Yule Love It: Creative and Advanced Christmas Marketing Ideas for Agencies
Last update: 16 February 2024 at 08:29 am
5.00/5You may’ve heard the adage…
“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”
And when it comes to marketing during the Christmas holiday season, this advice couldn’t be more accurate.
Whether you market for big SaaS brands, growing ecommerce stores, or small business owners, planning your clients’ Christmas campaigns is crucial to helping them make the most profit during the holiday season.
41% of US holiday shoppers plan to start shopping as early as October, 39% plan to shop in November, and 20% plan to shop in December.
If you market to Gen Zers, you have an even more significant advantage.
37% of Gen Zers expect to spend more on gifts than last year — nearly double the average across all age groups. Nearly half also said they’d likely start shopping earlier if retailers marketed promotions and holiday deals earlier.
In other words, you need a Christmas marketing strategy. As soon as possible.
And that’s what we’re here to help you with.
Stick around if you’re late in the game but still want to capitalize on the festive season.
In this article, we’re sharing six Christmas marketing campaign ideas to help your agency plan the best holiday campaigns for your clients.
Let’s get started!
In this article
- Holiday calendar campaign
- Christmas gift guide (and other guides) campaign
- 12 days of Christmas email marketing campaign
- Black Friday, SBS, and Cyber Monday campaign
- Lead magnet email marketing campaign
- Influencer marketing user-generated content campaign
- Wrap up
Key Takeaways:
- Early Planning Matters: With 41% of US holiday shoppers starting in October, early planning for Christmas marketing is crucial.
- Gen Z Trends: Gen Zers plan to spend more and start shopping earlier, making them a valuable target audience.
- Six Campaign Ideas:
- Holiday Calendar: Create impactful calendars tailored to customer segments.
- Gift Guide: Use guided selling data for personalized gift suggestions.
- 12 Days of Christmas Emails: Send daily holiday deals, potentially using gamification.
- Black Friday, SBS, Cyber Monday: Run different promotions for each event, optimizing for Gen Zers.
- Lead Magnet Emails: Offer downloads and discount codes for contact information collection.
- Influencer Marketing: Engage influencers for user-generated content through contests or drawings.
- Segmentation and Personalization: Tailor campaigns for different audience groups and customize strategies based on client type (product-focused, service-focused, SaaS).
- Post-Holiday Sequences: Use lead nurturing for unconverted leads after Christmas and convert prospects for potential post-holiday sales.
- Incorporate Influencer Marketing: Leverage influencers to generate user-generated content, fostering trust and engagement.
- Adapt to Client Needs: Personalize marketing plans for each client and their target audience for successful Christmas campaigns.
Holiday calendar campaign
Lean into the holiday spirit by creating a calendar campaign for your client’s target audiences.
But not just any calendar campaign…
Create calendars with impact — in other words, strategize how to create calendars that solve audience pain points.
For instance, if you’re marketing for a consumer ecommerce business that sells children’s toys, you might encourage them to create an advent calendar for each customer segment. When the calendars are ready, please make a product campaign to feature them in inboxes, news feeds, and PPC ads.
Or, if you’re marketing for a B2B online store, you might create a massive calendar that helps B2B audiences plan their annual holiday campaigns.
Here’s a snippet of a Q1 to Q4 ecommerce holiday calendar to demonstrate what we mean:
Source: Printful
If you market for local businesses, consider sending email calendars highlighting Christmas-themed products for each upcoming holiday to their lists.
For instance, calendars may reference gift ideas for the following days:
- Black Friday
- Small Business Saturday
- Cyber Monday
- Christmas Eve
- Christmas Day
- New Year’s Eve
If your clients target people celebrating other holidays, you might also reference gift ideas for other celebrations, such as Hanukkah and Lunar New Year.
And speaking of gift ideas…
Christmas gift guide (and other guides) campaign
Help your client suggest the perfect gift to their audience by creating Christmas shopping and other holiday guides.
Lazer in on audience pain points, preferences, and habits to suggest the best ideas.
One of the best ways is to collect evidence from guided selling campaigns rich with customer data.
For instance, pull data from featured quizzes, polls, and other interactive content assets you use to learn more about target customers.
For example, if you’re marketing for a skincare company, you’ve likely learned that specific customer segments feel drawn to certain products. You can use this data to suggest personalized gift bundles via segmented email campaigns and retargeting strategies.
