Christmas Marketing: 9 Creative Marketing Ideas of Boosting Sales & 3 Must-know Marketing Strategies

Why should you attach great importance to Christmas marketing? According to Statista, the average household in the U.S. spent $805 on Christmas gifts in 2020. And $942 in 2019. Compared to 2019, the data declined due to the pandemic. However, it will recover since the world will recover from the impact of COVID-19. For businesses, they need to market their Christmas selling ideas to boost sales. When you are doing dropshipping, you need to stand out from your competitors to drive more sales via holiday shopping. Thus, finding suitable marketing ideas for your dropshipping store on Christmas is critical.

However, how could you send ‘Merry Christmas’ to your customers to attract more sales? Let’s explore Christmas marketing ideas you can try out in the post:

Most brands will create special promotions and deals that delight their customers rather than making unnecessary holiday noise to their Christmas advertising campaign. Thus, I collect 9 top Christmas advertising ideas below. You can read them and use the ideas to fuel your holiday advertising ideas. Also, I provide some strategies for your marketing journey. Then you can find out the best Christmas marketing ideas that are most suitable for your business and get started with one of these marketing strategies.

Why Should You Start Christmas Marketing Early

Christmas day is coming on December 25. However, do you start marketing exactly on that day? The short answer is: No. You have to start early. The competition is high since many store owners want to convert more sales from their Christmas advertising campaign. Therefore, starting early and making full preparation can contribute to your success in the holiday marketing campaign.

The head of sales APAC at AdRoll, Denise Wyer, said that around 40% of Australians will start their shopping journey of the Christmas holiday by the end of October since they believe that being in the market upfront is important for any business looking for a merry Christmas.

Whether you are operating an AliExpress dropshipping business, branded dropshipping, or regular online e-commerce, marketing has amazing magic. However, one of the biggest mistakes store owners always make is not giving marketing enough time to work its magic. Hence, starting early really benefits you a lot.

You are capable of getting enough time to come up with ideas, create assets, and prepare media plans if you start planning your Christmas campaign in July. Moreover, you’d better start running promotions in early September once you’ve created your campaign. Plus, a bonus is that media costs will not soar until October. Hence, you will get more benefits.

9 Top Christmas Marketing Ideas

You need to start Christmas marketing early. But what could you do? Here I choose 9 top marketing ideas for your business. Read and get started with the most suitable to get more sales.

1. Offer Gifts

Gifts are half the battle of holiday shopping. Deciding what gifts to offer to attract customers is critical. You can offer your customers a curated list of the best gifts that they can get right from your store. Here, you also can include some customer testimonials to eliminate some of the work for your shoppers and attract more attention.

The retail chain Boots has created dozens of lists and categories for all gift-giving scenarios, taking this practice to a new level. However, it's also beneficial for you to start with one or two lists since it makes you build true good relationships with your customers and promote sales.

2. Create Coupons

The benefits of coupons are amazing. All holiday sales provide deals for consumers. If you don’t create your Christmas marketing campaigns for your customers, they may be disappointed. Plus, coupons, deals, and discount codes boost sales from the following aspects:

• First of all, revenues of emails that included a coupon will increase 48% per email
• For online shoppers, they will spend 24% more when using coupon codes compared to when they don’t use them

There is no rule about how you should use coupons in your Christmas marketing activities. Therefore, you can offer discounts when prospects join your newsletter. In addition, you can provide a chance to win a prize for referring a friend and offer free shipping for opting into your SMS marketing list.

3. Offer Bundle Items

Selling bundle items is popular in the online selling process. Bundling items together always means the perceived value increases. In other words, buyers can get more items by purchasing one. They even can get multiplied benefits whenever bundled goods are discounted. Offering bundle items is a brilliant way to increase the average order value. Here are some examples of bundling items you can learn for your Christmas advertising activities:

• Buy one, get one free
• The price of a living room set will be cheaper with a discount compared to buying each piece separately
• Offer a discount to a cleaning set when your customers purchase a jewelry piece

4. Social Media Ads

In the marketing process, social media ads can make your business shine during the holiday season. Your other Christmas marketing ideas like creating coupons, collaborating with influencers, may include some aspect of social media. Paid social media ads are a way to make sure those initiatives are seen. Here, the first you should know is to determine which platform to use. As a retailer, Instagram and Facebook are both great options.

5. Provide a Free Christmas Checklist

You may enjoy a time for getting together with family and friends during the Christmas season, but it can bring some stress as well. A checklist can include the numerous Christmas work that must be done. Offering a free Christmas checklist for your customers is a great way to solve their problems efficiently.

Firstly, you can list the must-see Christmas movies or must-try recipes in your store. Then, you can check these checklists to learn the list of items that are related to followers by downloading from your store or your social media. According to these lists, you can offer your visitors items that they are eager to get.

