If you’re marketing an ecommerce business, the end-of-year holiday season may include your most significant, targeted campaigns of the year. And that’s not likely to change as consumers shift more of their holiday shopping online, giving ecommerce an increasingly big piece of the holiday sales pie.
Even still, holiday marketing efforts extend beyond the end of the year. There are niche events, holidays, celebrations, or observances that may resonate with current or potential consumers happening every day. Read on to get a selection of key dates and tips for building your holiday marketing calendar.
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A holiday marketing calendar is a tool for planning and executing holiday marketing campaigns. Seasonal or holiday marketing involves deploying campaigns and using tactics and channels to promote a brand, product, or service around specific holidays, seasons, or events.
It is a curated list of holidays and occasions relevant to your business and your customers, mapped out in an annual marketing calendar. This tool can be used to plan each campaign’s promotions, content, channels, and duration.
Beyond marketing during the end-of-year holiday season and other major annual spending events such as back to school, there are many other smaller holidays, events, and celebrations throughout the year. Star Wars Day, Clean Out Your Inbox Week, and National Pet Day are just a few examples of events that may provide valuable micro-marketing opportunities.
Consider your buyer personas and build a holiday marketing calendar around events that are meaningful to your customers and relevant to your business. This can help you create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns that can build brand awareness, increase sales, and strengthen customer relationships.
As your target audiences, marketing goals, and offerings differ, so will the holidays you choose to include on your marketing calendar. There are likely many holidays, events, and celebrations that could be an excellent fit for your brand or business, but here are some of the most notable dates to inspire you:
With a new calendar year and a busy holiday season wrapped up, January offers us a collective “restart” button. It’s also a great time to reconnect with customers who discovered your business or brand during the holiday shopping season.
February brings two big single-day events—the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day—but it’s also a time to celebrate Black History Month.
As the spirit of spring arrives, harness budding feelings of renewal to refresh your seasonal marketing campaigns.
With the season kicking into high gear, National Decorating Month may appeal to those in spring-cleaning mode, but April is also a month for celebrating mother Earth and holidays like Easter and Passover.
May is a month with a varied holiday calendar, representing a variety of target audiences. Mother’s Day in the US and Canada remains one of the biggest spending events of the year, but May is also a time to celebrate Star Wars fans, nurses, and firefighters.
June is a month to celebrate fathers, Juneteenth, Pride, and the official kickoff to summer.
July is a hot time for summer sales, vacation spending, and impulse purchases.
August always marks a notable shift as summer begins to fade and back-to-school season ramps up. Back-to-school spending has been growing annually for decades, from $8.4 billion in 2007 to more than $41 billion in 2023.
There are plenty of fun holidays and events to leverage in September, like National Video Games Day or National Indoor Plant Week, but this is also a time when marketers roll up their sleeves for the big fall holiday season—which accounts for over a quarter of annual revenue for many businesses.
Come October, fall has arrived, ushering in pumpkin spice latte season and sweater weather. The month ends with Halloween, marking the kickoff to the end-of-year marketing season.
November brings a reason to celebrate your favorite vegan on World Vegan Day or your favorite single on Singles’ Day—a global shopping event. It’s also time for the US shopping trifecta, including Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, that routinely produces record spending levels.
The end of the year has arrived packed with time-honored holidays alongside newer marketing opportunities, such as National App Day and Free Shipping Day.
It takes time to build a strategic list of holidays and events along with the campaigns to support them.
Launching holiday campaigns too close to the holiday itself can cause undue stress and mean you miss out on traffic from early shoppers. According to the recent Shopify-Gallup Holiday Shopping Pulse survey, 41% of respondents said they plan to start holiday shopping in October or earlier. Start your holiday marketing planning as early as possible and ideally plan campaigns by the quarter preceding each holiday.
Note that some holidays may not fall on a consistent date. Ramadan, for instance, is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar and culminates in Eid al-Fitr, but it spans different dates every year according to the Gregorian calendar.
The end-of-year holiday season remains the biggest push for holiday marketing efforts, but consumer behavior during this season is changing.
Not only are consumers starting to shop earlier, but getting a deal is more important than ever. In a survey for Shopify, 72% of consumers said they’re more likely to shop during BFCM this year to get more for their money. They are expecting brands to deliver the deals, with 71% saying it’s important for a brand to communicate with them about their offers ahead of BFCM.
Support the development of your holiday marketing calendar with relevant research and a thorough understanding of your buyer personas to craft timely campaigns and messages that will resonate.
Many holidays have global appeal, while others are more regional. Research local markets before launching a holiday marketing campaign in multiple countries or regions.
Mother’s Day, for example, falls on different dates in different countries. Christmas is a winter holiday in the Northern Hemisphere and a summer holiday in the Southern Hemisphere.
If you have a global business, adjust your messaging, translate your copy, use appropriate images, and adjust your offers to suit different markets.
Shipping and returns have become a high priority for consumers and a defining part of the customer experience—most say they will stop ordering from a business after a late delivery. Particularly for busy shopping holidays or seasons, marketing campaigns need the support of efficient supply chain management, reliable shipping, and high-quality customer support.
As with all marketing efforts, measure and analyze all relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) during your holiday campaigns. Effective KPIs are measurable, timely, actionable, and related to profitability. For a Valentine’s Day social media campaign, for example, you might look at how many website visits your ad or post drove. With performance data in hand, you can pivot and adjust your holiday marketing strategy as needed.
To create a marketing calendar, include important dates like holidays, product launches, and industry events that are relevant to your business. Build long-term campaigns and short-term strategic initiatives around those key dates yourself or use specialized marketing calendar tools.
Businesses spend the most advertising dollars during the end-of-year holiday season, which includes major holidays such as Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.
Start holiday marketing efforts as early as possible, because consumers have been starting end-of-year holiday shopping earlier in recent years, with 41% saying they’ll start shopping in October or earlier. Other holidays may require shorter production timeframes and less lead-up marketing. Valentine’s Day, for example, tends to see shopping much closer to the actual holiday itself.
