The holiday season is just around the corner, and for Shopify merchants, it’s a golden opportunity to connect with customers and boost ticket sales for Christmas events. Effective promotion inevitably makes your festive events successful, whether it’s an in-person event or a virtual experience.
As Mark Victor Hansen rightly stated, “Ninety percent of the success of any product or service lies in its promotion and marketing.” This principle is equally applicable to your Christmas event. Without effective promotion, you risk missing out on informing potential attendees who will genuinely value your event.
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Crafting an effective strategy for promoting Christmas day events is achievable regardless of your budget, ensuring your event gets the attention and attendance it deserves.
Top Marketing Strategies to Promote Christmas Events
To maximize your sales this holiday season, we present a curated list of the top six tips for promoting Christmas events explicitly tailored for Shopify merchants. These tips delve into different promotional strategies, providing actionable insights that you can adopt to promote your event.
- Create a Festive Landing Page
Launching a festive landing page on your Shopify store and consolidating all details about your Christmas event to help potential attendees gather information about your event, special discounts, referral programs, exclusive deals, and more.
You can create a visually appealing representation of your Christmas event through this landing page using festive colours, seasonal imagery, and holiday-themed graphics. While designing the page, align brand identity, reinforcing the connection between your brand and the festive celebrations.
SEO optimization can help organically attract attendees to this landing page, making it easy to discover your Christmas events when people search online. A well-researched festive landing page will serve as a virtual gateway to your event.
Here are five tips to consider while creating your landing page:
- Crafting a festive visual experience.
- Providing comprehensive Christmas event details.
- Strategically placing clear call-to-actions (CTAs).
- Optimizing the page for mobile users.
- Amplifying the reach of this page through social media.
- Use Social Media Platforms
In the world that we live in, never underestimate the power of social media platforms. Apart from posting Christmas event details on your website, sharing details about the events on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc, can instantly increase interest among your target audience.
Traditional marketing of sharing event details through publications and flyers is good, but through social media, you can immediately track the engagement and change the course of your promotional strategies accordingly. As a cherry on top, social media platforms allow your followers to share your event with other interested people, friends, and family.
Here are some tips to increase engagement for your Christmas events on social media:
- Post-event teasers on social media to stir curiosity.
- Host giveaways or contests to increase participation.
- Use polls to understand the interests of your attendees.
- Create an event countdown to build excitement.
- Introduce event hashtags to facilitate discoverability.
- Create Christmas-themed Email Marketing Campaigns
One of the easiest ways to spread the word about your Christmas events in 2023 is through email marketing campaigns. You can set up a personalized email campaign highlighting the uniqueness of attending your event.
Additionally, you can incentivize attendance with exclusive discounts and early access for your prior event attendees. Here are a few steps you can follow to strategize an impressive email marketing campaign for promoting your Christmas events:
- Build a targeted email list to tailor your communication based on attendee preferences, engagement level, prior event registration history, etc.
- Craft email content using festive visuals, creative copy, and a clear call-to-action to capture attention.
- Create an email campaign around your Christmas events. Plan a series of emails, including a teaser, detailed information, exclusive offers, and a final reminder on the event date.
- Personalize your emails by addressing the recipients by name and making event suggestions based on past interactions.
- Showcase your event highlights by clearly communicating the uniqueness of your Christmas event, whether it is a special performance, exclusive discounts, or limited-time offers.
- Create a sense of urgency and scarcity to encourage prompt action.
- Ensure that the emails are mobile-friendly and the user experience is smooth to minimize the fallout of potential attendees.
- Leverage Shopify apps to help you streamline your email process. Evey Events & Tickets is a Shopify app that can help you with event planning, ticketing, customized emails, and SMS for your Christmas events.
- Turn Your Event into a Community Celebration
An effective strategy to gain support for your event is to make your event a community-centric experience. Contact local vendors, artists, performers, or well-known individuals interested in attending or supporting your Christmas event.
Your proactive collaboration with members of local communities will help the attendees resonate with your event. When local vendors or performers become interested in participating in your event, naturally, they will become advocates for your Christmas event, increasing organic word-of-mouth promotion and boosting ticket sales.
A participatory approach during event planning will help build lasting connections and embody the spirit of the Christmas celebration. Adding community-specific local customs and traditions will enhance the appeal of your Christmas event. Attendees appreciate events that recognize their cultural identity, making the event an inclusive and meaningful experience.
- Collaborate with Influencers
- Collaborate with Influencers
Influencer marketing is a clever strategy during Christmas promotional activities. Partnering with influencers who have sway over your target audience can significantly impact your reach and engagement.
While finalizing influencers to collaborate, their personality, credibility, and expertise must resonate with your event to ensure an organic connection between your event and potential attendees.
Let’s delve into the top 3 advantages of influencer marketing for promoting your Christmas events.
- Social Media Dominance: Influencers have a loyal follower group on various platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, which can boost the overall visibility of your event.
