If you’re scrambling around for Christmas marketing ideas for your business, chances are you’re like me: adamant summer was only a few weeks ago.
If you’re reading this in August, start planning now. But if you’re reading this in late November/early December, and you haven’t started your Christmas marketing yet, you’re cutting it fine.
But it’s not too late.
Below, I’ve compiled a list of twenty-seven ideas you can implement to Christmas the living shit out of your marketing just in time for the festivities.
27 amazing Christmas marketing ideas
Let’s not waste any more time, let’s see how best to market your Christmas themed products:
One. Add festive images to your website
Honestly, it’s one of the quickest things you can do.
Grab a Christmas jumper, Santa hat or any old bit of tinsel to wear like a scarf and get snapping. By adding a festive touch to your website, it makes people feel Christmassy. And these days, that means pre-Christmas sales and bargains.
Two. Stick your Christmas products/services on your homepage
But won’t that frighten away anybody not interested in Christmas?
Short answer: No.
Everybody expects websites to be Christmas crazy from 1st November onwards, so put your Christmas products, sales or services front and centre on your homepage and link to your product pages. Your customers have got money to burn and they want what you have, so make it dead easy for them to buy from you.
Three. Separate your products into lists
Rather than dumping everything together, make it easy for customers to buy by making dropdown lists.
Loads of websites do it, like PrezzyBox. They separate their gifts into lists for:
- Husbands
- Wives
- Grandparents
- Kids
- Stocking fillers
- Secret Santa
And so on. This allows your customers to find what they’re looking for fast without having to think. Give people time to think and they’ll click away.
Four. Customise your packaging
If it’s not too late, create festive packaging.
Nothing says Christmas like adding snowflakes, reindeer, Santa or snowmen to your packaging. But if you’re a bit late to your Christmas marketing, it might be too short notice. Or maybe a bit expensive to change all of your products.
Don’t panic.
There is a faster and cheaper alternative.
Five. Add festive on-pack labels
Add a touch of Christmas without redesigning your whole range.
If your products are available to buy in shops, chances are Christmas marketing ideas like point four will come too late in the day.
However, on-pack sticky labels enable you to make your packaging look festive without a complete redesign.
One company that can help you do this is Denny Bros.
And the great thing is, you can do this all year round, so you can run giveaways and celebrate events without touching your original packaging. On-pack labels are great for persuading people to buy and can increase brand loyalty.
Six. Use push notifications on your site
Ugh – everybody hates in-browser push notifications. Yep, you scroll down a page and – BHAM – a push notification pop-up appears. Most of the time, you tut and click away. But here’s the thing, push notifications are a great way to get sales, especially if there’s a juicy discount on offer.
If you’re going to use them, make it worth the inconvenience, give them a bloody discount.
Seven. Give a Christmas discount
Yep, it seems obvious after the end of point six.
People expect a discount these days, so give it to them. Unless your profit margin is zero, you can afford to get into the spirit of the season by offering 10% off a product. I’d advise no lower than 10%; otherwise, it looks like you’re taking the piss.
Eight. Create a Christmas gift guide
A gift guide goes great with a discount.
Creating gift guides makes it easy for shoppers to buy more than one product from your website, just like Maisondepax do above. When grouped together, you’re telling your customers that you have everything they need in one place.
Nine. Bundle items together
Why sell a razor on its own? If any of these Christmas marketing ideas will almost guarantee you get more sales, it’s this one. By bundling gift ideas together (like they do on Amazon), you’re telling customers that they need to buy all the bits and bobs to go with it to make it even better. It’s easy to overlook, so don’t. Do this, and you’ll see your sales creep up.
Ten. Update your product imagery
Make your product imagery a little more Christmassy.
Just by tying it into Christmas, you’re making it look and feel like it’s worth buying as a present. That’s all well and good, but what if you sell a service you can’t physically see or touch? Ah, I’ve got you covered there too…
Eleven. Update your product copy
Yep, it’s as simple as that.
This is one of the best and first Christmas marketing ideas you can implement. If you can tweak your current product descriptions to include some festive wording, it means you don’t have to rewrite everything. But be careful, don’t shove words in for the sake of it. It’s got to sound enticing. Make it all about how it’ll change their lives and less about how great you are for creating it.
