:
- Motivate customers to create or update their carts and favorites/wish lists through promotional messages.
- Apply custom and personalized labels to products on your customers' wish lists to communicate the discounts.
- Consider giving your customers reward points or an additional gift (from their personal wishlist) upon especially pricey wishlist purchases.
4. Stocking Stuffer Specials
Getting small enough yet meaningful items to put in a Christmas stocking is a whole other level of a yearly gift-searching challenge. Help your customers out by highlighting such small affordable items in your catalog as perfect stocking stuffers.
Campaign Tips:
- Use item dimensions data (by leveraging custom conditions) to automatically apply discounts and product labels only to all small items in your catalog.
- When stocking stuffers in a cart amount to a certain set price, you can have your system automatically add a stocking for free to raise the chance of order placement.
5. Secret Santa
Join the good old Secret Santa game by offering your customers Mystery Gift Boxes. Let your customers either savor the intrigue and order the boxes for themselves or buy them for their own Secret Santa participation. You can also add Mystery Gifts to customers' carts as gifts when they meet certain promotion conditions.
Campaign Tips:
- Add sets of gift boxes for certain categories as new items to your catalog and introduce them as Mystery Gift Boxes.
- Use product labels to design mystery labels in a way that conveys the categories but maintains an element of secrecy and intrigue.
- Offer bulk orders of Mystery Boxes that can come from the HRs, who organize Secret Santa in the workplace.
6. Ugly Sweater Day Specials
How many businesses include New Year in their Christmas marketing campaigns? Most, if not all of them. But how many do that with the Ugly Sweater Day? Not too many. Stand out in the crowd by offering a themed promotion: set up a one-day discount or offer a gift for purchases made only on December 15.
Campaign Tips:
- Set promotions to let the discounts last only from 12:00 AM December 15 to 11:59 PM December 15.
- Rely on customer attributes to automatically tailor discounts based on previous purchases.
- Automatically add a themed gift to qualifying orders. (Whether the gift itself is an ugly sweater or not is up to you).
7. Snowball Savings
Winter is the perfect time to creatively market the snowball effect to your customers. Set up a campaign that encourages clients to make repeat purchases by unlocking a new discount tier with every placed order. Add a gift to the final tier – and your Christmas promotion sales will snowball along.
Campaign Tips:
- Apply custom labels to products included in the snowball savings promotion.
- Set up promotion conditions to increase discounts with each subsequent purchase: 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%+.
- Consider offering a gift or a Christmas gift card to the customers who reached the highest discount tier.
8. 12 Days of Discounts
The 12 Days of Christmas marketing campaign ideas are among the most common for a reason – they create excitement, build anticipation, and form a sense of urgency all at the same time. There are many ways to be creative with this campaign type – the only code principle you need to adhere to is crafting a 12-day promotion leading up to Christmas by offering different incentives or goals each day.
Campaign Tips:
- Schedule daily discounts, create custom labels, and apply them to products featured in your daily deals.
- Display a daily countdown timer to build anticipation for upcoming deals.
- Depending on how generous you can afford to be, add the gift to certain qualifying daily orders or a special gift on the twelfth night of the promotion.
9. Festive Flash Sale
Flash sales are yet another classic that never gets old. Why not give it a Christmas marketing spin? Launch a targeted limited-time sale on specific product groups and make these products stand out with vibrant labels that will capture your customers' attention.
Campaign Tips:
- Leverage the product label templates (available in our Christmas Special Pack) to highlight various product groups and their discounts in a colorful and festive way.
- Display countdown timers to indicate the remaining sale time and drive urgency.
- Consider offering gift wrapping for free.
10. Fireside Favorites
If the logical brain is truly responsible only for 5% of our decisions, they definitely don’t happen during the festivities. To charm the emotional and basic brains into purchasing, create the right sensory atmosphere by letting cozy and warm products in your catalog take center stage.
Campaign Tips:
- Design custom fire-shaped labels for products that will make your customers feel warm: coffee mugs, blankets, heaters, hot chocolate – your catalog will help you decide.
