by 
‘Tis the season to be jolly and boost your sales.
With the winter holidays just around the corner, we can feel the spirit of magic in the air: the sparkling balls and ornaments in the store windows, the colored city lights, and the quiet before the shopping frenzy.
Christmas is a great opportunity to reunite with our dear ones, to return to that original goodness inside, and to give unconditionally.
For you, business owners, Christmas is also an opportunity to increase sales and gain new customers, while gifting your best deals and offers.
Considering this is the year’s top shopping period, you must find a way to stand out from the crowd and make your deals seen, drive traffic to your website & shop and sell our products.
So, we’ve prepared a Christmas marketing strategy to help you craft an outstanding sales campaign. Plus, we offer you a full set of ready-made and customizable marketing templates to get your promotion out there. Free of charge!
Read the article and click the button to get the templates!
Christmas marketing offerings:
Just jump to your gift!
- Christmas marketing ideas: sales promotion strategies & tactics
- How to find a creative concept for your Christmas campaign
- Style your content with a touch of Christmas flair
- Time for decorations: design guidelines
- Christmas cheer: color palettes
- Festive fonts
- Get the FREE marketing kit: beautiful and fully Christmas customizable templates.
1. A. Choose a Christmas sales promotion strategy
First things first: decide what type of marketing strategy you will use.
Here are 6 Christmas sales promotion strategies to choose from:
Christmas discounts
This sales tactic goes without saying. You don’t want to be the Scrooge of online retailers at Christmas time. Calculate your spendings and estimate an attractive discount that you can afford giving during the Christmas sales season. Offer your customers a great experience all-year-round. Give them reasons to love buying from you and to come back to you.
Free Gifts
Christmas is all about gifts giving. And your business is not exempt from offering free gifts this winter season. Celebrate Xmas by giving away free gifts when customers place an order and strengthen your bond with them. Loyalty is the result of successive positive experiences with a brand.
Gift Cards
We all have that special fussy someone. Help people make a picky dear one a happy dear one with a generous gift card. You can either create print gift cards or digital cards that can easily be sent to a person’s mailbox or inbox.
Gift Packs & Gift Ideas
Most of the time, people are browsing the internet looking for gifts inspiration. So, when the Christmas shopping time arrives, be ready to welcome your visitors with some ready-made gift packs or at least with a batch of amazing gift ideas. Help your visitors find presents for their family and friends and increase your sales.
Free Shipping
Whatever sales technique you pick for this Christmas, add Free Shipping on top of it. Offer your customers a Merry Christmas and a few savings left in their pockets. They might tell their friends about you. And come back next year.
People expect shipping to be free, but that does not always happen. Be an online retailer that offers default free shipping to all orders, Monday-Sunday, till December fades away.
Christmas Contest
Engage your customers with a Christmas contest. Offer a prize for the ugliest Christmas jumper, or for the most beautiful Christmas tree. Or you could ask people to craft some Christmas decorations and send you a photo. If you’ve got a children’s brand you could invite them to send Santa a letter (to your address) and ask for a present. Ask people to enroll in the contest by submitting a photo, or a video file to your Facebook page.
1. B. Christmas marketing tactics
Then, integrate one or several of these marketing tactics to make your campaign even more appealing to your customers.
Start a PPC campaign
If you own an online retail store, you probably know the importance of PPC ads by now. During the winter holidays season, online campaigns are mandatory. Start setting one up.
You can set up a search PPC campaign, a display campaign or you can advertise your promotion through videos. Ideally, use all three media types to make your voice heard.
The best time to start a PPC campaign is 1 month before Christmas, that is the end of November. This means you have to prepare your materials one month prior to launching your campaign.
Speaking about promotional materials, try to avoid ad fatigue by creating several search ads, images, and videos. Rotate them throughout the month of December to keep people interested in your brand and increase your chances to sell.
Create stand-alone landing pages
When running a PPC campaign, it is better to have independent landing pages that will walk the visitor through your product’s story. Create a series of landing pages for your deals and build each page as a journey through the sales funnel, til the moment of the purchase.
Send Christmas sales emails
Craft some jolly emails and send them out to your customers to let them know about your December deals and discounts. Make sure you find a catchy subject line and include festive product pictures.
