7 Digital Marketing Strategies Brands Can Leverage to Grow Their Holiday Sales
5.00/5The holiday season is always a time when consumers tend to shop more. Individuals and families shop for Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas, and New Year items.
Keypoints takeaway
- The holiday season is a peak shopping period when global consumers significantly increase spending—U.S. holiday retail sales reached $955.6 billion in 2023, with the average American budget rising to $902 in 2024.
- To capitalize on this surge, brands must adopt strong digital marketing strategies that tap into heightened consumer emotions, online traffic, and competitive opportunities.
- 7 key strategies include:
- Setting up optimized and personalized email campaigns;
- Monitoring social media trends and launching interactive holiday campaigns;
- Leveraging influencer and user-generated content for authenticity;
- Using WhatsApp marketing for high engagement;
- Running targeted, festive paid ad campaigns;
- Implementing referral programs to drive word-of-mouth sales;
- Optimizing websites and landing pages for speed, mobile use, and seamless conversions.
- When executed well, these tactics can help brands double their holiday sales and boost long-term customer loyalty.
Whether it’s groceries, holiday decor items, or gifts, sales during this season are massive, and brands deploy various digital marketing strategies to maximize their sales.
According to research conducted by the National Research Federation, the retail sales over the 2023 winter holiday shopping season in America totaled $955.6 billion.
And the total average holiday season spending budget of an American went from $875 in 2023 to $902 in 2024, with gift spending taking more of the budget.
This is to tell you that consumers, not just in the United States but around the world, budget a significant amount for the holiday season.
And as a brand with digital presence, it’s up to you to think of marketing strategies to get your own piece of the cake.
As a search engine optimization expert who monitors the digital marketing space during the holiday season, I have researched and come up with 7 digital marketing channels and strategies that many brands deploy to double their sales during the holiday season.
The goal is to show you step by step how you can leverage them to boost your holiday sales, grow your revenue, and make more profit.
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Find your perfect agencyWhy focus on the Holiday Season?
The holiday season is a goldmine for brands because of the following reasons:
- Increased Consumer Spending: Consumers spend more during holidays. They buy Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year items for themselves, their family, and friends. They take advantage of Black Friday’s massive discounts and coupons that brands offer to make more purchases.
- Emotional Appeal: Holiday marketing taps into the emotions of consumers. Christmas and New Year are seasons of joy, love, and generosity. Consumers demonstrate it by buying home decor items and gifts they present to their loved ones.
- Spike In Online Traffic: More consumers browse online during holidays for trending items, exclusive deals, coupons, and discounts.
- Competitive Advantage: Brands that begin early to test different marketing strategies to boost their holiday sales always dominate and outshine those that don’t.
Now, let’s look at the 7 digital marketing strategies your brand can use to grow your holiday sales.
1. Set Up an Optimized Holiday Email Marketing Sequence
Even if you don’t set up an optimized email marketing sequence, you shouldn’t miss it during the holiday season.
Most of your audience, with whom you have built relationships and trust, are always in the buying mode from October to late December. And emails drive direct conversions and foster loyalty.
“Holiday email marketing works best when personalization meets timing. Sending segmented campaigns based on customer behavior, like browsing or abandoned carts, consistently improves engagement and purchasing intent, especially when paired with limited-time offers,” says Nicolas Breedlove, CEO of PlaygroundEquipment.com.
Don’t take my word for it. Below is a screenshot of an email from the Growth Team of Impact advising me, as one of their partners, to promote certain products consumers buy during Q4 to grow my sales by up to 40%.
These products are what many people in America buy, especially during Black Fridays, because of coupons and massive discounts that brands offer.
As a partner, my email audience in the Home and Kitchen appliance niche will want to take action once I promote this offer to them.
Almost all the top-rated email marketing platforms offer automated email sequence features.
Segment your email audience into VIP customers, new subscribers, and inactive subscribers. Clean up the inactive subscribers to free up your email list, lower your email subscription fee, and improve your delivery rate.
Focus on your VIP customers, and target them with email sequences that convince them to buy your products and services.
