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 recommendations – and see how a couple of seemingly minor features can help you set up a whopping 15 different campaigns, boosting the results of your holiday initiatives.
3 Key Elements That Drive Good Sales
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 promotion ideas for retail a real success, you need just three sturdy functional elements:
➊ Promotion mechanisms that implement promo rules and automate sales.
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.
➋ Visual signals to raise awareness of your promotional activities.
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.
➌ Push to conversion or motivation to participate.
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 Christmas Special Pack is at your service. 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 campaigns. 🎁
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.
Now, we’d love to share with you 15 different Christmas marketing campaigns 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 Wishlist Discounts
Another way to take advantage of access to customers’ desired items in your Christmas marketing 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 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 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 promotion 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 festive 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 Holidays
Who doesn’t like animals? Not your customers. Extend the festive joy to pets with a special pet-friendly Christmas campaign 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 promotions 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.
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! 🎄
Amasty's Limited Offer: Christmas Special Pack
Effortlessly craft engaging and effective Christmas marketing campaigns!
Boost Your Holidays Sales
in Just 3 Simple Steps:
- Set up custom rules with Special Promotions Pro.
- Catch attention with Product Labels.
- Drive conversions with Free Gift Pro!
