22+ Christmas Marketing Ideas for Online Businesses in 2024

Christmas is one of the most exciting times of the year for customers as well as entrepreneurs.

Customers are more than excited to spend a fortune on the wishlists they have drooled over the year. Meanwhile, merchants and marketers are up to eyeballs at work figuring out which Christmas marketing ideas should be implemented to make the most of holiday sales.

If you’re also looking for some marketing ideas for Christmas, then look no further. 

A free buffet of Christmas marketing ideas is here, waiting for you to capitalize on them. Be sure to take notes as you will surely find a slew of creative Xmas marketing ideas and evergreen tips that work for your business.

Let’s get started!

Best Christmas Marketing Ideas to Get You Inspired

1. Decorate Your Online Store and Social Media Profiles

First things first, when it comes to the Christmas shopping season, your online store must signify the Christmas spirit. Imagine yourself walking in the street during the Christmas season and all the spectacular decorations across the streets and retail stores.

Create a similar look and feel on your Shopify store as well as social media profiles to spread positive vibes about the festival. Launching a Christmas-themed landing page is one of the best Christmas marketing ideas.

Now, when talking of landing pages, GemPages has got you covered with everything that you need to go with a bang in the Christmas season. Whether you need a stunning landing page template for Christmas or a complete guide to creating a striking Shopify landing page, you don’t need to look anywhere else.

Important note: GemPages is also hosting exclusive Black Friday giveaways, offering 20% OFF your first 3 months just for you! Now is the perfect time to start creating eye-catching store pages and landing pages with advanced and powerful features with GemPages.

GemPages’ template library has a variety of templates for different shopping occasions or holiday seasons such as Xmas and New Year, Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Valentine's Day, and the list goes on and on.

Let’s talk about social media now. You can also create the Christmas theme on your social media accounts by creating a new profile picture, posts, and stories. You can use free online tools such as Canva, Appy Pie Design, and Freepik to easily create your social media content.

2. Launch a pre-holiday sales campaign with a countdown timer

Celebrate the holiday season by launching an early sales campaign that excites your customers with festive savings. Instead of waiting until the sale day, you should start promoting your Christmas deals early to create buzz.

You also can build anticipation by notifying visitors of the upcoming sale. This helps drive interest, increase potential sales, and grow your email list by offering early sign-ups for updates and exclusive access. Besides, it is a perfect way to use popups to highlight the event date and give shoppers a sneak peek of discounts (like “Up to 80% off!”) to spark interest. Adding a countdown timer can also enhance urgency, encouraging customers to save the date for your holiday sale.

3. Offer Christmas Special Loyalty Rewards

Christmas is one of the best times of the year to reward your customers for their loyalty. If you’re running a loyalty program on your Shopify store, you can reward your customers in many different ways.

For example, you can gift your customers some bonus points for Christmas shopping or offer a gift card with a certain $ value. Big brands like Starbucks and Sephora set great examples of how you should reward your customers. That’s also one of the reasons they are known for having two of the most engaging loyalty programs in the world.

Starbucks launched its ‘Starbucks for life’ campaign during the 2021 holiday season with an exciting announcement of prizes for its loyalty program members.

Learn more: Level Up Your Shopify Loyalty Program With A Landing Page

4.Create Christmas bundles

Many customers are looking to buy gift baskets to give as Christmas gifts. You can bundle similar products together and offer them as a gift basket to your customers.

By doing this, you can not only make it easier for your customers to buy a gift for their loved ones but you can also take it as an opportunity to cross-sell your products. Boots has a dedicated section on their online store for Christmas gifts where customers can buy bundled products.

This ‘Soap & Glory Sweet Tin-Tations’ gift bundle offer from Boots consists of multiple enticing factors such as the discount offer as well as 120 points for the purchase.

Pro tip: Offering curated gift bundles is a great way to increase sales. You can learn more: How To Create Bundles on Shopify: 2 Simple Ways with GemPages.

5. Design Your Store for Impulse Buying

At some point in our lives, we all must’ve bought some products based on our impulse buying behavior. Impulse buying is the act of buying any product which you did not plan to buy in advance but still do so due to a sudden desire to buy it.

This technique is very common for physical retail stores but it can also be used by online stores. You just need to be creative about the product placement on your website so that customers can be attracted to these products during their buying journey.

Research by the Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS) has found that impulse buying has a correlation with website quality. So, make sure your website’s design quality is taken care of. Also, you may combine it with another strategy, such as urgency or scarcity, to make it even more effective.