- Craft personalized email subject lines that reflect the holiday season.
- Let your email body include relevant content that speaks to their pain point
- Automate the email drip campaign to lead a major holiday event.
- Entice them with early bird offers, limited discounts and coupons, and last-minute deals.
2. Monitor Social Media Trends
Social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook are where holiday conversations happen.
As I write this guide, I searched for #Christmas on Instagram, and I saw that #ChristmasPresent already has 2 million posts.
This is to tell you that Christmas present conversations are gathering momentum on Instagram ahead of Christmas. For a brand on Instagram that sells Christmas gifts, this is an ideal hashtag to monitor and take advantage of by investing in video marketing, since IG is a visual platform.
Many users engaging in these posts are looking for Christmas gifts to buy for themselves, their families, and friends. This is an effective digital marketing strategy you shouldn’t miss.
“Social media isn’t just a channel for broadcasting promotions, it’s a listening tool. Brands that tap into real-time holiday conversations can spot trending topics faster and pivot their content to match what consumers are already excited about,” says Kellon Ambrose, Managing Director at Electric Wheelchairs USA.
Launch an interactive social media marketing campaign using polls, quizzes, giveaways, and countdowns to increase your visibility and push your content and offers in the feed of any user interested in holiday shopping.
For the #ChristmasPresent, a brand on Instagram that sells Christmas gifts can create an IG challenge where users perform tasks like reposting your content, liking your page, tagging their friends to your post, and sharing your content to enter a contest to get a Christmas gift you sell for free.
Imagine thousands of people engaging with your post on Christmas presents. That will boost the online visibility of your brand. 3 or 4 Christmas presents you gave out for free could generate leads and sales for your business without you spending money on paid campaigns
3. Harness The Power of Influencer and UGC Marketing
Let’s assume you want to buy the Balsam Hill 10 ft Outdoor Red Berry Pine Pre-Lit Garland, which costs around $200 for holiday decoration.
Would you trust an online ad or a friend or celebrity you trust sharing their experience using it?
I guess you will trust the latter. This simply means shoppers trust people more than ads.
As we enter Q4, when people shop for the holidays, identify top-rated influencers in your niche who also align with your brand values and partner with them.
“The key to successful influencer marketing during holidays is micro-authenticity. Smaller influencers often have higher engagement rates and stronger audience trust, delivering a better ROI than large one-off celebrity endorsements,” says Spyridon Mesimeris, CMO of LegalDocs.
They already have a huge audience on different platforms who take their words for it.
Get them to promote your products and services to their audience. This will not only help you grow your sales this holiday season, but it will also help increase brand awareness, get you an audience and followers who will engage your content on social media platforms, and even join your newsletter.
Digital marketing tools like Semrush Social Toolkit offer you valuable insights on the best influencer to work with.
Also, encourage user-generated content (UGC). Your happy customers sharing their positive experience with your products and services will help grow your sales.
Your audience who are skeptical about paying for what you sell will be convinced to do so.
Collect their testimonials, reviews, and shout-outs and package them into content you can use as proof in your email campaigns or paid advertisements to boost authenticity.
4. Leverage WhatsApp Marketing
Many brands underrate WhatsApp marketing. They see WhatsApp as an instant messaging app. But the fact is that WhatsApp has gone beyond just a messaging app.
According to a report published on the official blog of WhatsApp, over 175 million people message WhatsApp Business accounts daily.
Businesses, especially ecommerce brands, are leveraging it to grow their sales. And during the forthcoming holiday season, when consumers make a budget for holiday shopping, brands with a huge presence and more reach on WhatsApp position themselves to generate more sales.
If you don’t have a WhatsApp business account, create one and start collecting phone numbers of your target audience ethically.
You can also share your WhatsApp business link on other platforms, where your buyer personas can connect with you on WhatsApp.
If you have the budget, run WhatsApp ad campaigns to move the needle faster.
“Brands using WhatsApp marketing often see engagement rates 3 to 5x higher than email. Quick responses, personalized offers, and conversational selling make customers feel valued, and that’s priceless during the holidays,” says Daniel Battaglia, Founder and CEO of Parking Cupid.