Subject line inspiration:
- ‘This the season to give and receive! (suited for general online stores, clothing stores)
- Make the magic happen with 50% OFF! (suited for general online stores, clothing stores)
- Joyful presents for family & friends! (clothing stores)
- Get home for Christmas with 50% OFF! (suited for travel agencies, airplane company)
- Spread the love with these bundle gifts! (suited for general online stores, clothing stores)
Send a print/digital catalog
Entice people to buy your products with a beautifully crafted Christmas sales catalog. You can either create a print catalog or a digital version. Insert discounts vouchers or free gift codes.
Offer free gift wrapping as an option
Christmas shopping is all about the wrapping. Make it easier for your customers to deal with gifts giving by offering free gift wrapping as an option.
Hide cost details for presents
When people order a gift for someone, they’ll want to hide the cost details. Make this an option in your check-out, so that people can easily hide the price with the simple tick of a box.
Send a printed Christmas card
In a world of digital cards, surprise your customers by sending them some good ol’ printed Christmas cards to their mailbox. Include a small gift, like a discount coupon, to make the experience even more merry and bright.
Update your Social Media pages
Decorate all your Social Media pages with Christmas brand/product images. Make sure you get your profile picture and cover photo Christmas-ready.
Also, increase your Social Media posts frequency to 3-5 posts/day.
Include donations
Christmas is a time for giving. Team up with a charity and organize a fundraising campaign. Inform your customers that you’re supporting a local/global social cause and that you will donate a percentage of all holiday season sales to this organization.
2. Wrap up your sales promotion in a creative concept.
Enough about marketing strategies, it’s time to wrap up your Christmas sale campaign into a nice creative concept. Find a name, a headline, a visual image, and a story.
The most important thing you need to take into account is originality. Since everyone runs some kind of advertising campaign during Christmas, you need to pack your offer in a brilliant way that stands out and appeals to potential buyers.
For example, Christmas reindeers may be obsolete, but if you manage to cast them in an unconventional scenario, you could make people laugh and they might buy your product.
Find a surprising creative concept that has never been done before and grab people’s attention. Schedule a brainstorming, select the most original ideas and wrap up your sales promotion.
Follow these simple steps to come up with a creative concept:
- Identify your objective.
- Define your target audience.
- Offer a benefit.
- Organize a brainstorm session and select the best idea. Build your campaign around that idea.
- Translate the creative idea into a real advertising campaign: list down the communications channels and marketing materials you want to execute and start producing them.
3. Hand-pick your words for a magical Christmas atmosphere.
Style your content with a touch of festive flair. From your campaign headline to emails subject lines, make sure you sprinkle some Christmas sparkle over each phrase. Hand-pick your words to create that magical Christmas atmosphere.
Content goes hand in hand with images. That’s why it is important to craft your campaign focusing on both graphics and text. Words can touch hearts if you string your words skillfully.
Here’s a list of the texts you’ll need for your Christmas sales promotion:
- A campaign headline – this is the main line of your campaign, It can either take the form of a call to action as in “Make the most of Christmas!” or a slogan “Because Christmas is about family.”
- Body copies for all your marketing materials: posters, brochures, catalogs, flyers etc…
- A Christmas email text.
- A blog post.
- Website calls to action. Style your buttons’ calls to actions for Christmas. For example, instead of “Order now” you could say “Gift now”.
- A body copy for gift cards and discount vouchers.
4. Time for decorations: design guidelines
Offer your customers a beautiful Christmas shopping experience. Create a jolly atmosphere with the help of design, colors, photography, and fonts.
Decide whether you want to go for a traditional Christmas design theme or for an unconventional Christmas atmosphere.
Then, choose a color palette. See some suggestions below. And pick the design elements that you want to use for decorations. Think of snowflakes, ribbons, bells, Christmas trees, and colored globes.
Replicate your design on all your online and offline outlets and marketing materials:
- Decorate your e-commerce website. Give it a festive touch. Craft a new set of Christmas visuals, like a website header, visuals for the homepage slider, and banners. See our free set of visual templates.
- Decorate your shop (if you have one) in a similar manner.
- Change your profile picture and cover photos on all your Social Media pages.
- Use the Christmas design for all your marketing materials: emails, display ads, brochures, shopping bags, and even packaging.
5. Christmas cheer: color palettes
Think of Christmas and you’ll suddenly see red and green popping up in your mind. That’s because Santa’s costume is red and the Christmas tree is green.