- Trust and Credibility: Event endorsements from a respected influencer can enhance the credibility of your event and increase the likelihood of follower attendance.
- Engaging Content: Communicating the uniqueness of your event is easier through influencers as they are highly skilled content creators specialized in creating exciting and compelling content.
- Implement a Referral Program
- Implement a Referral Program
A well-structured referral program will encourage attendees to bring friends and family to your event. You can incentivize your referral program by providing discounts and exclusive access.
Introducing tiered rewards to motivate attendees to reach higher referral milestones will significantly impact ticket sales for your Christmas events. It is important to implement a tracking system to monitor the progress and success of this referral program.
Ensure that the guidelines and rules of participation are transparent. Setting up a timeframe for these referral programs will encourage a sense of urgency among attendees. In short, by carefully implementing a referral program, you can convert your attendees into enthusiastic promoters of your Christmas events.
For additional information, you can also check out our article, 13 Ways to Promote Your Holiday Events Effectively on Your Shopify Platform.
Why Promoting Christmas Events Matters?
Since we have explored tips on promoting your Christmas event, let’s understand why paying attention to an excellent promotional strategy matters. When organizing a Christmas event intending maximum participation, the art of promotion plays a pivotal role in ensuring its success.
Let’s delve into why promoting Christmas events in 2023 matters and how it can transform your festive event.
- Build Anticipation: Carefully crafted teasers and sneak peeks generate excitement and anticipation amongst potential attendees.
- Attract a Larger Audience: A well-promoted Christmas event maximizes attendance. When you carefully strategize a promotional activity, you are not only informing the target audience about the event but also encouraging them to participate.
- Lasting Impression: Promoting helps shape a narrative around your event, mainly when communicating about special appearances, unique features, and overall experiences. This will create a memorable impression that will stay in the minds of your potential attendees.
- Brand Visibility: Christmas is a prime opportunity to boost your brand visibility. Through promotions, you can reach a newer audience and establish your brand identity, increasing visibility for the event itself.
- Optimize Resource Allocation: Strategic promotion and tracking let you gather insights on audience preferences and behaviours. This allows you to allocate resources where they yield the most impact.
Christmas Event Promotion Timelines for Shopify Merchants
Planning event promotions in advance ensure the success of events on Christmas day. Early preparation allows Shopify merchants to create a comprehensive promotional roadmap.
The approach given below allows for the gradual implementation of different promotional activities, maximizing reach and engagement. Additionally, planning well in advance will enable organizers to face unforeseen challenges and tweak their strategy based on data-driven findings.
| 3-4 Months Before | 6-8 Weeks Before |
| Email marketing: finalizing the email list and early bird discounts. | Extensive influencer marketing |
| Create Facebook and LinkedIn events. | Optimize landing page with SEO techniques. |
| Post in relevant social media groups. | Set up online ads. |
| Contact influencers, sponsors, and local performers. | Run social media contests. |
| Launch a Christmas-themed landing page. | End early bird promotions. |
| Promote event-specific branding. | |
| 3-5 Weeks Before | 1-2 Weeks Before |
| Email marketing drip campaigns | Create a social media hashtag. |
| Run social media ads. | Post BTS content using the created hashtags. |
| Urge sponsors and performers to post about the event. | Design email campaigns that will create a sense of urgency. |
| Create a social media filter. | |
| Day of the Event | Day After the Event |
| Be active on social media. | Publish a thank you post for attendees and supporters. |
| Engage with attendees online. | Send a survey to customers and employees to understand your strengths and improvements. |
| Run your hashtag actively. | Post highlights from your events in the form of videos and photos. |
| Take videos and photos of the event and post them online. |
Conclusion
As we conclude, it is clear that the key to a successful Christmas event lies in thoughtful planning and strategic promotional activities. With the help of these tips, you can boost ticket sales by crafting a powerful narrative around your Christmas event to showcase its uniqueness. Here’s to a season of successful promotions, sold-out tickets, satisfied attendees, and the warmth of the celebration.
How do we measure the success of Christmas event promotion efforts?
For Shopify merchants, apps like Evey Events and Tickets can make ticket sales, check-ins, and tracking easy.
What are some Christmas event ideas for organizers?
You can organize in-person and online events based on these Christmas event ideas, ranging from cozy Christmas movie marathons, outdoor holiday markets, craft fairs, Christmas sweater parties, holiday recipe competitions, and more.
Is content important in event promotion?
Compelling and well-crafted content is vital for the success of event promotion. Good content will convey a straightforward narrative about your brand, value addition to the event, engage the audience, and encourage attendance.
What are different ways to promote events in Christmas apart from traditional methods?
Other than traditional methods of promotion, creative Christmas event promotion ideas include influencer collaborations, online campaigns, local business partnerships, and taking advantage of user-generated content.
What role does attendee engagement have in event promotion?
Engaged and happy attendees are more likely to share their experiences, spread positive word-of-mouth promotions, and help in the success of your future promotions.