Have a sound content marketing strategy and create content that aligns with each of the holiday events to get your audience engaged. Then offer them discounts and coupons to convert them into sales.
Let’s assume you sell women’s makeup items. Start creating content on different ways women can make up for Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and even New Year’s.
Analyze the engagement rate to know if your content resonates with your audience. If yes, a few times a week, share a coupon code they can use to order your products at a discounted price.
What I like WhatsApp marketing is that the open rate is high compared to email marketing. Users tend to open their WhatsApp messages once they get a notification.
5. Launch Holiday-Themed Paid Ad Campaigns
For brands with big advertising budgets, the holiday season is the best time to spend more on paid advertising.
Consumers are actively searching for holiday items to buy on all platforms, and you should take advantage to sell more of your products and services.
Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Google Ads work best for pay per click advertising.
A daily ad budget of $100 can make a big impact.
Use festive ad creatives with a clear call-to-action button.
Set up a retargeting campaign for abandoned carts so users who initially engaged with your ad or added a product to their cart and complete the purchase process.
Schedule your ads ahead of peak shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
A lot of shoppers in the United States and Canada wait for these days to take advantage of the massive discounts brands offer.
Below is a paid campaign Qatar Airways is running on Facebook.
If you look at the creative, you can see the headline includes Autumn, a season in the United States, Canada, and some European countries that starts from September till late December.
This period falls in the holiday season, when many people book flights to different locations where they would spend their holiday season.
You can also see that they offer a 20% discount to entice travelers who love Qatar Airways to book flights and enjoy the price discount.
Many brands flush money down the toilet all in the name of running holiday season ad campaigns. They don’t know how to target the audience who are likely to buy their products.
So if your marketing team isn’t good at paid advertisement on platforms like Google, Meta, and TikTok, I suggest you hire digital marketers with years of experience in paid search and other forms of digital advertisement. They will put your ad budget to good use and get you the results you want.
There are freelancers and agencies with a track record of helping businesses grow their holiday sales with low-cost advertising.
6. Use Word-of-mouth Strategies, like Referral Programs
If you’re tired of spending thousands on ads during the Holiday season without seeing a high ROI, referral programs can be one channel to turn to.
What’s cool about them is that the only real cost of starting a referral program is to invest in a referral tool. These tools make it easy to send referral invitation emails, track referral fraud, and choose from different incentives. mAs part of your referral program, you could ask your existing customers to recommend your products to their friends and family.
For each successful referral, you could offer 10% – 20% off as a reward. This can have a significant boost in your Q4 holiday sales.
ReferralCandy’s customers, like Branch Basics, generated over 1.5 million in sales with a 4100% ROI on their referral program, so the potential for your ecommerce brand is also huge.
7. Optimize Your Landing Pages and Websites for Conversion
While you launch a digital marketing campaign on various digital channels I shared above, don’t forget to optimize your landing pages and websites for conversion.
It’s a waste of marketing efforts if a potential customer you drove from a paid campaign to your site can’t place orders seamlessly just because your landing page is a mess.
People hit the back button once your pages take forever to load.
Have a website or landing page that loads under 3 seconds. Switch to fast and reliable web hosting services, audit the plugins and tools in your site, and uninstall those that negatively impact the speed of your pages. Use website monitoring tools to proactively track performance, detect issues in real time, and prevent downtime, especially during Black Friday or holiday sales when every second (and visitor) counts.
- Most holiday shoppings happen on smartphones, so ensure pages are mobile-friendly and have a secure checkout.
- Make navigation easy and have a clear guide that makes shopping on your website or store fast and seamless.
Final thoughts
The holiday season is a goldmine for brands to increase their sales. Consumers set a budget to buy items and gifts to celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the New Year with friends.
I have shared with you different digital marketing strategies you can use to generate more sales through Q4, starting from setting up an optimized holiday email marketing sequence, harnessing influencer marketing, to optimizing your landing page and website for higher conversion, you have all you need to double your sales this holiday season.
