11 Holiday Marketing Ideas To Increase Sales

For most of us, winter is a season of bright and cheerful holidays. However, for workers in eCommerce, this is a time to push the envelope and drive sales, leveraging the surge in consumer purchases.

Which countries’ citizens spend the most on winter holidays?

According to Statista, among Europeans, the residents of Germany are leading in the nomination for winter holiday season spendaholics – they spent 1,653 USD per household in 2023. France and the UK are not too far behind – 1,142 and 1,042 USD, respectively. In the US, the average household spending per Christmas is 1205 USD.

Such indulgences in shopping represent immense opportunities for sellers. Let’s explore some of the best holiday marketing ideas for leveraging these opportunities and driving sales for your business.

Unwrapping Happiness: The Magic of Gift-Giving

The happiness around giving and receiving gifts, particularly the intrigue associated with unwrapping a gift, is worth exploring first in our arsenal of holiday promotion ideas.

Make Your Own Gift Guide

With the holidays approaching, many people hunt high and low, seeking something to please their loved ones. Help them out by offering ready-made gift options.

You know this feeling when you desperately want to buy something but have no idea what exactly. Your imagination fails you.

That’s an opportunity you should exploit as a seller. Create a branded gift guide, providing suggestions of what to buy based on preferences, demographics, nationality, etc.: 

• Do some research, talk with your sales consultants or someone in daily contact with people in offline shops, or handle customer questions online – they’ll have plenty of insights.
• Your online shop’s front page should feature this guide.

This simple marketing technique will drive your sales, and the customers will keep coming to your shop for further gift ideas. 

Introduce Teaser Gifts

It’s not a new idea, by far. However, it’s highly effective, yet sellers often forget about it.

Give out small gifts or teasers to all customers. For example, in a cosmetics store, these could be product samples.

What else? Free pocket calendars with store advertising, souvenirs, magnets… Give it a good thought! Brainstorm with your employees and colleagues.

Show a promo with a teaser on your social networks, post information in the online or brick-and-mortar store. The PR and advertising fuss you create can do magic for your sales.

Also, think about optimizing your teaser idea for search engines through SEO. A landing page containing a teaser and an effective CTA, plus a few solid link-building strategies, can massively help.

If you are not able to pick a backlink yourself, ask someone good at this or hire an SEO professional for your team who will know where to buy backlinks and make them work.

Remind Visitors About Gifts For Themselves

Did you know that in the US, 59% of consumers plan to spend more than $100 on gifts for themselves? Convince your online visitors that they deserve to treat themselves and offer great gift ideas.

You can send a clear message to remind them about buying something for themselves when they make a purchase or when they leave your website/online shop.

This doesn’t have to be the priciest product in your catalog; rather, something small and related to their primary purchase. It’s not hard to do so by implementing analytics (such as GA4) on your website and tracking users’ behavior.

Competitions, Giveaways, and Quizzes

Creating engagement around your brand and actively involving customers in your marketing activities always pays off. Also, consider introducing elements of gamification into your buyer’s journey.

Hold a Giveaway Among Customers

We know from childhood that Christmas and New Year mark the time for playing games and participating in cheerful competitions. Especially this refers to the younger generation X who is highly susceptible to gamification and is used to everything being auto-magical.

So, why not monetize this almost innate behavior trait? According to DailyStory, you can monetize even a one-in-a-lifetime video or a blog, provided you can leverage the latest digital marketing and SEO techniques.   

Here are a few ideas for your giveaway:

• A certificate (featuring your services or products).
• A sweet prize (a must-have idea for customers with kids).
• Winter gift basket (containing cozy winter items like candles, blankets, and hot cocoa).
• Santa’s surprise sack (filled with various holiday goodies).
• Family game night bundle (exploiting the idea of winter holidays being the time when families get together). 

Run Competitions to Boost Engagement

Competitions increase engagement and drive sales like nothing else. If you have a YouTube channel, you can showcase your new products and announce a prize (free product) for suggesting the best name or logo for each product or a series of similar ones.

Here are several extra ideas on how to increase engagement and drive sales through competitions:

• Run a competition for the best Christmas photo or a story.
• Announce a competition for hashtags – those of your subscribers/customers who use your brand hashtags the most get the prize.
• Add an IQ test to your online store.
• Design and launch a game on your website, actively involving visitors and motivating them to purchase.