- Set tiered ‘Warm’, ‘Hot’, and ‘Scorching’ discounts.
- Create a Fireside Favorites Bundle and automatically add a gift to carts with the complete set in it.
11. Pet-Friendly Holiday Promo Ideas
Who doesn’t like animals? Not your customers. Extend the festive joy to pets with a special pet-friendly Christmas promotion that includes a free pet toy as a delightful gift for certain purchases.
Campaign Tips:
- Apply labels to the most fitting items in your catalog. Even if you’re not a pet-oriented store, your ‘animal testing free’ products will do.
- Use product labels to easily create custom eligibility labels shaped like a pet paw.
- Set up promotions to count toward a specific goal (like a sum spent) and automatically add a free pet toy to qualifying orders.
12. Charitable Christmas Spirit
At its best, Christmas celebrations are about the spirit of giving. Combine your Christmas offer with a charitable initiative. Offer discounts on select items, highlighted with special labels, and for every purchase made – donate a percentage to a charity.
Campaign Tips:
- Offer short survey forms to let customers choose what charity their purchase supports.
- Add multiple labels on one product if it is eligible for multiple charities.
- Live up to your words and report on the charitable activities to customers later.
13. New Year's Resolution Starter Pack
Anticipate New Year resolutions with a "Resolution Starter Pack". Mark items that align with common resolutions (healthy food, sports equipment, water bottles, etc.) and offer discounts on these items.
Campaign Tips:
- Use segmentation to apply the promotion to each customer’s resolution-friendly category. Don’t force a bookworm to work out and support their wish to read more books instead.
- Select the base price for a discount calculation to ensure accurate and appealing offers.
- Automatically add a goal-setting planner as a gift to expensive orders.
14. Winter Wellness Package
Since a healthy lifestyle is one of the most common New Year’s resolutions, it’s also a popular theme for winter holiday presents. If your catalog fits the bill and offers anything that supports healthier living, then you can smartly profit from the surge in orders of health, sports, and self-care items.
Campaign Tips:
- Create "Winter Wellness" bundles that would reflect the ‘healthy lifestyle’ theme and work as complete presents.
- Design custom labels for products that qualify for the Winter Wellness campaign.
- Automatically attach a free wellness guide as an e-book or printed brochure to orders that meet specific rules (for instance, $Y spent on the promoted category).
15. Santa's Workshop Clearance
As the holidays draw to a close, take a look at your festive inventory and ask yourself: do you want to store this in your warehouse for another year? If your answer is ‘no’, clear out your seasonal inventory with a "Santa's Workshop Clearance" promotion.
Campaign Tips:
- Use custom labels to identify clearance items in Santa's Workshop.
- Set up discounts on clearance items.
- Optionally, you can add a surprise clearance item as a gift to large clearance purchases.
10 Extra Christmas Marketing Ideas for Your Store
If you feel constrained by the ideas using the 3 key elements above, you can expand your marketing approach with the 10 additional Christmas campaigns from below.
16. Free Gift Wrapping Service
Gift wrapping is at its highest demand during the end-of-year holidays. Offer free gift wrapping on all or certain orders during the holiday season to provide added convenience for your customers.
Campaign Tips:
- Promote this as an exclusive holiday service to set your store apart from competitors.
- Allow customers to choose from a variety of holiday-themed wrapping options.
- Include personalized gift messages for an extra touch.
17. Santa’s Special Delivery
Christmas is the unique time of the year when your customers would even prefer a competitor’s significantly higher price if said competitor offers faster delivery. To avoid these scenarios, offer special “Santa’s Special Delivery” services with guaranteed pre-Christmas delivery for last-minute shoppers.
Campaign Tips:
- Partner with a reliable express courier for the Christmas period to ensure timely delivery.
- Promote this service heavily in the final days leading up to Christmas.
- Offer discounts or free expedited shipping to incentivize customers to take advantage of the service.
