15 Christmas marketing ideas to boost holiday eCommerce sales

With the holiday weekend (Black Friday and Cyber Monday) over, it’s time to concentrate on the next big retail opportunity – CHRISTMAS. Carve a grand path for your fabulous Christmas offers, discounts, and sales. Here is a week-by-week Christmas sale holiday calendar with 15 christmas sales tips to make sure you don’t lose your adrenaline after BFCM sales and keep going the remaining year. Here are some Christmas marketing ideas for you!

WEEK 1 (1st to 4th Dec): Replace your BFCM sales decoration with Christmas

#1: Turn off BFCM-specific campaigns

Since BFCM is done and dusted now, it’s time to make sure all such campaigns aren’t showing outdated information and offers. So, anything you have related to the BFCM campaign, switch it off.

#2: Dress your website for amazing Christmas sale experiences

A little holiday cheer is what your stores need. You’ll attract more visitors with visuals like winter fairytales, snow, reindeers, Christmas lights, and trees. So, commence your Christmas marketing strategy with a Santa-themed homepage, landing pages, and blog posts. And if you want to optimize your eCommerce stores for the Christmas sale season, checkout our 85 steps to achieve peak holiday sales this year.

WEEK 2 (5th to 11th Dec): Tis’ the time for discounts and Christmas sale offers

#3: Create irresistible Christmas deals

Decide on the products you’re going to sell and the discounts you’ll be offering this Christmas. It is normal for customers to expect a Christmas sale, which is why you must make it worth their time to shop on your online store. You can even try 12 Days of Christmas marketing ideas where you can come up with new deals every day. Some deals you can include are:

• Buy one get one free or buy two get one free offers
• Run cross-selling campaigns to boost Christmas marketing results
• Reward customers on every purchase with extra points that can be converted to currency
• Offer subscription discounts or gift cards

#4: Display your Christmas season sales offers on homepage & all prominent product pages

This is where your copywriting skills would come in handy. All you need is clear, catchy and quirky headlines to describe your offers as banners on the homepage and fuel your Christmas season sales. And, designing these offers in Christmas themes would be like cherry on the cake. Additionally, you can even introduce real-time Christmas sales notifications, pop-ups, and push notifications.

#5: Create Christmas PPC ad campaign

You can always gain amazing traction from your Christmas shopping ads. Therefore, add PPC and ad campaigns to your Christmas preparation checklist. Choose the right keywords, how you want to place your ad, the pay-per-click, and let your online ads do their magic in attracting new customers and propelling online Christmas sales numbers. A few Christmas sales tips to elevate the functionality of your Google Ad campaigns:

• Highlight your best offers and products
• Add as many Christmas sale keywords as you can to your ads
• Create a sense of urgency like 15 hours to free shipping, etc.

WEEK 3 (12th to 18th Dec) : Emails. Newsletters. Social Posts. Let out your inner content creativity

#6: Prepare your Christmas email campaign workflow

A very integral part of your Christmas marketing strategy is email marketing. Make it a part of your Christmas preparation checklist. Divide your Christmas sale email campaign into pre-Christmas, Christmas (one-day before & after) and post-Christmas. You can use the same email list from your BFCM and Thanksgiving sale. And don’t forget to include your newly acquired customers.

#7: Send pre-Christmas emails

From offers to discounts, free shipping and coupon codes to rewards, newsletters, and cashbacks- keep flooding your customer’s mailbox with your Christmas season sales emails. However, don’t spam them. The idea is to ensure your brand is in your customer’s mind. And don’t stop yourself from being as creative as you can be.

#8: Track Analytics and keep an eye on your shipping calendar

Since you’ve started running ads for your upcoming Christmas and year-end sales, you need to track the results and analyze your performances. In case you want to tweak a few keywords or run ads on a few trendy keywords, then this is time to execute all your Christmas sales tips. Logistics will also be crazy right now, thanks to the recently concluded BFCM sale. So, keep a track of all your ongoing orders and resolve any queries that arise due to wrong deliveries.

#9: Test your checkout flow

The last thing you want is for your shoppers to not complete a purchase at the very end. It is why you need to remove friction wherever you can. For example, you can check the shipping policy, test out payment options, check page optimization speed, see if your images are loading fast or not, review if all your offers are rightly applicable or not, and so on.

Simultaneously, check your site’s mobile responsiveness and its traffic capacity. To analyze your site’s mobile loading speed, you can use Google’s mobile-friendly test. To prevent website downtime during Christmas sales, checkout our resource.

WEEK 4 (19th to 25th Dec) : Your Super Christmas is here. It’s the Jingle All the Way Season

#10: Dress your social profiles for a ‘Happy Christmas’

Your Christmas marketing strategy is incomplete without social media. Explore all your channels as one of the Christmas marketing ideas for 2023, create a strategy for every channel, and promote your Christmas sale campaigns and sales directly to your customers. Track KPIs like likes, comments, tweets, share, mentions, user-generated content, etc. Remember, Christmas has something for every brand, all you have to do is explore the right social media marketing strategies. To give your profiles a Christmas-y feel, initiate the following steps :

• Change your cover and display image to match the Christmas spirit
• Add timers to your social posts for free shipping deadline reminders, sale about to go live, or sale about to end, etc.
• Create a Christmas sale contest like giveaways, discounts, freebies, etc., with a unique brand-relevant hashtag for your brand (see below)
• Post countdowns, reels, or stories to engage with your customers (see below)

#11: Put together a Happy Christmas email

The season of Santa Claus, reindeers and Christmas has finally arrived. After sending pre-Christmas emails, it’s usual for your customers to expect a great Christmas exclusive offer. With just a few days left, email your customers about your amazing Christmas marketing offers, discounts, exclusive deals, free shipping, coupons, and more. You can even personalize it by sending your customers details on the ongoing discounts and offers available of the products they’ve most browsed.

WEEK 5 (26th Dec to 1st Jan 2023) : Yaaayyy!! You Made it to the Finish Line!

#12: Thank your customers for an amazing Christmas sale season

Your customers were kind enough to shop with you during such a competitive and neck-breaking season, which is why you need to make them feel prized now that you’re done with Christmas marketing. A simple thank you note stating how they made it a successful Christmas sale season for you will go a long way in strengthening your relationship with them.

#13: Get Christmas sale season statistics

It’s time to put your team to work to analyze how this sale season has been for the brand. This will help you set a benchmark for your next sale season, understand your customers better, and frame Christmas marketing ideas for the next sale season accordingly. Identify the following KPIs:

#14: Send post-Christmas emails and newsletters

Although Christmas sale is over, it doesn’t mean your email campaign is. After Christmas, everyone is relaxing and your customers’ email inbox is not crowded either. So, take advantage of this opportunity and send post-Christmas emails with a killer subject line. Make sure to send the last chance email to remind everyone that it’s almost over.

#15: Send New Year’s emails

Last but not the least, send off your customers at the end of the year with a happy and joyful Happy New Year email. It’s not necessary that you pair this one up with an offer or a promo code, but if you want, you can.

Congratulations, you’ve done excellent this sale season. Now, on 31st December 2023, don’t forget to turn off all your holiday-themed campaigns. It doesn’t portray your brand in the spotlight if a new year rolls out and you’re still promoting your last year’s holiday offers. So, comb through your site to make sure you’re done for the year.

Make the most of this holiday season with Ranosys

Don’t forget downloading our complete Christmas sale holiday calendar to bring in sales, revenue and new customers, post-BFCM. And if you’re looking for further assistance in optimizing your eCommerce store for the Christmas sale season, connect with our certified platform experts across Adobe Commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopify Plus, and commercetools platforms.