6. Use Push Notifications

What is a push notification? When an application is not open, it will generate an alert (typically a pop-up or other message) to notify the users of a new message, social media post, update, etc. It’s great to spread the word about Christmas marketing initiatives if your business already has or is involved in an app.

Apart from using push notifications in applications, your business can also utilize these notifications through a browser. You can prompt your customers to opt-in to notifications from the browser when they come to your website for some holiday shopping.

However, there is one thing you need to keep in mind, you should avoid inundating your customers with notifications day and night. Push notifications are a great way to send information about reminders, exclusive offers, special hours, and other updates at the proper time.

7. Cooperate with Influencers

Influencer marketing has become an impressive way to help build a brand and involve the brand’s social media presence. The truth is that influencers or content creators on social media are very valuable for companies to promote products to customers.

When applying influencer marketing, an effective strategy is to focus on micro-influencers who have accounts with 1,000-10,000 followers. Compared to mega-influencers, micro-influencers are popular for a higher engagement rate. A micro-influencer’s average engagement rate on Instagram is 3.86%.

You can boost Christmas sales by finding some local micro-influencers to work with during the holidays. Also, it might be a good chance to run a holiday giveaway. The best thing about this partnership is that it doesn’t have to end after the Christmas holidays. You can continue to use it throughout the year either continually or for other specific social media marketing campaigns.

8. Holiday-specific Advertising

Holiday-specific advertising is necessary. In a nutshell, you should decorate your ads both online and in print with a little Christmas flair during the festive season, such as images of Christmas trees and Santa Claus.

These ads are great for promotions of standalone products or themed collections. In addition, you need to ensure that they link to a specific Christmas landing page to make it easier for customers to purchase the content from the advertisement quickly. What's more, it can eliminate any resistance in their journey via online marketing advertisements. These holiday-specific advertising design ideas are endless, so you can try to be creative.

9. Add Christmas Flair to Your Brand

This marketing idea is proper for all businesses since almost any business can create a festive flair to their brand. You can update your social media profiles and logo to get into the holiday spirit. Moreover, you are capable of updating your website, in-store Christmas decorations like Christmas trees, print advertising, email marketing, and even your mobile app. Any places your customers can come in contact with your brand might be a great opportunity to tell them ‘Merry Christmas.’ Then, you could attract more customers through the greeting “Merry Christmas”.

3 Best Christmas Marketing Tactics

We have explored the 9 best Christmas marketing ideas, now you may have an idea that is most suitable for your online business. It’s time to learn some marketing tactics to make your Christmas sales more successful.

1. Use Your Existing Customers

I have to say your existing customers’ benefits are amazing while you have got more customers and sales for your online store. A study by Adobe says that 40% of online revenue came from only 8% of website visits. The data in the study indicates that a small number of customers account for a large percentage of revenue. The study by Adobe also says those new visitors accounted for a 4% increase in revenue over the holiday period. Whereas the store’s returning and repeat customers accounted for a 48% increase.

Hence, your existing customers are important. How can you re-engage your existing customers? You are able to send out an email campaign with an exclusive promotion to say thanks for their support this year. In addition, it’s great to send a gift for a loved one to them which encourages customers to buy a gift card and receive a discount.

2. Free Shipping and Express Delivery

The thing here is all about your delivery services. All consumers prefer free and fast delivery. Maybe your buyers may be looking to purchase earlier in the year, and they’re satisfied with the delivery. However, the last-minute scramble will generate more sales, and cause high press on the shipment. In return, there will be more returns and refunds during the holiday shopping.

To reduce these returns, the best way is to have express delivery as an option on your website. You can highlight the selling point in your marketing ads to let your customers know their purchases will arrive on time.

Free shipment is amazing when marketing on Christmas. The fact is most people will choose products with free delivery although sometimes it will cost more money. Therefore, you should adjust your product prices to absorb postage costs to ensure your benefits. You could only run free shipping as a short promo over the festive season if you can't implement it in the long term.

3. Marketing After Christmas

Christmas day is going away, however, it’s not the end for your Christmas marketing. I have mentioned above, your existing customers are vital. But how could you turn all of the new customers you've acquired over Christmas into repeat buyers? One impressive way is to market after the Christmas holiday.

What should you do? It’s better to send a post-holiday deal or new year’s special to your holiday consumers. It can help you keep up the sales during the next months that usually have lower traffic.

Final Word

No matter which way you choose to sell online, dropshipping or traditional business, and no matter what you sell online, your skills, services, or hand-made products, great Christmas marketing ideas can bring more sales in the holiday session. Thus, don’t miss these creative ideas for your Christmas marketing.

Now, you have a better understanding of marketing ideas and tactics, you can choose the most suitable one to get started. Here, I would like to say “Merry Christmas” to show my best wishes for your business success.