Christmas is all about performance for brands. The average French Christmas budget was €497, including gifts, meals and entertainment. For retailers, this period is an opportunity to capture attention and boost sales.
From the end of November onwards, Christmas marketing campaigns have been multiplying to appeal to an audience in search of gift ideas and attractive offers. Beyond visibility, the real challenge lies in conversion: how do you encourage people to buy in an environment saturated with advertising messages and promotional offers? How do you engage your audience?
In this context, gamification is a differentiating lever. Using Christmas competitions to boost engagement and steer purchasing paths is a strategy adopted by brands in their Christmas marketing campaigns.
Preferred formats, effective mechanisms, best practice… We give you advice on how to make your campaigns fun and effective.
Christmas: a commercial highlight for engaging and converting your audience
As the festive season approaches, companies’ marketing efforts intensify. In the space of a few weeks, consumers’ attention turns massively to finding gifts, planning meals and organising celebrations. It’s a busy time of year, with an ever-increasing number of advertising campaigns, making differentiation essential.
- One of the first challenges for retailers is to stand out from the constant stream of promotional messages. They have to come up with communications that are both relevant and rooted in the world of Christmas, drawing on the emotion, friendliness and generosity that are characteristic of the season. To capture attention, the right tone and careful staging of the offer become key elements.
- But catching the eye is not enough. Holiday shopping often takes place over several weeks. Consumers compare, consult friends and family, and take their time to think things through. Maintaining commitment over time is therefore crucial. This requires a regular presence and high added-value interactions, enabling the brand to stay top of mind right up to the decisive moment of purchase.
- Turning interest into action is the third major challenge of a Christmas marketing campaign. To convert people, it’s essential to offer attractive products and services, but also to reassure them and promote the act of buying. Immersive advertising formats, incentive mechanisms (such as vouchers) or highlighting strong values (local manufacturing, ethical commitment, etc.) can make all the difference.
- Finally, the Christmas period is a fantastic opportunity to lay the foundations for a lasting customer relationship. A smooth customer experience, on-time delivery and a responsive after-sales service are all ways of building customer loyalty. At the same time, data collection (opt-in, preferences, purchase history) can be used to feed an effective retargeting strategy for the year ahead.
Gamification: an effective lever for a successful Christmas marketing campaign
To stand out from the crowd over the festive period, the success of a Christmas marketing campaign depends on the ability to create an interactive and engaging experience. This is where gamification marketing comes into its own. By integrating gamification into their strategy, brands can boost their visibility, stimulate engagement and facilitate conversion. The key, however, is to choose the right format for the objectives being pursued.
Here are three ideas for Christmas competitions that are particularly effective at this strategic time of year, depending on your objectives.
1. The winning moment to capture attention and convert
A must-have marketing game, the Jackpot, Pinata, Scratch cards) is ideal for highlighting prizes with high incentive power: vouchers, exclusive discounts, top products, etc. A 100% winning mechanism enables you to widen the audience reached, while increasing the chances of conversion in the short term.
2. The digital Advent calendar to stimulate your community in December
A cornerstone of end-of-year campaigns, the digital Advent Calendar has become the iconic Christmas format. It helps to create a routine, by setting up an eagerly-awaited rendezvous with the audience. This recurrence encourages engagement throughout December.
Each square is an opportunity to discover a facet of the brand universe, a product, an offer or exclusive content. With a scripted approach and meticulous design, the calendar helps to immerse participants in a coherent and memorable experience.
3. Quizzes to engage your audience and promote your products
More interactive, the Quiz captures attention by stimulating curiosity and the pleasure of testing knowledge. It’s a format for conveying key messages, promoting products or raising customer awareness of brand commitments.
Used as part of a Christmas marketing campaign, the interactive quiz becomes a tool at the service of the brand. It provides an opportunity to guide participants towards certain product ranges or an offer, encouraging better recall.
The checklist for a successful Christmas marketing campaign
A Christmas marketing campaign relies on creativity and rigorous execution. To maximise the impact of Christmas competitions and achieve your objectives – visibility, engagement, conversion, loyalty – a few practices are essential.
1. Precisely target the expectations of your community
Before choosing a mechanic, you need to identify your target audience’s interests, behaviour and preferred channels. This enables you to propose a suitable game format, distributed wherever the audience is active (social networks, website, points of sale, newsletters, etc.).
2. Delivering a seamless, integrated experience
The game must be integrated into the user experience: integrated into an Instagram story, transformed into an interactive advert on an application, accessible via a QR code in a shop or an interactive kiosk. Each point of contact must reinforce frictionless engagement.
3. Using games as a means of collecting data
Behind the festive entertainment, the competition is an opportunity to enrich your CRM database. A form combined with a clear incentive makes it possible to collect data for campaigns. All in compliance with expectations in terms of transparency and consent.
4. Monitor key indicators and adjust in real time
Participation rates, conversion rates, shares, qualified leads… Tracking your KPIs allows you to quickly identify your strengths and areas for improvement. A well-managed Christmas marketing campaign is a living campaign, which evolves according to the feedback and performance observed right up to D-day.
Gamification gives your brand leverage to create an interactive, memorable and effective experience. Christmas competitions respond to the challenges of the season while reinforcing the closeness with your audience. Find out more about our interactive competition formats and energise your Christmas campaign!
