How to Build a Perfect Christmas Marketing Campaign: 11 Tips & Great Examples

Of course, as a holiday season, your customers or potential leads will probably have the time to check out your creative ideas or e-commerce store. You can capitalize on this audience to increase holiday sales, improve your mobile marketing strategy, and create personalized offers through Christmas marketing. This guide will show you our 12 best Christmas marketing campaign tips you can adopt for maximum results. Let’s get started. 

1. Begin Your Email Marketing Campaign Early

Email marketing still tops the list of best Christmas marketing strategies. Planning it early is a great way to deliver personalized experiences to your target audience. By the time Christmas arrives, your customers or audience will have a handful of creative emails establishing your app, brand, or general product in their minds. Since shoppers pay more attention to their emails during festive periods, imagine how far ahead of your competitors you’d be then!

2. Launch a "Countdown to Christmas" Campaign

You can also employ the countdown to Christmas technique while reaching out to your audience through emails or in-app messages. This is a marketing psychology tactic in which you use a ticking clock with a countdown to Christmas to win the attention of your customers or e-commerce store visitors.

You can launch your Christmas countdown campaign on your website or in strategic areas where your audience can find them. Alternatively, you can do this through SMS short codes or ringback tunes. However, for SMS, consider using a different countdown or reminder approach, like triggered messages or alerts.

3. Use Mobile Push Notifications

Mobile push notifications are an amazing way to send customers reminders during holiday sales. These reminders can be to make in-app purchases or visit abandoned carts. That way, you can reduce cart abandonment and also drive sales. Like SMS or email marketing, push notifications are an effective way to increase your ROI.

4. Run Retargeting Ads

5. Utilize User-Generated Content for Your Social Media Campaigns

User-generated content (UGC) for your holiday marketing campaign is one of the best choices this Christmas. In fact, it’s what changed Coca-Cola’s advertising model since 2011. Not only does UGC localize your advertising strategy, but it also makes your brand appear authentic. Moreover, you get higher engagement than you’d normally get with branded or professional content on social media. A good way to start is to craft hashtags your customers can use to discuss your brand and products on social media.

6. Use Christmas-Themed Mobile App Design

Just as the saying goes, “Christmas is a spirit,” using Christmas themes and colors for your mobile app design lets your audience or customers connect with your brand or products deeply and emotionally. While doing so shows your intentionality about the seasons, it also gives your customers the nostalgic Christmas feeling or vibes when they visit your app or e-commerce store. 

However, one thing that can give your users the best experience is personalization. You should tailor the app’s design to suit each user, which means working with seasoned mobile app design companies to achieve this.

7. 12 Days of Giveaways

Twelve days of giveaways is an awesome Christmas marketing strategy. Your customers will probably crave gifts during Christmas, and 12 days of giveaways is a win-win and fun strategy to employ. Just to be clear that we’re on the same page, a 12-day giveaway is a Christmas marketing event where you reveal a winner of a gift or item every day for 12 days. 

Usually, the giveaway packages are disclosed publicly, and your customers or audiences must sign up for the giveaway or perform tasks such as referrals or purchases that qualify them to stand a chance of winning. This is also a good time to use in-app reminders and push notifications to increase participation.

8. Run Holiday-Themed Social Media Competitions

Aside from 12 days of Christmas giveaways, organizing a holiday contest is another fun way to elevate your holiday marketing campaign and increase engagement and visibility for your brand on social media. This can work hand-in-hand with the UGC strategy and ensure that whatever competition idea you opt for, you will get direct traffic to your mobile app and website.

9. Consider an Online Scavenger Hunt

In the spirit of Christmas, an online scavenger hunt could take the engagement to another level. Your creativity is all that is needed to promote your brand or products using it. For instance, you could use your product, brand logo, or anything strategically related to your brand as clues the participants must uncover to win the game. That way, as participants aim to uncover the mysteries or use clues given to them, they showcase your brand or products.

