10 Holiday Marketing Strategies to Increase Seasonal Engagement
As we navigate season after season, smart holiday marketing strategies bring new opportunities for brands to thrive online.
For most retailers, the holiday periods are the most profitable and often account for the bulk of a brand’s yearly sales. That is why it is essential to plan your seasonal marketing calendar with strategies that suit your specific consumer base.
According to experts at the National Retail Federation, online holiday sales in winter 2023 exceeded $964.4 billion. However, as competition for e-commerce stores peaks, it’s vital that your brand stands out from festive favorites for a chance to cut a slice of the revenue.
With this in mind, we’ve compiled a guide on how to improve your holiday marketing in 2024 ahead of a competitive festive selling season. Check out these 10 holiday marketing strategies to inspire you.
Holiday Marketing Strategies for 2024
1. Make the Gift Buying Process Easy for Your Customers
Seasonal shopping is undoubtedly a hectic affair. As we race from store to store to find the perfect gifts, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the number of festive deals and discounts available.
This is where a gift guide comes into play. In order to make the seasonal shopping experience easier for your customers, why not add a gift guide to your product marketing strategy?
Whether you’re a brick-and-mortar store that can set up a curated merchandising spot or an e-commerce seller that can create a landing page full of personalized gift suggestions, the easier you make it to discover your seasonal products, the more conversions you’ll score.
Why not take gift guiding one step further with the introduction of targeted emails and guide-based popups throughout your seasonal campaign?
One way to do this successfully is to leverage personalization. Based on their historical purchases, you can target each of your consumers individually with gifts and offers that match their product tastes and preferences.
Elf Cosmetics is a brilliant example of a brand that knows how to add some sparkle to its gift guides. Take a look at their 2023 festive email template:
As you can see here, they divide their gift guide into personality traits: “Are you sweet, spicy or savory?” This fun twist on a gift guide email encourages engagement and is directly transports customers to curated landing pages full of gifts based on their ‘flavor’.
2. Tap into Nostalgia
Famous holidays like Christmas are defined by nostalgia, so make sure to use it in your holiday marketing strategies. As we take time to reflect on childhood magic and family memories, this is a perfect time for brands to tap into some nostalgic advertising.
Turn the clock back with your branding and create campaigns that include black-and-white pictures, old-style fonts, and the little things that transport your consumers back to a powerful memory.
Presenting a narrative that tugs on the heartstrings of your targets is a brilliant way to boost engagement and get your customers to share your message across their socials.
A great example of this comes from Tesco in 2013. As an oldie but goldie Christmas advert, the UK supermarket retailer crafted its festive campaign around the magic of home movies at Christmas.
“We wanted to show what a real Christmas is all about – not a perfect, airbrushed one – but the ones we recognize from our own lives,” said David Wood, former marketing director at Tesco.
Stripping back their advert to an old montage of home films that saw family members enjoying the festive season through the ages, they aimed to stir up poignant memories of Christmas past.
3. Prioritize Customer Loyalty
While it is important to attract new customers during seasonal periods, it’s crucial that your marketing strategy doesn’t leave your loyal leads high and dry.
Did you know that the top 10% of repeat customers spend three times as much money as 90% of new acquisitions? As loyal affiliates to your brand, they already trust your products and are more willing to try out some of your seasonal stock.
With this in mind, ensure that your seasonal market campaign targets your loyal customers directly. This could be in the form of a first look at one of your seasonal releases, an exclusive discount, or even one step further with a handwritten holiday card to add a personal touch to their shopping experience.
4. Offer Free Rewards to Loyal Shoppers
On the topic of nurturing loyal customers, another tip to enhance your seasonal marketing strategy is to create a one-off rewards program.
This allows repeat customers to build up points throughout the year as they shop with your brand and enjoy rewards in the form of free gifts and discounts as different holidays roll around.
There are numerous ways to do this. For in-store shoppers, modern POS systems at the checkout store data on each purchase and can be integrated with your loyalty program to tally up reward points. However, for e-commerce and app-based retailers, each purchase can be stored on a user’s account to be redeemed in or out of the store.
KFC is a great example of a brand with a great seasonal reward program. While they offer free item gifts and discounts throughout the year, they up the stakes during holiday periods, allowing customers to play in their online rewards arcade for a chance to win a Valentine’s Chicken Bucket or a festive Tower Burger covered in gravy.
This encourages customers to keep spending for more chances to spin and win free items.
5. Create a Webroom for Your Seasonal Products
While we’ve all heard of a showroom, have you heard of a webroom? For e-commerce sellers looking to stand out amongst competitors, providing an all-access view of your products could be the key to securing a seasonal sale.
Webrooming allows a shopper to explore your products from every angle possible. Using their finger or a mouse, they can twist and turn a 3D image of your seasonal bestsellers for a complete showroom experience online.