To customize the design of your Shopify store, you can install a Shopify app like GemPages page builder. It gives you the freedom to create, customize, and optimize stunning store pages using its drag-and-drop editor.

GemPages not only allows you to create store pages from scratch but also helps you to customize and optimize your pages for conversion.

Customize your Shopify store pages your way

The powerful page builder empowers you to create store pages that bring unique experiences and convert customers. No coding needed.

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6. Drive More Sales Through The Christmas Email Campaign

Email marketing is known to be one of the most effective channels to drive conversion and sales. By creating a Christmas special email campaign, you can nudge your customers about your holiday special collections and discount offers.

That said, you may need a proper strategy to make the most out of your Christmas email campaign. You need to ensure that your email grabs the attention of your email subscribers and leads them to take action, i.e., to visit your store for shopping.

Quick tips to level up your email marketing for the holiday season:

• Be creative with the email subject line to ensure that you have a high click through rate.
• Send personalized emails separately to different groups of target customers instead of sending bulk emails to everyone.
• Help your customers with gift guides to resolve their dilemma on what to buy for gift-giving.
• Many people may access your email through their mobile phone. Optimize your email design for mobile.

This email from LARQ is a great example to learn from. It includes a link to "Holiday gift ideas" for customers along with products, a "Shop now" button, and a little guide displaying the delivery timelines to create urgency.

7. Remind subscribers about their active coupon codes

When people sign up for a discount code, it's important to encourage them to use it. A follow-up sticky bar is an effective way to remind customers about their coupons.

Sticky bars stay visible on the screen, keeping the discount fresh in customers’ minds without disrupting their shopping experience. This helps you make the most of your Christmas marketing efforts.

When customers have a code that’s only valid for the holiday season, they’ll feel a sense of urgency, which can motivate them to complete their purchases.

8. Promote best-selling or discounted products

First-time visitors can often feel overwhelmed by online stores with extensive inventories, leaving them unsure of where to begin. This feeling, known as analysis paralysis, can lead to visitors leaving your site without taking any meaningful action.

If your website offers a wide range of products, consider showcasing your best-selling or discounted items in an exit-intent popup. During the holiday season, you can feature these products as part of a Christmas gift guide.

9. Share Christmas-themed Content

You know the famous marketing quote “Content is King”, right?

Well, that’s applicable even for the holiday season. Creating useful and captivating content for the holiday season or Christmas can help you drive more traffic to your website. 

You can create Christmas-themed YouTube videos, blog content, or even images for your Instagram carousel posts. You get the idea, right?

Take a look at this YouTube video from Sephora about their recommended must-have gift sets for the 2023 season. The video has got more than 1300 likes on YouTube.

In this video, they are unboxing the gift sets one by one. Also, they include the product links in the video description so that customers could go and buy the products directly from there.

10.Collaborate with social media influencers and boost the effectiveness of those campaigns

Influencer marketing has been in the buzz for a long time. But there’s also a new trend within this marketing scope. Businesses have not started reaching out to micro-influencers.

Micro-influencers are the rising creators or social media influencers who have about 10K to 50K followers. Although they don’t have millions of followers, they usually have stronger engagement with their audience.

Also, one more benefit is that micro-influencers cost much lesser than mega or celebrity influencers. But make sure that you choose the right influencers based on your industry or niche by doing some research on each influencer’s profile and posts.

By the way, did you know that Shopify has launched Shopify Collabs to help merchants connect and work with creators or influencers? You may check out this article for everything you need to know about Shopify Collabs.

Top platforms for influencer marketing:

Choosing the right influencer platform is as important as choosing the right influencer. Statistics from Influencer Marketing Hub suggest that TikTok is the top influencer campaign channel in terms of its usage. But you may need to see where your target audience is.

11. Run a Social Media Contest

Here’s one of the Christmas marketing gift ideas that can increase your social media followers as well. Running a social medial contest can help you get engagement and raise the excitement of your existing followers/customers. Also, it can attract new followers who may want to join the contest.

Come up with an interesting contest idea and offer some cool prizes for the winner or top 3 spots so that people would love to join the contest. Check out this contest on Twitter from Divoom–a company that makes stylish speakers and pixel art gadgets. 

It is also appealing to the followers with its increased size of the prize pool and new goodies.

