16 marketing campaign ideas to boost your Christmas sales

New: Discover our ideas for Christmas 2020

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…

Which means that it’s time to start thinking about your holiday marketing campaigns. The festive season formally begins with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Now, how are you going to celebrate the month leading up to the December holidays with your audiences?

Christmas is easily one of the best times of the year. But it can be a challenge to capture shoppers’ attention, given the number of holiday promotions they are bombarded with. If you’re asking yourself how you are going to separate yourself from the rest during the holidays, this article is for you. This season, connect and build stronger relationships with your audience through interactive experiences! Here are our top 16 Christmas promotion ideas to boost your sales & collect consumer data this holiday season.

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1. “Countdown to Christmas”

What would Christmas be without Advent calendars? Create your interactive one quickly and easily! Every day a new window opens to offer a different discount (24 days of deals!), quiz, video, prize or content. The ideal campaign to engage your audience. Besides, if people keep returning to your channels again and again, you are more likely to stay top of mind when they need your product or service ?

That’s what Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) did last year. The football club created an Advent calendar that unveiled a new promotion or prize to win every day. To enter the draw, participants were asked to provide their contact information in a form. PSG collected 47% of opt-ins to its newsletter and 2,700 profiles per day on average.

Key elements to a successful Christmas contest:

An attractive prize that is relevant to your business;
Virality: make your contest easy to share;
A fun and engaging format;
A dedicated tool for fast, efficient and reliable creation.

2. Oh Christmas tree

The decoration of the Christmas tree is a ritual that is very important to people. Whether clean, glittery or overloaded, one thing is certain: it makes us proud. Take this opportunity to organise a photo contest of the most beautiful ones! Invite your audience to share a photo of their decorated Christmas tree and to collect a maximum of votes to try to win a prize.

Psst! In case you missed it, we have released 5 new photo galleries to make your contests even more beautiful. Check them out now →

3. Dear Santa…

Let’s continue with user-generated content. Invite your audience to write a letter to Santa indicating the gifts (related or not to your business) that they would like to receive. Reward the participant who wrote the funniest letter or the one with the most votes by offering them one of the gifts in their letter. It works for both children and adults ?

4. 4 Pics 1 Word

Build on the popular game “4 Pics 1 Word”, in which participants have to guess one or more hidden word(s) by finding each of the letters that compose it. How to: Create a “guess the word” campaign and illustrate it with 4 pics! And here’s a “4 pictures 1 word” special Christmas just for you!

5. Some general culture…

Evaluate the general knowledge of your users and add an additional challenge by offering them a “sudden death” quiz. With this type of quiz, the participant is eliminated from the first wrong answer! A good way to engage your audience while encouraging them to come back to your channels to try again.

6. Christmas jackpot

Looking for a format that is easy to set up, hyper-addictive and fun? Opt for the jackpot format. This type of campaign displays a slot machine that is automatically activated when the visitor signs up. Participants immediately discover if they have won or lost.

Create your Christmas Jackpot in just a few clicks with our new Christmas Jackpot template! Available in the Qualifio platform.

7. Holiday puzzle

Want an even more interactive format than the jackpot? Choose the puzzle! Generate a puzzle from the image of your choice and encourage your users to recreate it. Your turn now ?

8. The gift guide, a holiday staple

Creating a gift guide can be a great way to showcase your products while helping your users choose the gift they should give their loved ones. Simply ask the users a few questions about the person they’re buying for, then display gift ideas based on those answers.
Here are some examples of criteria that you can include in your gift guide:

Budget (e.g. under 10 €, under 20 €)
Gender (e.g. gifts for her, for dads, for couples, for kids)
Relationship (e.g. colleagues, best friends)
Interests (e.g. beauty, alcohol) New in Qualifio! Add an age verification field to your forms.

Do not forget to add a convincing call-to-action, such as a “limited” offer to encourage shoppers to visit your store or online store. Tip: If you have a Christmas catalogue, you can include a link (QR code, smart URL…) to your online guide in it.

Fine wine merchant Millésima has diverted this campaign format to make a wine guide for Christmas meals. Internet users had to indicate the type of meal for which they wanted to receive advice (appetizers, starters, dishes, desserts) and the guide automatically generated the most appropriate wine based on their answers.

9. Foie gras VS Faux gras

Engage your audience with various battles on Christmas-related topics. Oysters or caviar? Foie gras or faux gras? Christmas log or cheese (or both)? If you work in the travel sector, you can ask visitors whether they’d prefer to spend their holidays under the sun or in the snow. An easy way to segment your audience, then target participants with offers or content tailored to their preferences?

10. Say it with a landing page

This year, say goodbye to paper! Send your Christmas wishes via a landing page dedicated to all your customers or employees. Create a simple web page in a few clicks, add multimedia content (photo, video, text, audio, GIF, etc.) and publish it on your website, on a dedicated mini-site, on your Facebook page and/or on your mobile app.

11. Happy holidays!

Christmas is synonymous with holidays. If you work in the travel sector or have a partner in that industry, you can imagine a fun and engaging campaign for your users as well with a travel to win or a discount for their next holidays.

12. Fun for all ages!

Do you have a varied catalogue of toys for children and adults? Imagine a memory in which your Internet users would have to find the toys corresponding to the good age groups to try to win some for Christmas.

13. The notorious personality test

What Christmas guest are you? What Christmas character are you? What Santa are you? What Christmas song are you? The personality test format is a safe bet and can be a great marketing tool. Let your users discover the profile that corresponds to them based on their answers and encourage them to share it on social media.

Tip: for personality tests, ask participants to fill out a form before they can see their profile. Use the data collected after Christmas for targeted actions.

14. Best of 2018

To celebrate the end of the year in style, why not imagine a Swiper poll? Engage your audience by asking them to identify their favourite events or news of the year.
Need an alternative? If you are a designer in the making or have good photo editing skills, you can also add manipulated photos to your survey and ask users to find the fake news among the real ones!

15. End-of-year survey

Who says Christmas also says good resolutions. Ask your audience to review theirs. Tip: Display the results in graphs at the end of the survey.

16. Don’t forget after-Christmas sales & promotions

This is the perfect time to continue to increase your sales. Hold a flash contest and offer discounts. “Santa did not bring you the gift you wanted? Win a voucher to buy it yourself!“