18. Golden Christmas Ticket
This one can be a little more high-budget idea but it’s extremely fitting if your brand is targeting a premium target audience or sells very high-ticket items. Slip a "Golden Christmas Ticket" into select orders, giving the lucky recipient a large prize or exclusive discount on their next purchase.
Campaign Tips:
- Make the tickets rare to create excitement and anticipation.
- Offer prizes that align with your brand, such as high-ticket items or a significant discount.
- Promote the campaign with fun, holiday-themed graphics and messaging.
19. Christmas Treasure Hunt
Introduce some X-mas gamification onto your store. Host a virtual treasure hunt event throughout December, letting your customers search your website for hidden holiday-themed items and win prizes or discounts.
Campaign Tips:
- Hide Christmas-related icons, such as candy canes or ornaments, on different product pages.
- Offer different levels of prizes based on how many items customers find.
- Promote the treasure hunt on social media to drive traffic to your site.
20. Christmas Tree of Deals
Another gamified concept is setting up a virtual Christmas tree on your website where each ornament represents a special deal. Customers can "pick" an ornament to reveal their deal.
Campaign Tips:
- Ensure a wide variety of deals to appeal to different types of shoppers.
- Use this campaign as a way to increase interaction.
- Promote this interactive experience through social media and email.
21. Personalized Holiday Greetings
Sending congratulatory cards to partners and VIP customers is a common practice in B2B organizations. Why not implement it in your store? Send personalized Christmas cards or video greetings to your loyal customers, thanking them for their support throughout the year.
Campaign Tips:
- Include a special holiday discount code in the greeting.
- Use customer data to personalize the message based on past purchases.
- Make the card or video festive and thoughtful to strengthen customer loyalty.
22. Holiday Referral Program
Promoting your campaigns on social media or via PPC and email can be effective for exposure. But nothing beats the effectiveness and the conversion rates of affiliate or referral traffic. Encourage customers to refer friends and family during the holiday season for bonus rewards or discounts.
Campaign Tips:
- Offer tiered rewards based on the number of referrals, such as gift cards, discounts, or exclusive holiday products.
- Make sharing easy with social media and email integration.
- Highlight how this campaign helps spread holiday cheer by introducing new customers to your brand.
23. Santa’s Workshop Live
Want to try hosting a webinar but not sure how your store can stand out? Host a live-streaming event where you showcase how your products are made, packaged, or prepared for holiday delivery. There, you can offer exclusive deals for attendees.
Campaign Tips:
- Include behind-the-scenes footage to humanize your brand and connect with customers.
- Offer live Q&A sessions where customers can ask about your products and holiday shopping tips.
- Provide a special discount code to those who tune in, creating a sense of exclusivity.
24. Christmas Gift Receipt
Returns are spiking each January and February for a reason. After all, giving the gifts that truly delight someone is difficult. Offer your customers a special "Christmas Gift Receipt", which allows the gift recipient to see the items they can exchange the receipt for without seeing the original price.
Campaign Tips:
- Market this as a holiday-specific perk that simplifies gift-giving.
- Highlight that the receipt makes it easy for recipients to exchange gifts without awkward conversations about returns.
- Encourage customers to include this option with their purchases, especially for items marked as gifts.
25. Welcome New Customers into the New Year
Your Christmas sales can become the first point of interaction with many new customers. Capitalize on this encounter and give customers a reason to get back even after the holidays by launching a holiday rewards program. Allow customers to earn points for every purchase during the holiday season, redeemable for discounts or exclusive products.
Campaign Tips:
- Set clear point milestones that lead to exciting rewards.
- Offer bonus points for referring friends or making larger purchases.
- Promote the rewards program through email and social media.
Wrapping Up
Have you decided what is the best promotional strategy for the Christmas season for your business? We hope that, if not providing a complete solution, we have at least given you plenty of inspiration for combining various suggestions and shaping your own Christmas marketing idea.
Whether you're running flash sales, offering gifts, or personalizing promotions, make sure to include the three core elements of effective promotions: automated mechanism, visual signals, and a final push. With that in place, all you need is to create a festive shopping atmosphere that your customers will enjoy and remember.
Happy selling! 🎄