All they want to know is how what you do changes their lives. Give people ideas on who the gift is perfect for, be it a:
- Husband
- Wife
- Child
- Colleague
- Weird Uncle who stinks of cabbage
Personally, I’d get a copywriter to rewrite any messaging to make sure it’s done right and doesn’t look a bit dodgy. Oh, and if they work in context with what you sell, don’t be afraid to use puns in your Christmas marketing.
Twelve. Pimp Christmas on Social Media
Social media plays a huge factor in driving traffic to your website, so go all-out on your Christmas posts.
There are loads of things you can do on socials, like:
- Add Christmassy profile pictures and headers
- Post images of your Christmas packaging
- Run Christmas discounts
- Give away free Christmas-themed gifts
- Post a video of you dancing in a Santa hat
Customers expect a little more personality on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok. Social media is ideal if you don’t have a big budget or you’ve left it too late to do much else. Websites like Canva have hundreds of Christmas templates, so you can look like you’ve gone all in this Christmas, even if you’ve left it to the last minute.
Oh, and look over what you’ve written or posted in the past and repurpose your blog posts.
Thirteen. Include discounts in your email marketing
Send out regular marketing emails and newsletters?
Then make the most of your email list and up your Christmas marketing game to people primed and ready to buy your stuff. Give them an early bird discount. And make sure you send out reminders at least once or twice a week in the run-up to Christmas.
Sure, some people might not like it, but there will be readers planning on buying and keep forgetting. By reminding them and giving them a cut-off date, it’ll persuade them to buy now for fear of losing out.
And with that in mind…
Fourteen. Create a cut-off date for purchases
Urgency = sales. Give people endless time and they won’t buy. So, specify a cut-off date for final purchases, so they get them in time for Christmas. And make sure you remind them on social media and in your blog posts and newsletters. Let them hear the tick-tock of the countdown clock and they’ll be more likely to buy.
I get that you don’t want to come across as pushy, but you run a business and you’re in business to make sales.
Fifteen. Go big on stress
Christmas is stressful, so hammer that message home. People buy from you because what you do makes their life easier, so create content that solves those stresses.
Like what?
Well, anything. It’s better if you can tie it into what you have to offer, but ever writing articles and list guides on subjects like:
- Everything to wrap your gift perfectly
- How to make the perfect Christmas dinner
- How to make the tastiest Christmas pudding
Articles like this help take the stress out of Christmas.
Yes, of all the Christmas marketing ideas in this list, this one is probably the one you might think is just a bit weird, especially if you’re looking at the titles above and you’re a solicitor.
But even then, you could turn the above into:
- How to make the perfect Christmas dinner and save your marriage
Christmas is a time to be a bit silly with your articles. And even if you can’t tie it into what you’re offering, your customers will appreciate a list post that makes it dead easy for them to tick things off their list.
They’ll thank you for it.
Sixteen. Add gift cards to your store
Nowt like the gift of more sales.
Offer a gift card purchasing option on your website. They’re great for Secret Santa gifts or people who don’t really know what to get their Great Aunt Mildred, so give them to option of popping a gift card in their trolley.
Seventeen. Run a 12-Days of Christmas sale
That’s twelve days of discounts, vouchers and the like.
Do a different deal for every day. One day it could be 25% off one product, the next 15% off something else.
Make it whatever you want it to be. As Christmas marketing ideas go, it’s one that’s done to death, but balls to it, do it.
You’ll hear a million times you should do something different to stand out, especially at Christmas. But a 12-days sale is classic. It’s expected, so make sure your deals are what stand out.
Eighteen. Run a Black Friday sale
Black Friday, more like Black Month-day. Remember when Black Friday was just one day?
Or better still, when the thing didn’t exist at all?
Great days!
Now, it runs for weeks, if not months. So, it’s never too late to announce a Black Friday deal.
Like it or not, Black Friday almost guaranteed sales, so make sure people know about it – and if you sell your products on Amazon, etc., make sure it’s part of their Black Friday deals too.