Announcing next #pixelart drawing #contest:

It's the most wonderful time of the year, ALMOST! Let's celebrate the winter holiday with the pixel art. For this #xmas, we increased the size of the prize pool with some new goodies, so enter now!#contestgiveaway #divoom #Christmas pic.twitter.com/UC98R5gxM5

— Divoom (@divoom) November 7, 2022

Pro Tip: If you do not have good enough followers on your social media business accounts to run a contest, you can collaborate with influencers who have followers in your niche to promote your contest on their profiles. That way, you can leverage their audience to get more participation in the contest.

12. Plug Instagram Content to Your Website

We discussed earlier about creating Christmas-themed social media posts. Now, let’s talk about how you can use those posts to bring some extra charm to your website as well.

Using Shopify apps like Growave or Instafeed, you can display your Instagram posts on your website. By doing this, you can reuse your Instagram content and promote your Instagram account to new website visitors, too.

Growave app helps you to turn your Instagram posts into shoppable galleries and allows your customers to shop directly through Instafeed. And this is just one of the many features of this Shopify app.

13. Use Urgency and Scarcity Techniques

Urgency and scarcity are two of the favorite techniques of marketers to increase conventions and boost sales.

• By introducing limited-time offers, you can create a sense of urgency in your customers.
• When the products are low on stock, you can display the count of items left in stock to show scarcity. 

In either case, you are prompting your customers to complete the purchase urgently.

There are various tools and techniques that can be helpful to create urgency and show scarcity in your store. You can show a countdown timer for limited-time offers, host a flash sale, create VIP Offers, add certain products to the vault, show the demand for your product, and so on.

If you’re wondering how you can add elements of urgency and scarcity to your website, check out these cool GemPages features that can help you to prepare your store with design elements such as a countdown timer, popup, banners, and so on.

Your store needs some bells and whistles?

Explore GemPages' advanced features and see what works best for your store. Free plan available. No strings attached.

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14. Launch special offers for VIP customers

Nothing excites customers like free gifts. They would love it every single time!

You may have to evaluate how you can offer such free products based on the pricing of your primary product. For example, if you’re selling a high-priced product, you can offer a small but thoughtful special offers along with that product for VIP customer. . 

But if you’re selling many different low-priced products, you can fix a specific order value that customers need to meet in order to get a special gift. This way, you can ensure that your cost of offering free gifts is manageable considering the order value. Also, some customers may even buy more to increase their order value and to get a free gift.

Estée Lauder offers a free 7-piece gift with any $75 purchase. Plus, if customers spend $125, they can get an additional free gift.

15. Offer Christmas shopping guides

Providing helpful Christmas promotion ideas and shopping guides for website visitors is an excellent strategy to grow your email list while offering valuable support to shoppers, keeping them informed about the best holiday sales.

As the holiday approaches, many shoppers feel stressed about finding the right gifts, making this one of the most effective Christmas marketing strategies on your list.

Christmas gift guides assist shoppers in finding the ideal presents for their loved ones, easing the often daunting task of gift selection. These guides enhance the shopping experience and highlight your expertise and commitment to customer satisfaction.

16. Offer free shipping and highlight shipping conditions

Here’s one more free offer idea to delight your customers this Christmas. In fact, free shipping has been used by many online businesses (which is an indication that it definitely works).

Most customers check the shipping cost at the time of purchasing any product online and it could impact their buying decision. Based on Baymard Institute's data from 48 different studies, 48% of customers leave their cart without buying due to extra costs (shipping, tax, fees) being too high.

Also, one more reason some customers may hesitate to buy online is that they are not satisfied with the return policy. All in all, offering free shipping and returns can resolve all such worries of your customers and it will encourage them to complete their purchase.

Casper has a pop-up on its website for "Free no-contact delivery & returns*" for all orders regardless of whether they are big or small.

17. Level Up Your Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimation (SEO) is mandatory for any online business regardless of the season. However, for the holiday season, there’s more that you could do to optimize your website for the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) based on common topics such as "Christmas gift ideas", “best gift for Christmas”, and so on.

Caption: Ranking your website higher in the Google search results can help you to bring more traffic to your website and increase your sales.

If you’re selling products in a specific niche, you may use the keywords related to your niche. You can also use keyword research tools such as Google Suggest, AnswerThePublic, SEMrush, and Google's Keyword Planner, just to name a few.

18. Use Web Push Notifications

Web push notifications (also known as browser notifications) are clickable messages that are sent by a website or web app and pop up on your device - even when you’re not active on the website.

