Marketing ideas for Christmas and interactive promotions
Interactive marketing is a set of practices that aim to foster interaction between users and brands or companies. It is made up of several marketing techniques such as games, surveys, and personality tests. It strives to increase user engagement and create a dialogue to gather high-quality information (contact details, tastes and preferences, interests, expectations…). The brand provides the user a unique, entertaining, and added value experience while achieving trust and brand awareness.
We can also define it as the brands’ capability to approach their clients and fans in the digital world to obtain their feedback to undertake future actions. Hence, bringing brands and users closer together to better the purchasing experience and increase turnaround.
Let’s see now how we can apply interactive marketing to the Christmas campaign using Easypromos’ applications.
Interactive Christmas marketing campaign
In this day and age, there are plenty of techniques that encourage users to interact with brands and companies. However, the most effective ones are games or quiz apps: trivia quizzes, personality tests, surveys, etc.
Creating interactive Christmas campaigns can be an easy task if you know how to do it. You just have to keep in mind a couple of issues before configuring the campaign:
- Who is the campaign aimed at. It is fundamental to define the buyer persona and adapt its elements to that audience.
- Define the objectives do you want to achieve with your interactive marketing campaign and choose the most appropriate dynamic to achieve them, e.g:
- Get to know your customers → satisfaction survey.
- Interact with customers through multiple distribution channels → puzzle.
- Boost brand awareness → memory game.
- Segment and group users → personality test.
- Diversify your brand’s contents → multimedia contest.
- Attract new clients. → spin the wheel.
- Increase customer loyalty → validate purchase receipts.
- Gather social networks followers’ contact details → entry form giveaway.
- Increase sales figures → distribute coupons.
Christmas marketing ideas: incentivize participation and reward users
Every promotion has to have an incentive, albeit not necessarily a prize or discount. A prize that is in line with your customers’ preferences is the secret to a successful Christmas interactive marketing campaign. For instance, an incentive could be to solve a puzzle and get a Happy Holidays message, the possibility of downloading a Christmas card or completing a challenging game like a word search. However, if you wish to highlight your new season product, you can organize a giveaway; if the aim is to increase sales, you can distribute coupons or discounts.
Once you’ve decided on the kind of dynamic and reward for your Interactive Christmas promotion, the next step is to disseminate it through digital channels. I.e., your brand’s website, online shop, email, SMS, Social Media, Blog, Mobile App, etc.
Once you have decided which channels to use, personalize the content and message to each channel’s format for optimal reception. Keep in mind each social network’s image format to create an optimal experience. Or create a clear and attractive email where users can participate in a single click.
What to do with the information you collect?
With Easypromos’ applications you can gather the information of registered users. Simply, go to the users or statistics section of your promotion and retrieve the information of the leads in an excel or csv format. Furthermore, you can connect your Christmas promotion with other marketing tools like Mailchimp or a CRM using the integration tools that Easypromos offers.
Christmas marketing ideas and resources
The digital world has grown so rapidly and globally that having an online presence is a must for any business or brand. Hence, digital marketing has influenced the way companies interact with their audiences on dates like Christmas. Let’s have a look at some Christmas marketing ideas and examples.
Digital Advent calendar
The idea behind a digital Advent Calendar is to recreate the excitement of a traditional countdown. In this case, the interactivity relies on users having to access every day to open a window and discover what’s inside; a message, a prize, a discount. Which translates to a high level of user engagement. Furthermore, to participate users only have to register once, thus facilitating further visits. Try this Advent Calendar demo to get a feel for the user experience and download the ready made template to make your own on not time!
Entry Form Giveaway
Capturing new leads is a commonly sought objective by most brands since nurturing their database with new contacts is essential to a company’s marketing. In periods of such high consumption as Christmas, when consumers are highly motivated to shop, entry form giveaways are ideal to interact with them. Offer a prize that appeals to your target audience and get lots of registrations!
Take a look at the example above. The The Viena Insurance Group launched an entry form giveaway as part of their Christmas campaign and shared it on their Facebook and Instagram accounts. Participating was as as easy as filling out the registration form and the lucky winner won a Philip’s smart TV.
Do you like the idea of a giveaway to celebrate Christmas? Then try our Entry Form Giveaway DEMO and download the template to create your own.
Multimedia contest
Interact with your followers and collect user generated content with a multimedia contest. Participants can upload either photos, videos or PDF documents. Consequently, a multimedia contest will help you increase brand awareness and cover the needs of the most demanding contests: multiple categories, album creation, jury stages, etc.
Branded Christmas Games
Online games are 100% interactive as they always promote user interaction. Hence, using online games is ideal for a company’s interactive marketing.
Since there are many kinds of games, it is fundamental to lay out the objectives and choose the game that better fits them. For instance, combination games are ideal to potentiate branding and brand awareness on top of generating leads and capturing your target audience.
Take a look at this promotion that the Sutton Hotel chain launched to help its audience get into the festive spirit with a Reveal & Win game that the brand shared on social media. To participate, users simply had to click on the link and try to find three matching images to win discounts, desserts, or bottles of wine. The brand set up the promotion so users played first and registered second. Thus, making registration necessary only to claim the prize if the player won, or to enter a final prize draw for a 2-night stay in one of the chain’s hotels.
Spin the wheel
Want to give away several prizes among your customers to celebrate Christmas? We suggest you use a Spin the wheel game. This will allow you to give away prizes fairly and effortlessly. What’s more, you will provide an interactive and unique experience that will make your customers feel rewarded and increase their loyalty.
Christmas General Timed Quiz
Here’s another of our Christmas marketing ideas to educate and test your customers. Challenge and engage your audience with a Christmas Timed quiz. Foster competitiveness while gathering data on the users that interact the most with your brand.
Christmas Personality Quiz
Interactive marketing is based on customers’ interests and preferences. Therefore, what better way to get to know them than a personality quiz? The customers get a recommendation based on their answers and you get valuable information to categorize users for further communications.
Christmas Coupons
Take advantage of Christmas to boost your sales and increase foot traffic to your shop. How? With the Distribute Coupon Codes app. Collect your audience information by offering coupons, promotional codes, discounts, gifts or prizes.
Learn more about the possibilities of Distribute Coupons actions to increase foot traffic and sales at your brick-and-mortar shops.
What do you think of these Christmas interactive marketing ideas? We hope this article has helped you get some inspiration and some resources for your campaign. If you have any doubt or question, you can contact us via live chat. We will be happy to help!