This is especially helpful for bigger seasonal purchases. For example, if you’re a luxury seller with a collection of seasonal bags, offering a webroom gives customers more confidence when making a purchase and reduces the number of products being sent back after the seasonal period is over.
6. Start a Seasonal SMS Campaign
Did you know that more than half of online sales come from a mobile device in 2024?
If you want to ensure that you’re targeting customers from all angles during holiday periods, it’s important that you create a smartphone-focused marketing strategy to improve your chances of hooking customers on the go.
From social content creation to SMS marketing, the key is to get creative with your marketing and provide your smartphone customers with exclusive deals. After all, they account for the largest portion of your sales.
One way to do this is to create a powerful SMS campaign. Not only will a message notification immediately pop up on your target’s screen, but an SMS campaign is much harder to scroll past or file into the junk box.
Send a message that is short, snappy, and provides a quick call to action for a seasonal sale. This could be an exclusive offer, a first look at a product drop, or a personalized gift guide based on individual preferences.
Take a look at these great examples from SKIMS and Greetable for Valentine’s Day 2024.
The messages are short and sweet, and both provide a quick link to Galentines-themed products and offers.
7. Get Your Customers Talking
Next up, let’s talk about engagement. The more engagement your social content receives during seasonal periods, the higher it will appear on the feeds of your target leads.
One way to enhance your engagement is to get your customers talking. Create content that will spark discussions and encourage viewers to share on their own social platforms.
Better still, create a social campaign that encourages followers to post their own content in relation to your brand. This can be a photo competition or a trend-based post that promises the winner a free seasonal gift or offer.
61% of consumers are more likely to engage with an advert if it contains UGC, so this is a great strategy to utilize and raise brand engagement with during a competitive seasonal shopping period.
8. Use Hashtags to Enhance Your Seasonal Social Campaigns
On the topic of seasonal social media marketing, why not also add a hashtag to your holiday-themes campaigns to improve your campaign sharability online?
Taking advantage of highly engaged hashtags on X, Instagram, and TikTok is a great way to increase the visibility of your social content and get your message out to the masses.
Better still, why not go one step further and create an original holiday-themed hashtag that can be shared to reference your seasonal campaign? Shortening your festive advert or seasonal product release into a sharable hashtag can increase awareness tenfold in a busy social landscape.
Take UPS, for example. Every winter, they release their #WishesDelivered campaign across social media as a fun way to give back during the holiday season.
They ask their followers to create content detailing their own holiday wishes, tagged with the hashtag #WishesDelivered. They then grant some of them in the form of big gestures, which are then shared online for viewers to engage with.
Better still, each wish uploaded with the #wishesDelivered raises $1 for many non-profit organizations, such as The Salvation Army and Toys for Tots.
This is the perfect example of a brand using its holiday marketing to spread kindness while inadvertently also boosting engagement and displaying the power of its services for future interactions.
9. Retarget Your Customers with Seasonal Offers
Did you know that more than 96% of customers will bounce from a web store without making a purchase?
However, have no fear, the holiday season is the best time to retarget them with brilliant offers and new releases.
When a holiday rolls around, whether it be Valentine’s, Father’s Day, or Christmas, each of these occasions is the perfect time to get into contact with customers who didn’t quite make it over the conversion line.
There are plenty of ways to build a retargeting campaign during the holiday season. From targeted emails with gift guides to remarketing with native ads that target customers who previously visited your site.
Apple does this well with its retargeted social ads. Leveraging the powers of personalization, they create seasonal promotions based on products individual customers have browsed on-site. Combining this with a seasonal holiday provides the customer with the perfect reason to jump the final hurdle and make the purchase.
10. Start Your Marketing Campaign Before the Seasonal Rush
Finally, ensure that you start early with your seasonal marketing.
If you want your holiday campaigns to stand out from the crowd, taking the time to perfect your strategy way ahead of the seasonal rush gives you the opportunity to tweak and adjust based on demographic trends and/or viral topics dominating industry discussions.
Launching your campaign ahead of time also provides you with a headstart on collecting seasonal conversions. For example, if you’re dropping a Christmas-themed product range, why not release it in November to target those well-prepared shoppers starting early?
Holiday Marketing Strategies: That’s a Wrap
Seasonal shopping is definitely on the rise. As brands adapt to a ‘trend-led’ generation of shoppers, more consumers than ever before are prepared to buy new products for each season and holiday event.
Therefore, in a competitive online landscape, your brand must be prepared for a fast-paced seasonal shopping frenzy as customers rush to find the best deals.
In order to stand out, get creative with your campaigning, tap into nostalgia, and retarget, retarget, retarget for a chance to secure more conversions in 2024.