For using web push notifications on your Shopify store, you can install a Shopify app like FirePush or PushOwl Web Push Notifications. By using such app, you can recover abandoned carts as it can help you to send notifications to anonymous website visitors as well.

Firepush app lets you remind your potential customers to complete their purchase by sending messages to their mobile or desktop.

19. Don’t Forget Remarketing

Remarketing is a great strategy for your Christmas marketing campaigns because you can reach relevant potential customers who are more likely to convert. Thus, remarketing can give you a higher return on investment (ROI). 

For those who might not know the term, remarketing (also known as retargeting) is a strategy in which you advertise to those website visitors who have visited your website searching for some products for any other reason. Also, you can show ads to people in your database or those using your mobile app.

However, keep in mind that running paid ads is not the only way to go for remarketing. You can also run an email campaign for your past customers. Since they’ve already used your product and are familiar with your brand, it’s more likely that they would return to your website for more shopping.

20. Start a Charity Initiative

Through a charity initiative, your business can serve people beyond customers and set an example for others. With the help of your customers, you can raise funds for a noble cause and help the people who are in need.

You can donate a certain percentage of sales to a charity or a specific amount per item sold. If you want, you can also let your customers directly contribute a specific amount toward charity at the time of checkout.

However, charity or help doesn't always have to be monetary, you can even donate your products based on the sales you make from your business or find any other way to help others. You can find a cause that is aligned with the values and mission of your business.

Also, you can partner with a local or any other trusted charity. Whichever cause or route you choose, raise awareness about your initiative among your customers so that you can get maximum participation. You can make good use of social media and emails to spread the word with your customers. 

21. Create a Strategy for Black Friday & Cyber Monday

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are two of the biggest revenue-generating days for online businesses. During 2021, Shopify store owners generated a whopping USD $9.3 billion in total global sales. 61 million customers all over the world purchased from businesses that are powered by Shopify.

However, to make the most out of these big eCommerce occasions, you need to prepare a strategy so that you attract can buyers to visit and purchase from your store on these days. And when they do, you have the opportunity to get more business from these buyers on Christmas as well.

Here are a few things that you can implement into your strategy:

Design your store for Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Considering the importance of these two big days, you should prepare your store’s design for each day. However, customizing your store on every such occasion can be overwhelming and time-consuming.

A page builder app like GemPages can make your work a lot easier with ready-to-use templates.

GemPages can help your Shopify store to quickly get ready for big occasions like Black Friday and Cyber Monday with the stunning, ready-made templates.

Get selling faster with ready-made templates

Explore GemPages' extensive template library—for any purpose and any industry.

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Pro tip: If you’re looking for help from CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) experts to optimize your store design, you can check out the GemPages CRO Experts marketplace.

Offer discount coupons for Christmas shopping: When customers buy your products during BFCM, give them a good reason to come back to your store during Christmas. You can offer them Christmas special discount coupons with their BFCM shoppping. 

Provide value to build an email list: Come up with a creative way to provide value to your customers and capture as many emails as possible. Even if they don’t buy your product on these occasions but if you’re successful to get their email, it’ll be a great opportunity during the Christmas email campaign.

Learn more: 50+ Best Black Friday Cyber Monday Email Subject Line Examples

22. Collaborate with Another Business

Collaborating with another business that has a similar target audience as yours could help both - your as well as their business. It creates opportunities for both businesses to expand their audience, promote each other’s products or services, and increase sales through those potential customers.

To collaborate with other businesses, you need to get involved in the business communities, talk with other business owners, and make some good friends. Building great relationships isn’t just about mutual business benefits, it can create a sense of community where you can connect with people and support each other even without expecting anything in return.

Once you’ve built a good network and relationships, there are several ways to collaborate for business growth purposes. Here are some of the examples:

• Cross-promote your businesses on social media platforms
• Cross-promote each other’s brands through email marketing
• Organize a giveaway contest together and offer each other’s products as prizes
• Write a guest post for another business and let them do the same on your blog

23. Design Your Newsletter Sign-Up Form

When you are giving a new Christmas theme to your website and social media profile, don’t forget to design your newsletter sign-up form as well. After all, that’s one of your biggest lead-generation machines. 

You can decorate your sign-up form by using Christmas-themed images and a color scheme. Additionally, you can also add an exciting gift offer or discount code with the newsletter sign-up to entice the visitors to insert their email addresses. 

