US shoppers spent a record $994.1 billion during the 2024 holiday season, the National Retail Federation reports.
To claim a piece of that pie in 2025—and beyond—a proactive seasonal marketing calendar can map every shopping event, so you can show up with the right offer at the right time.
From National Pet Day to Singles’ Day, high-intent shopping happens year-round. Use the guide below to grab key 2025 days and tips for turning them into campaigns that sell.
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 on 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 your own marketing calendar template:
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 retail 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 $18 billion in 2007 to more than $39 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 around 17% 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.
Adobe’s full‐season recap shows that US consumers spent $241.4 billion online between November 1 and December 31, 2024.
Some 54.5% of that revenue came from smartphones, up from 51.1% the year before. On Christmas Day alone, mobile’s share spiked to 65%. For your upcoming holiday calendar, be sure you:
Nearly 45% of 2024 holiday shoppers told NRF they planned to begin buying gifts before November. Likewise, Shopify-Gallup polling found 4 in 10 consumers lock in budgets and begin shopping in September.
To capture these early birds:
January through March is a good time to audit who is inside your CRM before the year’s heavy-traffic sprints begin. Start by pruning your contact list of people who haven’t opened your emails in 180 days. Chances are, they don’t want to hear from your brand anymore.
If you haven’t already, import last year’s transactions, browsing, and loyalty records into Shopify. This will create a unified profile for each customer that routes all data into a single source of truth. You can then access real-time, accurate data like lifetime value (LTV), return history, and products viewed to plan out your campaigns.
Once your data is clean, grow your email list. Launch a Shopify Forms popup with a discount incentive and leave a static button or footer form for those who ignore popups. Then, feed your highest-LTV holiday buyers into Shopify Audiences to build lookalike segments on Meta and TikTok, so your Q1 prospecting dollars can chase shoppers more likely to convert.
Longer daylight and vacation vibes mean one thing: summer sales. With a tight data infrastructure and fresh email list, you’ll welcome in the hot deals with user-generated content (UGC).
Launch a “Show us your summer gear” contest to collect organic UGC and repost it on your profiles. Use Shopify Collabs to partner with creators on paid campaigns and get your products in front of the right audience.
Either way, shoppers will see your products in real-life situations, like beach trips and backyard barbeques, shot by creators they already trust. This collaboration between Olipop and @goofychuck_4 is a great example of a paid campaign in which Olipop promotes a giveaway for their new Peaches and Cream soda.