And then, there’s gold and silver cause there’s no Christmas without glitter and sparkle. Depending on each individual’s preference, Christmas decorations may be classy (red is the main color), unconventional (where gold, blue or other color is the main color) or…eccentric (violet, neon green etc).
Choosing a color palette is a very important step in building your Christmas campaign. And that’s because it lays as the foundation of your design and campaign atmosphere. Colors have massive power. They can create a positive or negative user experience and can even influence purchase decision!
We’ve created four color palettes suggestions for this year’s Christmas sales campaigns. See which one suits your brand and grab the codes.
- Floral Christmas
Choose this color combination if you want to go for a floral Christmas palette. Use this vivid red for your decorations and light green for the background.
This color scheme is perfect women’s brands, from makeup to clothing. It will also help you successfully promote flower shops, beauty care products, and bookstores.
- Scandinavian Christmas
If you’d like to try something different this year, go for this Scandinavian Christmas palette. The dark blue and red pair will surely get noticed.
This blue is a Scandinavian trademark (it is inspired by the frozen lakes and northern sky), so you’ll make sure you’re using a color that originates in Santa’s homeland!
This colors combination is bold, playful and jolly. A great match!
- Golden Christmas
Stand out and shine bright like a star with this golden palette. Use this colors combination if you have a premium brand/product like watches, haute couture, jewelry, and even chocolate.
Build your design using gold as the main color and you’ll have yourself an elegant classy theme. Utilize this palette to craft all your marketing materials and play with the proportions, shapes and other elements.
- Sunny Christmas
Why go with the flow and use a traditional Christmas palette, when everything is possible? Use this sunny palette to create a positive Christmas atmosphere. Although it is sunny and bright, this palette still employs the classic Christmas tree green. However, we dropped the red and instead used two derivates: orange and peach pink. Use dark violet to tone down your designs and add a touch of mistery!
6. Christmas fonts
Fonts bring extra personality to a visual. Each font has its own character and can add meaning to a word. Use a harsh font and people may feel aggressed. Use hand lettering typography and people will want to befriend you.
Christmas is a special jolly holiday time. So, choose a font (or 2-3 fonts) for your campaign that conveys happiness and joy.
Here is a selection of 6 Christmas fonts that you can grab right now to craft your campaign message.
Miraculous Christmas
This neat and cursive handwriting-like font reminds us of the printed Christmas cards we used to send and receive back in the golden days of stationery cards.
It’s friendly and festive at the same time and it can successfully be used for Christmas marketing materials.
Download the Miraculous Christmas font at 1001 fonts.
Candy Cane
This playful font is inspired by – you guessed it! – candies. It can be used to add a touch of joy and fun to a Christmas message and it is especially suited for children’s brands.
Get Candy Cane at 1001 fonts.
First Christmas
Use this snowy font for your headlines to make your message pop. The voluminous lettering reminds us of the piled snow banks that spread across the streets around Christmas. It’s perfect for Christmas and it will get noticed anywhere you’d place it.
Get this font at 1001 fonts.
Countryside
Hand lettering can help you convey a warm and jolly feeling. After all, that’s what we all what for Christmas. With a multitude of playful swirls, this font is suited for children and women’s brands.
Get it at Fontspace.
Quincho script
Here is another hand-lettering font, only this one is about elegance and style. Use this font to create a friendly atmosphere for your ad.
Get Quincho script at Fontspace.
Harrington
If you’ve got a premium brand, use this stylish font to wish your customers a Merry Christmas. It can be used in either black or white for a classy look.
Get it at Fontspace.
7. Get the FREE set of fully customizable marketing templates.
Here at Bannersnack we’ve put together a full set of beautiful Christmas ads templates to help you out with your holidays sales campaign.
Click the link below to get free access to the Christmas banner templates and start customizing them right now. Once you get access to Bannersnack’s editor, you can add your brand details, logo, change the colors and add your product pictures.
Have yourself a gainful Christmas!
Now you’re all set to launch your Christmas sale promotion. Find a sales strategy, integrate some badass marketing tactics, come up with an original creative concept, write down a touching copy and customize the free graphics templates.
Launch your promotion and create some buzz around your brand. Drive people to your website and shop and see your sales blast off!
It’s the most wonderful time of the year to increase your revenue!