Look at competitors – what kind of competition do they do? Perhaps you can “borrow” their best holiday season marketing ideas. It’s important to reward everyone in your competitions. Even the smallest gift and discount will help you drive motivation and boost sales.  

Maximum Discounts for an Excellent Holiday Mood

Generous discounts act like attention-grabbing magnets. Whenever someone passes by your shop, they will stop and look closer at the goods with the highest discounts. For your brick-and-mortar shop, do the following:

• Set up a separate table featuring products with the highest discounts.
• Assign an employee to do this work.
• Make a Christmas or New Year’s decoration for this area.
• Offer your visitors a holiday wrapping for their purchases.

Similar things you can do for your online store, plus a creative product tour, zoom feature, and product video, to name a few. 

Holiday time is an excellent opportunity to revisit your warehouses and see what’s not been selling for a year or so. Offer maximum discounts for these items, like 50 and even 70%, and feature these items on your first webpage.

Don’t forget to support your holiday marketing campaign through your social media accounts! 

Winter holiday time is an occasion to promote your social media. Whatever discounts and competitions you run on the website or offline, you should do the same for social media.

Create a Festive Atmosphere for Your Customers

Christmas and New Year are all about a festive atmosphere. Adults and kids alike wait for this time with anticipation of a miracle. So, why don’t you create a miracle for them? At least an anticipation of a miracle coming by realizing our festive marketing ideas.

Tell a Story

Come up with a heartwarming Christmas story that people will want to share. It could be a real story or a fantasy – a fairy tale featuring fantasy heroes and your brand and products in the heart of your narrative. 

If putting words together into sentences isn’t your strong side, leave the storytelling idea to the professionals. These days, you can outsource content writing for an affordable price, just like you do with software development when you or your team lack the required skills.

The idea behind storytelling is that it can go viral across social networks if done right. It could become a massive catalyst for your brand awareness and drive sales.

Offer Free Shipping

For online stores, free shipping can be a powerful incentive to encourage potential customers to purchase, especially those plagued by fears and doubts. 

After the first purchase with a free delivery, making a second one will be much easier. This is a known marketing hook, no less effective than a back-in-stock notice or a generous discount. 

Besides, the existing customers will appreciate the gesture, too.

Suggest Holiday Decor Ideas

Help create a festive atmosphere for your visitors – offer collections of Christmas decorations for the interior of their home, apartment, or office.

Most shop visitors in the winter holiday time look for decor items. Some want to try something entirely new; others look to renew and update their existing decor collections. 

Either way, you’ll grab their attention, and, as you remember – after the first purchase comes the second, and third, and so on.

Outside-The-Box Holiday Season Marketing Ideas

We often overfocus on the same lines within the same topic. Outside-the-box thinking is what can help us out. It’s easier to do when someone guides you and provides fresh ideas. This is exactly what we’ll attempt to do in the current chapter.  

Calendar For The Year to Come

A branded calendar with your corporate logo and products can kill two birds with one stone: satisfy the visitor’s need for a calendar and increase your brand’s visibility.

Think broader and include in your helpful calendar red letter days, e.g.:

• Ice Cream Day
• Cupcake Day
• Maple Syrup Day

Or tips:

• Where and how to spend time during the holidays.
• Interesting recipes for different occasions.
• Unique culture-specific traditions.
• Simple ways to de-stress during the holidays
• Winter skincare tips, such as the correct SPF value and type

If you make your calendar affordable or even free, it will magically affect the mood of your visitors and positively impact your sales.

Make Jokes!

It’s hard to believe, but the holiday rush is stressful, which is widely confirmed by psychologists. 

Here are several ideas on what you can do about it:

• Humor in your Christmas email newsletter will lighten the mood!
• Create a comic strip or a sarcastic gift list as a handout for your physical shop visitors.
• Share the best jokes you can find online on your social media pages.

Especially in ads, jokes can do miracles. They ease tensions, make people relaxed and more inclined to think positively, and spend more money on gifts from your shop!  

Final Recommendations

We have a couple of final holiday marketing tips to share to maximize the impact of the ideas we’ve already covered.

Firstly, start preparing for your holiday season in advance. Brainstorm with your colleagues and summarize the best holiday promotion ideas into a plan or strategy. The more time you have left to refine your plans before the holidays hit everyone, the better for your sales and business.

Lastly, don’t let your best ideas and marketing activities vanish as the holidays pass. Monitor and analyze your marketing performance and follow up with the customers on the best-performing strategies.