Nineteen. Run a Cyber Monday sale
Even if you only sell knitted scarves and gloves.
You’ve got a website and online shop? Right then, that’s cyber. Don’t worry that Cyber Monday is just for electronics; it isn’t. Well, mostly it is, but hey, rules are meant to be broken.
So, push your Cyber Monday Sale and tell your customers that your amazing deals are only available in your online store for 24-hours.
If they want them, they’ll have to log on into cyberspace (ugh – does anyone call it that anymore!?)
Twenty. Team up with other small businesses
The more eyes you have on your business, the better chance of making sales. Teaming up with small businesses that complement yours means you stand a bigger chance of making a sale.
Let’s say you make bespoke furniture. Teaming up with a company that makes handmade lamps means you can sell the idea of fitting out a whole living room with new furniture and lighting that complement one another.
You drive traffic to each other’s websites and potentially make more sales.
Twenty-one. Team up with charities
Put the heart back into Christmas.
Most of the time, the spirit of Christmas gets lost in trying to make as much money as possible. So, by teaming up with a charity, you can announce you’re going to give:
- A percentage of every sale goes to a charity
- A portion of your overall December sales to charity
And you can also give your customers a chance to donate by clicking a Gift Aid option at the checkout or allowing them to donate whatever they can afford.
Twenty-two. Offer free shipping
Nobody wants to pay for that anymore. Thanks to Amazon Prime, people expect free shipping, so either offer it on all purchases or offer it if they spend over a certain amount, like £35 or something.
Twenty-three. Offer free returns and extend the return period
Nobody wants to buy a gift in November only to find it has to be returned by Christmas Eve. Implement a free returns policy, and extend it until the 31st of January.
Oh, and give them a discount code too.
Sure, they might be disappointed the Gimp Mask didn’t fit, but they’ll be back for more bondage gear in the New Year (if that’s what you sell, obviously).
Twenty-four. Offer a gift-wrapping service
Take the stress out of wrapping for your customers. Wrapping always takes longer than you expect, so offer your customers a gift-wrapping service. T
his is something you can charge extra for.
And if you hammer home the hassle and time it takes for them to do it themselves, they’ll happily pay an additional £3.99 for you to do it for them. Unless you sell cars or something, but even then, a giant bow on delivery should do!
Twenty-five. Use seasonal words in your PPC ads
Make your stuff easy to find. If you’re using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, make sure you tweak your keywords to match the festive season. And you can do this by using tools such as Google Trends.
Twenty-six. Be honest about your stock levels
And if and when you’re expecting more.
Why?
Because there’s nothing worse than your customer clicking on your products only to find it’s out of stock. And don’t be like Amazon, with their: “We don’t know when or if this product will be back in stock.”
It’s dickish, be open, honest and tell your customers when you’ll have more stock. If it’s not until after Christmas, offer them a discount if they pre-order it now.
Twenty-seven. Don’t forget post-Christmas
Boxing Day, New Year – and that bit in between where people are fed up because they didn’t get what they wanted is ideal for continuing your sales push. People also have money burning a hole in their pockets while they’re sitting at home eating turkey sandwiches and roasted peanuts.
So, slash your prices even more and watch the sales pile high.
Things to think about next year.
If you didn’t start your Christmas marketing until late November/early December, make sure you start in October next time. October isn’t too early. Most people expect Christmas ads and sales the day after Halloween.
Ready to implement some Christmas marketing ideas?
Phew, that was a lot of Christmas content marketing ideas, right?
But it’s not too late (even if you’re reading this at the start of December).
Sure, you might not have the time, energy or budget to implement all twenty-seven of the Christmas marketing ideas above, but by implementing a few, you’re showing you’re not an ol’ stick in the mud. But if you can’t face writing about Christmas at any time of the year.
Or, if you need a copywriter to write your non-festive copy, check out my Services page, where you’ll find a list of what I do and how much it costs.
And if I’m right for you, let’s chat.
Until next time,
Matt
PS. If you’re not arsed about Christmas but want to increase sales by refreshing your brand and improving your SEO, check out my handy articles, How to create your brand story, Why your brand tone of voice is important and 24 awesome ways SEO optimise your blog posts.