The Holiday Design Playbook: How to Optimize for the Holiday Season

When brick-and-mortar retailers want to signal to shoppers that it’s time for the holiday season, they deck their stores with pops of seasonal colors, put up eye-catching decor, and install impressive window displays. Brands should introduce the same festive visual signals into their digital marketing campaigns.

Here are four ways to bring that holiday cheer.

1. Holidazzle Your Logo

The clearest and loudest way to announce the arrival of the holiday season is by holidazzling your logo—on your website, in your emails, on your social pages, in your catalog and other print campaigns…everywhere. This connects all of your touchpoints back to your holiday campaigns.

How can you holidazzle your logo? Consider embellishing it with motifs that are winter-, gift-, or holiday-themed and align with your brand and audience.

• Wintery wonderland: Snowflakes, snowmen, maybe even a soft dusting of snow atop your logo
• Festive foliage: Garland, holly leaves, evergreen trees, wreaths, or if it complements your brand, mistletoe
• Seasonal shimmer: Stars, sparkles, string lights
• Holiday whimsy: Ornaments, Santa hats, reindeer, sugar cookies
• Gift-wrapped goodness: Presents, bows, ribbons, gift tags

Bonus tip: A little motion can go a long way. Subtle animation can bring even more attention to your holidazzled logo. String lights, sparkles, and snowflakes are particularly strong candidates to make the moment even more memorable.

2. Holidazzle Other Elements

Your logo may be the starting point, but the holiday experience shouldn’t stop there. Infuse holiday cheer throughout your campaigns and webpages. For instance, you can:

• Refresh your designs with seasonal-specific color palettes from wintery cool blues to classic reds and greens
• Introduce festive iconography, patterns, textures, and badges
• Carry the motif implemented in your logo across other campaign and page elements, such as the loyalty program signup form on your website or the mobile app download button in your email campaigns

Bonus tip: Go the extra mile and infuse holiday cheer into the footer of your website, emails, and other touchpoints. It’s a delightful reward for scrolling all the way to the bottom.

3. Bring Gifting Content to the Fore

With your festive foundation set, it’s time to focus on gifting to fully capitalize on this high-intent purchasing period. Broadly speaking, that means revamping the hierarchy of your content to spotlight gifting.

Pay particular attention to above-the-fold opportunities to feature this messaging, including:

• Adding dedicated “Gifts” or “Holiday” navigation links on your website, in your emails, and elsewhere
• Showcasing gift-focused banners and promotional placements
• Creating always-on gifting destinations through pinned social posts, Instagram Highlights, and a steady cadence of new gift-related content

Bonus tip: The gifting season is a prime opportunity to grow cross-channel engagement and new channel opt-ins. For example, promote app-exclusive deals in your SMS promotional messages and highlight loyalty program membership benefits across channels.

4. Make Gifting Easier

In addition to high intent, many holiday shoppers are also juggling more decisions that can result in high anxiety. They worry about getting the right gift, whether they can afford it, and if it will arrive on time.

Alleviate your customers’ stress by proactively surfacing answers to these concerns (and more!) on your website and marketing messages. Consider highlighting:

• Guides for gifting and holiday planning
• Gift wrapping services
• Store hours, regardless of whether you have extended holiday hours, but especially if you do
• Return and exchange policies
• Financing options (e.g., private label credit card, buy now pay later)
• Order-by deadlines for delivery (e.g., standard, express, overnight, same-day)
• Order-by deadlines for products that are bulky, drop shipped, customized, monogrammed, etc.

Many of these details can live in secondary and tertiary placements for the majority of the season. However, as key deadlines approach, elevate these details within the experience by using countdown timers, “Don’t Miss Out” badges, or other urgency levers to ensure cut-off dates are front and center for your shoppers.

Bonus tip: Much of this content can be repurposed across channels. Gift guides, in particular, can provide value and build trust to engage shoppers with a softer sell than most other promotions.

Wrap All That Up in a Holiday Toolkit

To ensure a cohesive holiday experience across all digital touchpoints, establish a Holiday Toolkit that outlines seasonal design treatments, messaging priorities, and key campaign moments.

In addition to defining seasonal creative assets, your Holiday Toolkit should map key moments and the corresponding design and messaging that support them. As customer priorities shift from early inspiration to gifting, shipping deadlines, and post-holiday promotions, your creative and messaging should evolve alongside them.

For example, here are some standard windows in which design and messaging changes are common:

• October: Holiday messaging tends to occupy secondary positions. This early messaging tends to focus on holiday decor and being host-ready.
• Early November: Holidazzled logos and other design elements launch, if they didn’t in the latter half of October. Gift guides tend to launch now, along with early “Black Friday” branded promotions.
• Black Friday Week: Early Black Friday deals and deal previews abound. If you’re providing early access to loyalty members, app users, or other groups, make that clear to drive signups and downloads.
• The Cyber 5 (Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday): Because this is the heart of the holiday season, many brands have unique design treatments just for this time period to signal how special it is.
• Early December: Order-by deadlines become prominent, as do in-store sales, along with notices about seasonal store hours.
• Week before Christmas: Rush shipping deadlines, in-store shopping, curbside and in-store pickup, and gift cards become focal points, with e-gift cards being highlighted most aggressively during the 48 hours before Christmas.
• Post-Christmas into New Year: Holiday imagery fades as the focus shifts to post-holiday clearances, “Get what you really wanted” sales, and prompts to spend gift cards.

Varying your designs during some of these windows helps avoid visual fatigue, while adjusting messaging helps you stay aligned with what your customers need in the moment.

Bonus tip: Don’t limit your Holiday Toolkit to promotional campaigns. Apply seasonal elements to your triggered campaigns— particularly your browse, cart, and checkout abandonment campaigns—as well as to your email, SMS, and loyalty signup pages. All of these touchpoints play a major role in holiday performance and the momentum you carry into the new year.