24.Create festive quizzes

Creating a fun and compelling quiz can help you get engagement from your website visitors.

You can prepare questions in such a creative way that your audience would enjoy answering those questions and you can also get some valuable insights from those answers for your business. You can also use this technique to attract potential customers to sign up for your email newsletter.

Once you gain email subscribers from the quiz, you can use the data to send personalized emails to your customers based on their answers and preferences.

This quiz from Coco Village offered help to parents to find the perfect gift for their kids. On top of that, customers could also get a $10 gift card bonus.

25. Gamify the user experience

Gamification makes interacting with your website a memorable experience. Even visitors who are new to your brand or products will feel eager to engage with a game.

Adding fun popups like scratch cards or spin-the-wheel games can capture the interest of new visitors and keep them engaged. Using holiday-themed gamified popups adds a festive touch to your site and creates an enjoyable shopping experience for visitors during the Christmas season.

26. "12 Days of Christmas" Promotion

"12 Days of Christmas" is one of the usual Christmas marketing campaign ideas used during the holiday season. In this campaign, you can offer one specific discounted product on each day during the 12-day period of the campaign.

By doing this, you can use the scarcity technique as you will be making the product available only for 24 hours at a discounted price. This may encourage customers to purchase the product before the offer expires and you can increase your sales of certain products.

There are many ways to run this campaign. If you are running a loyalty program, you can also come up with some creative ideas to offer loyalty points during the campaign. For example, you can offer 2X (double) loyalty points on the purchase of certain items during the 12 days.

27. Create and Offer a Free Christmas Checklist

During the Christmas season, people are busy spending time with their families and friends. But there are also a lot of things to be done for the festival celebration and they may have some plans to accomplish. You can help your customers by creating a detailed Christmas checklist and offering them for free.

You can also add some fun and entertainment elements to your checklist by recommending must-watch Christmas movies. This activity can also help you to get some new email subscribers by offering it as a freebie download on your website.

28.Don’t forget after-Christmas sales

Your marketing campaigns can go on even after Christmas. Post-Christmas, people would want to buy stuff to enjoy themselves with their families and celebrate New Year's Eve. During this time, you still have the opportunity to bring in more sales and revenue.

You can launch a “Buy now pay later” offers to encourage customers to continue shopping without worrying about immediate payment. Also, if you have a margin, you can run some heavy discount campaigns to attract those buyers who wait for such discounts.

The online fashion retailer brand - boohoo - offers its customers an option to "Buy now, Pay Later in 30 days". Also, if customers want to make payments in installments, they can pay in three equal payments and those payments are collected every 30 days from a debit or credit card.

Customers of boohoo can use Klarna's payments service to buy products and make payments in 30 days or in 3 payments.

Stand Out with Creative Christmas Marketing Campaigns

Christmas digital marketing has a huge scope and many different ideas. But the important thing is the implementation of those ideas.

You must plan and prepare the ideas to be executed and get into action at the right time - before it’s too late. While you can get inspiration from all the ideas, to stand out from the competition, be creative and add your own elements and style to the campaigns. 

So, go ahead and make this Christmas memorable for your customers, yourself, and your business.

FAQS

What are some effective Christmas marketing ideas for small businesses?

Small businesses can benefit from holiday-themed promotions, such as exclusive discounts, bundled gift packages, festive email campaigns, and social media giveaways. Creating gift guides and hosting virtual events or live streams can also help engage customers during the season.

How can I make my Christmas promotions stand out from competitors?

To stand out, focus on personalized touches like customized recommendations, loyalty rewards for repeat customers, and interactive campaigns (such as advent calendar sales or daily deals). Storytelling in your marketing can also help create a stronger connection with your audience.

When should I start my Christmas marketing campaign?

Most businesses start their Christmas marketing early, around mid to late October, to capture early shoppers. However, campaigns can be run through December with different phases

What types of content work best for Christmas marketing?

Festive visuals, gift guides, countdowns, and holiday-themed videos tend to perform well. Blogs or social media posts with helpful shopping tips, as well as email newsletters with exclusive offers, can also boost engagement and conversions during the Christmas season.

How can Christmas marketing help grow my email list?

Offering holiday-themed lead magnets, such as gift guides, discount coupons, or free downloadable holiday planners, can encourage new sign-ups. Exclusive promotions or giveaways for subscribers only can further incentivize visitors to join your email list.