The time is again upon us to dust off our laptops, crack our knuckles, and craft the most enticing holiday marketing campaigns possible!
Crafting holiday offers that resonate with your target market is not just about spreading cheer but about generating tangible results.
A holiday offer is a tool companies use to compel their customers to purchase from them during the holiday season. These can be early bird discounts, 2-for-1s, sales, contests, and promotions.
This article explores how you can make holiday offers that draw crowds, like carolers to a doorbell, children to chocolate, and some other holiday-themed analogy—sledding swiftly onwards!
7 Holiday Special Offer Ideas
Let’s get into some ideas that you can apply to your brand’s holiday fiesta to boost your holiday sales and generate leads!
1. Early discounts
One winning idea is to offer a discount or benefit to anyone who purchases quickly with your company.
Perhaps the first 20 people who buy from your new season’s line of biodegradable festive decorations get a 15% discount.
Many people like to get into the spirit of the holidays as early as possible to bask in the festivities' glow fully.
Read more about boosting user engagement with festive widgets.
It is a particularly enticing offer for those people. Others are simply clever with their money and, since they know that gift-giving season is coming up, want to get the best deal they can for their friends and family.
You can check out the marketing trends of the moment to decide how best to advertise your holiday offers and reel those customers.
2. Gift guides
Another idea is to curate a gift guide to help customers identify and purchase the ideal presents for their beloved family members, friends, colleagues, frenemies, and mail carriers.
Your guide should offer various price points to cater to every budget and theme them around interests or demographics.
For example, you could have a wilderness-lover section, a bookworm chapter, and a home-cook section.
A tech lover might be jonesing for virtual fax software or a new phone. You can find a collection of items for various interests and budgets depending on what you sell.
3. Gift card bonus
Have you considered offering your customers an extra $10 for every $50 they put toward a gift card? “Free money? But cash doesn’t grow on trees!” we hear you crow. Aha!
It is no different from a discount or a sale! However, from the consumer’s point of view, it can feel a lot more enticing than that.
It can feel like something extra, a bonus—a little festive cheer and a way to take advantage of the holiday shopping cycle while sending warm happy new year wishes for business success.
4. Free shipping
What better way to entice a customer to your ecommerce shop than offering free shipping?
If someone is looking at cute pajamas on two different sites, you can easily sway them with the offer of free shipping.
Why spend $40 and an extra $5 on shipping for rainbow PJs when you can get tractor PJs for $40? It’s a no-brainer!
You’ve got to give a little to get a little sometimes; that’s what holiday offers are all about.
4. Holiday contests
The holidays are the perfect time to run a contest! Photo and video contests are elegant because you reuse the content for your marketing materials afterward!
You could run a “cutest family photo” contest featuring your products, offering people a chance to win a voucher for more!
These days, you can define the term ‘family’ in many ways. It could be the traditional household with mom, dad, and kids.
Or it could just be you and your animals or roommates. Or anything in between. Family is what you make it.
You can also have a more elaborate or silly theme, like the “Best Ugly Festive Jumper” contest or the “Best 3-second video” competition.
It generates more activity on your social media, which helps boost your brand and products on new people’s feeds and creates more interest and leads overall.
People will flock to your website to see what they can buy with a voucher!
And when they realize that their monthly paycheck just came in, they might be tempted to splurge on those cute dungarees anyway.
5. Events
It sounds like the last decade, but events are something you can do to generate more leads.
Whether you hire a DJ for your physical store and give out freebies to people on the street, host a game session to gamify your holiday marketing, or host a virtual event to sell online, you can engage with people wherever they’re based.
With so many companies trying to make their products as user-friendly as possible and their brands as relatable and cool as possible, it makes sense to try to reach people in the old-school, real-world way.
You can then use pipeline game data after the game or event to further tailor your future efforts to your customers.
Events are also an excellent medium for handing out vouchers and samples and giving people a glimpse of your fantastic customer service.
If you don’t have a physical store, you can still set up a stall at a farmer’s market or get permission to hand out samples on the street. You can even hire a venue and launch a branded party!
7. Giveaways
You can engage your customers and keep them engaged with your brand during the festive season by hosting raffles and giveaways.
Everyone loves a chance to win something, like time at a beauty spa, in just the time it takes to like and comment on a post. Even better!
The entry rules would depend on what you want to achieve—a subscription to your emails, perhaps, or more exposure on social media.
A raffle or giveaway is bound to garner attention from more people than currently follow you, which means more leads!
Tips for Crafting Holiday Offers
Now that we’ve covered some ideas for holiday offers, let’s get into the tips you can apply to make them pop like a champagne bottle on New Year’s Eve and not like the headache the day after.
Additionally, incorporating a humorous funny new year's resolutions in your marketing can engage customers who are already thinking about their goals for the upcoming year.
1. Timing is important
There are some core dates to remember around the festive season every year. Commercially, the most important ones to remember are Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and individual religious holidays.
Ideally, you will be thinking about your strategy for these dates months ahead so that your marketing efforts will be relevant and well-coordinated when those dates roll around.
You can use scheduled newsletters and social media in the lead-up to the holidays to garner interest.
Of course, most people will be purchasing until at least the end of December when the post-festive-season sales begin. You just have to attract them to you over the others.
2. Keep it simple
Many people will be vying for consumers’ attention this winter, so you can make it much easier for people to use your promotions than go with a different brand.
Your content should be relevant and targeted to ensure the right people are satisfied with uninteresting offers.
Pay attention to your audience's wants, and provide you target your ads well. You could even use questionnaires to understand better what people want.
Your content should also be easily consumable, that is to say—visually clear and appealing.
Highlight a few products and include essential information about each. Your marketing emails should also be easy to read so they don’t get automatically deleted.
All your links should work perfectly—no one should struggle to get to your product and calls to action should be included to help your customers.
3. The personal touch
While some people prefer just cold, hard facts, many people appreciate an email that feels warm and personal, even if they were just one of thousands of people to receive that exact email.
Using the customer’s name and the active instead of passive voice is ideal.
You can go even further with your personalization efforts and try to understand what different audiences need during the holidays.
Helpful articles for gift buying, making DIY soap, or recipes could add the personal flare that other campaigns lack. Audience segmentation can help you pinpoint what content you should put out there.
And in an era where personalization reigns supreme, data-sharing services become the backbone of your strategy.
With these services, you can collect and analyze customer data, tailoring your holiday offers to individual preferences and behaviors.
Wrap Up
Holiday offers that generate leads can come in various formats, and there’s no better time than the present to start preparing your marketing material for the chilly season ahead.
Like winter, your offers should add sparkle, joy, and excitement to your customers’ lives.
Warm their hearts with personal and vibrant offers, and watch your leads turn into customers!