Hims & Hers Campaigns
Get inspired by Hims & Hers, a telehealth brand that has a knack for using guided selling data to suggest tailored gift bundles.
It uses a simple product discovery quiz on its homepage with the CTA button “Find my treatment” to help visitors hone in on solutions for their specific problems:
Source: hims.com
Here’s a peek inside the quiz:
From here, Hims & Hers uses the data to suggest product bundles in line with the visitor’s quiz results; for one user, that might mean hair loss, shampoo, beard oil, and health products. For another, that might mean skincare serum, hair mask duo, and collagen supplements.
If the visitor decides not to buy, it saves their information for retargeting campaigns if they agree to cookies.
It also collects leads by only giving users their results if they sign up to receive them by email. This is a genius way to build up your clients’ email lists with high-value prospects.
Hims & Hers also creates a few generic holiday gift sets for people on the go who don’t take its quizzes.
This is an excellent option for last-minute holiday shoppers or people who buy extra gifts to have on hand.
In 2021, it launched a campaign called “Holiday Gift Sets for Hair and Skin,” offering a different deal on one of its products until Christmas. The campaign was successful and helped boost its sales during the holiday season:
Source: hims
Capitalize on the Festive Season to Create Another Merry Occasion
Clean Origin also capitalizes on holiday shopping guides to boost sales during Christmas time.
It publishes gift guides on its website and social media pages featuring its most popular lab-grown diamond jewelry sets and gift ideas for different budgets.
On its dedicated landing page, visitors can uncover the best holiday engagement rings or choose a gift guide by price:
Source: Clean Origin
They can also speak with a specialist for custom gift-giving support or run through frequently asked questions (FAQs) about buying lab-grown jewelry during the holidays:
Again, always consider which guides would best suit your client’s target audience before allocating time to plan them out.
We’ve shown examples for product-focused businesses, but you might also have service businesses to market for.
In this case, you’ll need to get creative about the type of holiday guides you create.
Fill the Blog with Helpful Content Related to the Holidays Season
For instance, the Aurit Center, a divorce law firm, writes Christmas articles and guides relevant to divorced parents.
The following example shows a guide published to help parents make creative Christmas plans with their kids after a divorce:
Source: Aurit Center
Guides like these can help potential service customers feel seen and understood, which can give your clients extra trust-earning brownie points.
Finally, if you market for SaaS brands, consider creating guides showing their audiences how to use software to get organized for the holiday season.
Get inspired by ClickUp, a productivity platform that published a guide on how to use its Holiday Planner Template to plan Christmas gifts, travel itineraries, and Christmas decorations:
Source: ClickUp
If your SaaS brand targets B2Bers, consider creating guides that show them how to use templates to plan company holiday parties or how to use them to market to their audiences during the holidays.
Now that we’re all set on various Christmas guides you can publish, let’s look at another creative way to offer different deals.
12 days of Christmas email marketing campaign
Capitalize on the famous “12 days of Christmas” song and tradition by emailing out a different holiday deal every day for 12 days.
Traditionally, this holiday period began on Christmas Day and ended on January 5th.
But for marketing purposes, many businesses opt to run promotions from December 14th to December 25th, with a designated deal or prize for each day.
But honestly, you can run your 12 days of Christmas campaign whenever you want — especially if you want to capitalize on early holiday shoppers.
You might also consider segmenting this campaign.
For instance, you might have one version for loyal customers, another for new leads, and a third for warm leads.
If you sell products, consider using gamification to create more engaging daily promos. That’s a fancy way of saying using fun games to draw people in.
For instance, you might have audiences “spin the wheel” one day to earn points, “draw a card” another day to make gifts, and “roll the dice” another day to win a generous discount code.
If you want to focus more on specific product or service offerings, look up your clients’ Christmas sales from last year to see which purchases were the most popular.
Here’s some promo inspiration you can use for your 12 days of Christmas email campaign:
- Day one: Offer free shipping or waive fees if they buy or sign up today
- Day two: Send a drawing to win a Christmas gift card (or offer bonus cash for gift cards)
- Day three: Offer discounts on Christmas-themed products and services, like Santa hats and holiday SaaS templates
- Day four: Start a giveaway contest
- Day five: Continue the giveaway contest
- Day six: Continue the giveaway contest
- Day seven: End the contest and announce the giveaway winner
- Day eight: Offer a buy-one-get-one product or service deal
- Day nine: Announce a generous refer-a-friend campaign
- Day ten: Offer 15% off product bundles or a VIP service package
- Day eleven: Offer 30% off product bundles or a VIP service package
- Day Twelve: Offer 50% off product bundles or a VIP service package
Black Friday, SBS, and Cyber Monday campaign
Turn your clients’ websites into Christmas sales hubs holiday shoppers can turn to on Black Friday, SBS, and Cyber Monday.