10. Send Mindful Thank-You Messages to Show Appreciation

Sending a heartfelt “thank you” message via push notifications, email or SMS can help you build long-lasting relationships and connect with your customers on a deeper or emotional level. You can customize this message and make it more attractive, intentional and personalized. You don’t have to do too much — a simple creative design with Christmas theme colors will be great. Plus, you can spice things up by personalizing your messages or mentioning your customers’ names. 

11. Offer Flash Sales

Offering a flash sale means you offer a discount on your products for a limited period. You could run this marketing strategy alongside a countdown timer showing the limited time left to purchase your product or install your app. As a mobile marketing campaign, try to use the app install ads technique, where your users can directly install your app from display ads. Flash sales create a sense of urgency and scarcity and drive FOMO (fear of missing out), which could trigger someone to buy your product or engage with whatever CTA you use.

Awesome Christmas Marketing Examples from Famous Brands

Here are some of the best Christmas marketing campaigns that produced amazing results:

Etsy’s Gift Finder

Etsy’s holiday marketing campaign, Gift Finder, leveraged holiday challenges, giveaways, and UGCs from their partners. Etsy’s production partners used the hashtag “#Etsygifts” to caption any attractive item they intended to create or sell on the site and then share it on their social media accounts. The holiday challenge was a win-win for Etsy and its production partners, as it made it easier for them to create targeted holiday sales and increase Etsy’s brand awareness. 

Coca-Cola's "Holidays Are Coming" Campaign 

The Coca-Cola “Holidays Are Coming” campaign was so popular that over a third of Brits sang its jingles lyrics daily. The campaign employed countdown to Christmas and UGC techniques, which gave people the nostalgic expectations of Christmas and prepared them for Coca-Cola’s upcoming festivities and programs. 

The Starbucks Red Cups

Every November, Starbucks offers a reusable cup just for a day, which is called “Red Cup Day.” The company has used the cup's presence to mark the festive season's arrival. This unique Christmas marketing strategy was introduced in 2015, and the uproar that came with it drove a huge amount of publicity for Starbucks. The following year, after launching the campaign, Starbucks registered an 11.9% increase in sales. Since then, Starbucks has made it a thing to introduce a reusable cup every November. Customers enjoy incentives like getting a 10% discount (plus 25 bonus stars as a reward for members who use Starbucks’s mobile app) when they visit Starbucks' local stores with reusable cups.

Google Santa Tracker 

Google’s Santa Tracker, launched in December 2004, helps kids track Santa’s location throughout Christmas. But Google’s Santa Tracker does more than stalk Santa. The tool also offers amazing games that kids could play while engaging in other fun and educational activities, which Google provides through collaboration with other non-profit organizations. This campaign is a mobile marketing tactic to reach more audiences and indirectly drive traffic to other Google products, such as Google Assistant and Google Earth. 

Build the Perfect Christmas Marketing Campaign With Reteno

The best time to plan your Christmas marketing is before December. Many experts suggest you start planning as early as August through November’s Thanksgiving and Black Friday seasons. Part of the reason for this advice is so that you may establish your brand and products before the rowdy and overwhelming Christmas festive season — planning during this period can be painful.

Notwithstanding, if you’re yet to kick off your marketing campaign and feel time behind schedule, you don’t have to worry. Using the Reteno app engagement platform, you can beat not just time but also your competitors and build the perfect Christmas marketing campaign tailored to your target audience. Plus, as a mobile app brand, you can elevate and scale your app features before the holiday season arrives fully. Sign up with Reteno to get started today!

Final Thought

Christmas is that time of year when you connect with your customers on a deeper level and establish your brand with more customers ahead of the new year. To achieve all these, you should plan your Christmas marketing strategy earlier using email campaigns, ad retargeting techniques, in-app messages and push notifications, gifting, and discounts, among others listed in this guide.

With this guide, you have everything to kick-start a perfect Christmas marketing campaign and explore your marketing strengths this Christmas. Yet, by using Reteno, you can achieve even more with your e-commerce and mobile marketing strategy.