The Christmas season is fast approaching, which means it’s time to start incorporating Santa Clause, sleigh bells, and Rudolph into your marketing plan. One of the best ways to do that is to launch a contest that embraces the holiday spirit.
More important than embracing the holiday spirit, though, a Christmas contest will help you to engage your audience and get more leads just in time for the new year. Whether you’re new to running viral contests or you’re well-versed in this marketing strategy, now is the perfect time to start thinking about a Christmas campaign.
You can start right now by browsing through these four Christmas-themed contest ideas to try and implement right before the 2021 holiday season kicks off.
Why You Need to Try a Contest This Holiday Season
Before we get into the fun Christmas-y ideas that will have you wanting to sip hot cocoa as you decorate your tree, let’s talk about what a holiday contest can do for you.
Creating an online giveaway (learn how to do so here in just 10 minutes) is an amazing way to attract attention to your brand. The average consumer loves free stuff, and most people are eager to enter a contest just for the small chance of winning a free gift, earning points to a rewards program, or receiving a generous coupon code.
In other words, running a contest with a free giveaway of some sort is an excellent way to attract and engage your audience. In turn, it will allow you to promote your brand, gain a bigger following, and potentially generate more business in the future. What better way to achieve these things than to promote the giving spirit of the holiday season?
4 Ideas for Launching a Christmas Contest
Christmas is the perfect time to let your creativity run free and apply it to a marketing campaign… let’s say, a contest! So without further ado, here are four contest ideas to try for Christmas 2021:
1. Christmas Basket Giveaway
Who doesn’t love a good gift basket? Basically, nobody, which is why our first suggestion for launching a Christmas contest is to fill baskets with your store’s best-selling products for a few lucky winners.
The best way to make a Christmas basket contest a success is to set up a Leaderboard Giveaway where the contestants earn points and make their way up the leaderboard as they refer friends, make purchases, or engage with your brand on social media.
Then, a few weeks before Christmas, you pull three winners out of your pool of contestants - and the contestants who’ve most engaged with your brand and drawn in the most friends have the highest chance of winning a basket. Easy right?
2. Create an Advent Calendar Contest
Another great idea for your upcoming Christmas contest is to utilize the iconic Advent Calendar, which is the perfect representation of the Christmas holiday.
The traditional Advent Calendar delivers a chocolate treat on each day, beginning on December 1st to the 24th, but you can spice things up by giving out prizes that relate to your brand, or you can stick with simple coupon codes. The prizes can go up in value each day, with the grand prize winner being announced on the last day of the Advent Calendar.
While coming up with 24+ prizes can be a lot of work, this is a great way to keep your audience engaged throughout the entire month of December. If you want to keep things simple, set up a Coupon Giveaway with the coupon values increasing with each day of the calendar.
3. Run a “12 Days of Christmas” Giveaway
If you’re not up for doing a 24-day contest with the Advent Calendar idea, consider running a “12 Days of Christmas” giveaway instead.
This is an excellent way to generate more leads for a Shopify store, and similar to the Advent Calendar contest, you can keep things simple with a Coupon Giveaway for each of the twelve days.
4. Set Up a Christmas Raffle Through Email Opt-Ins
One of the easiest ways to get more leads and increase revenue during the holidays is to entice potential customers with a Christmas raffle. The simplest way to do this is to have contestants enter into the raffle through an email opt-in “bribe”.
In other words, you bribe potential customers to join your email list for the chance to win raffle prizes or discounts. Once someone has subscribed to your email mailing list, they’ll be automatically entered into the raffle, and you can send out prizes on Christmas day.
If you decide to run this type of Christmas contest, just make sure that you’re using an enticing offer. This is all about persuading your audience to join your email list, so be persuasive. You can do that by giving out discount codes to everyone who enters into the raffle.
This doesn’t mean you have to give a 50%+ discount to everyone who enters. Most of the prizes can be a 10% discount (which is still a great excuse for people to shop at your store) with one or two lucky contestants winning a grand prize of 50% off.
Start Planning Your Christmas Contest Today!
Running a Christmas contest is not just a great way to have fun with your marketing plan during the holidays. It’s also a sure-fire way to improve social media engagement, get more leads, and boost brand awareness, which are all things that will start your 2022 off on the right foot.
For more info on how to launch a contest just in time for the holidays, create your free KickoffLabs account today. No matter what you want your Christmas contest to look like, we provide you with all the tips and tools you’ll need to successfully launch and manage the campaign.