7  Delightful Examples of Last Minute Christmas Marketing Strategies

Has the holiday season come around before you know it?

Just after the Black Friday fever, companies from across the world work hard to come up with effective marketing plans and strategies for Christmas. This is a peak period when every single brand must absolutely ramp up it's marketing efforts to remain competitive.

That's why you can never be too early to drawing up ideas and marketing tips for Christmas. But it's also not too late to make an impact. Well...Ok sure Christmas is right around the corner but you still have some time before that magic day, right?

Our main advice is: Last minute Christmas campaign or not, think about mobile experience. 

We know that mobile devices pushes more than 65% of e-commerce traffic. Marketers - maybe like you? -  absolutely need to think about it when it comes to crafting holiday marketing campaigns. 

To help you out, we pulled together 7 Last Minute Holiday Marketing Campaigns Strategy with a focus on mobile best practices. 

1/ Engage your community on Social Media Channels  with Stories

Obviously, you've already though about how you'll wish a "Merry Christmas" to your followers and fans, right? It's no secret that mobile is now the first device used to spend time on social media channels. 

Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and others - like Linkedin for BtoB - give you the opportunity to tell your brand story through... well, storie. Take advantage of this immersive and mobile-first friendly format to get the job done. 

You may not have already found templates or marketing tools to create delightful and immersive stories for mobile without breaking the bank or spending a week to get something which looks professional enough. 

That's why we've prepared this free and handy posts with free examples of Instagram Stories with some pretty cool animated videos.

2/ Collect leads with a mobile-first contest or promotion

Is there any better time to get people involved in an entertaining experience ?

At the end of the year, when everyone is already thinking about holidays, moments spent with their loved ones and above all Christmas presents, your prospects are actively looking for the best deals and totally focused on how they will please their family with awesome gifts. Offering them the opportunity to win a prize is a great way to get their attention. 

So this is the perfect time to set up a promotion or giveaway campaign on mobile, in order to collect leads data. Why not offer a memorable mobile-first experience - telling your brand story - to both increase your brand recognition and generate new leads. Promotions are a really smart way to reach new prospects and increase your marketing qualified leads database. 

Attractive prizes, storytelling about your brand and personalized content should be your best friends.

Bonus ? Use a chatbot to collect data.  

Indeed, seamless and friendly user experiences provided by chatbots ensure that your leads will think of you the next time they’ll need similar product or services. 

At Fastory, we found out that the conversational and smart bot - "Operator" - drastically increases the conversion rate on forms, generating lead generation campaigns that convert up to 2x more.

3/ Leverage existing contact sources

Of course, branded games and promotions are one way for brands to achieve their primary goal, which is to drive their leads down to their sales funnel. But surely, there is a lot more to say about your existing lead sources.

You are already really really late and looking for an other last minute Christmas strategy? Bam, you've got it. You may have people in your database who :

• have downloaded marketing ressources on your website
• have talked with you sales or support teams
• have already bought your product in shops
• are interested in receiving your offers via emails
• bounced on your website, etc. 

Once the data is collected, you have to think about how to leverage it with business goals in mind. Try to make a list of these marketing/sales leads sources and match them with particular marketing actions such as retargeting or emailing.

For example, you can automate the import of e-mail addresses collected into a Mailchimp list - make sure you have the consent of these leads to contact them -  and send them an email just after a promotion campaign to give us more information about the prize they played for and, last but not least, a discount to purchase it.

You can also choose to add contacts to a CRM database like Salesforce with automation tools like Hubspot workflows, Zapier or IFTTT and decide to trigger actions later. This will be a huge time saver for you as a marketer. 

4/ Craft an event based and mobile-friendly microsite

Microsites are a great way to highlight a specific marketing campaign, for an event or a particular target. When you’re planning a quick promotional campaign and you want to emphasize your campaign message, a microsite can offer:

• A seamless user experience, focused on your specific marketing message
• Lower risk of visitor distraction from the desired goal, since it completely stands alone. 
• Easier campaign tracking and analysis, since user journey is also completely different from other marketing campaigns.  

Here's an example of a holiday-themed microsite Google created for Christmas. They developed a short-term campaign to promote their products such as Gmail, Google Play Store, Youtube, and Google Translate through attractive branded mini-games. This website is also available and well-designed for mobile.

Ok... you may not be able to afford such a tailor-made microsite because you'll need to pay some developers. Ok... it's possible that you don't have enough time left to do so...

But you can craft a simpler, mobile-first and immersive microsite with Fastory - quickly enough to get it done before Christmas! 

5/ Customize your design and packaging

Red, green, white... we're not talking about the italian flag, but rather the swell of Christmas product packaging you'll see in December. Colours are a good start, but we can do something far more original for sure.

To help you out with you product packaging, you can take a look at these 20 ideas of  product packaging for Christmas. The problem is, what can you do if you've already missed the boat ? 

Well, you can start with a fancy design on your (e-commerce) website. For example, add Christmas themed imagery on your designs like this ...

...or an animated snow effect on your home page. This effect was created using HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript. You can learn how to implement an animated snow effect on HubSpot's Design blog. 

6/ Offer turnkey gift bundles and gift wrapping

You're probably not the only one who has a thousand things to do before Christmas. Gift wrapping and product bundles are a good way to make your prospects' Christmas shopping easier. 

This is even more important if your prospects are visiting your website on mobile or using your app. You'll need to make the shopping experience the most seamless possible - from gift ideas category to checkout - in order to increase your conversion rate. 

Products bundled together and wrapping option often increase the perceived value of your offer, this effect is also emphasized when bundled items are discounted!

Bonus? This improves your average cart spend as well as your conversion rate.

7/ Set up time limited offers

Offers available for a limited time only are a great way to draw people in, create a sense of urgency, and get them to convert.

In this period of the year when people have to buy presents for their family, friends, partner, colleagues, pets and whoever they will meet during the holidays, saving money is a clear benefit for your prospects. 

Offering your customers a reduction in price, free shipping, or some other deal makes them feel like they’re getting the most value for their money. 

But careful! With so many postage deadlines in this part of the year, make it clear the cutoff dates for delivery in certain regions to avoid customers complaints. 

Take Aways

Now over to you! With these 7 Christmas marketing ideas that you can implement quickly, you're in a good place to boost your sales before Christmas. Don't forget: even if you're behind, there are plenty last minute ideas you can use to take advantage of the holiday season. Think about mobile and user-experience as your main focus and for sure, you'll rock!