Run different promotions for each event to sweeten the deal.
For instance, on Black Friday, you might offer steep discounts on everything on your clients’ websites.
On SBS, you might have your clients partner with small businesses to create a virtual or in-person “Christmas market.”
And on Cyber Monday, you might focus on all things tech. For SaaS clients, that may mean offering three-month subscriptions to their audiences for the price of one. For product clients, that may mean featuring tech products or accessories.
Double up on sales during these major shopping events using social selling strategies. Social selling means setting up virtual shops on your clients’ social media business profiles so shoppers can buy from them without exiting social media land.
*Pro-Tip: If you market to Gen Zers, prioritize social selling marketing strategies, as social media is one of their preferred spots to shop online.
To optimize social media marketing campaigns, use a free social media scheduler or any other social media scheduling tool to plan and schedule promos in advance. These schedulers can help automate holiday-themed social media content so it reaches audiences at the perfect time.
Source: Later
And speaking of reaching audiences…
Lead magnet email marketing campaign
Draw more people in to show off your clients’ seasonal sales with irresistible lead magnets.
Lead magnets are gated downloads, discount codes, or special gifts your clients will offer their audiences in exchange for their contact information.
Once your clients have lead information, they can add the prospects to their email lists and designated email marketing campaigns. In this case, we recommend sending automated welcome campaigns and segmented lead nurturing campaigns designed to boost holiday sales.
Here’s how the sequence might look:
- Step 1: Offer lead magnets on landing pages, in social media content, and on your clients’ websites
- Step 2: Create a separate landing page to collect contact information for each of your lead magnets — for instance, you might have a landing page for an eBook download, a landing page for a 15% discount code, and a landing page for a Christmas holiday shopping guide download
- Step 3: Send welcome emails to all new prospects
- Step 4: Send segmented lead nurturing campaigns to all new prospects who’ve received welcome emails
- Be strategic about which segment to add prospects to; for instance, consider adding prospects who claimed your discount code to all sales-based promos.
- Step 5: Add converted leads to a new segmented Christmas email marketing campaign for existing customers — send this group generous offers to inspire more sales by Christmas
- Step 6: After the Christmas holiday season is over, add unconverted leads to a non-holiday-themed lead nurturing sequence; add converted prospects to a non-holiday-themed sequence for existing customers
Influencer marketing user-generated content campaign
Create an influencer marketing campaign focused on drumming up user-generated content.
If you have the funds, consider creating several influencer marketing campaigns with different brand advocates in your niche.
You can have influencers host a photo contest with a Christmas-specific hashtag or run a drawing to promote prizes. You can also have them ask followers to complete a series of action steps, such as following your clients’ social media pages and tagging friends in the comments.
Get affiliate marketers involved to help spread the word further — a great option for B2B brands.
Once you have a nice batch of user-generated content, create a massive Christmas spirit campaign that highlights how much holiday consumers or B2Bers love the clients you represent. This is key to inspiring faster sales and building trust with new leads on the fence about your clients’ brands.
For instance, consider posting user-generated content:
- In Story ads
- In PPC ads
- In carousel ads
- In social media, newsfeed posts
- In social media ads
- On websites
- On product pages
Christmas marketing campaigns wrap up
People aren’t holding back on Christmas shopping in 2023.
In fact, 74% of US holiday shoppers plan to spend about the same or more on holiday gifts this year compared to last year. According to Gallup, Americans predict they’ll spend an average of $923 on Christmas or other holiday gifts, just nine dollars shy of last year.
If you’ve been looking for the best Christmas marketing ideas to win over-eager shoppers, bookmark this guide and share it with your marketing team.
While the above Christmas marketing ideas are an excellent place to start, remember to personalize your marketing plans for each client and their respective audiences.
That’s it for now.
Merry Christmas (almost), and here’s to your success!
PS: Need extra Christmas marketing support to plan your clients’ campaigns? Find the perfect service provider for your Christmas marketing campaigns with Sortlist today.
