7 Proven Strategies to Master Holiday Marketing This Season

Introduction

The holiday season is not simply about a surge in sales, it is about the feeling, rhythm and shared time that bonds people and brands in special ways. No matter if it’s diwali, Christmas, or Black friday, the holiday ignites feelings in people that inspire them to be more open to, more curious about, and more likely to engage with a brand. In fact, holiday sales in November and December have averaged about 19% of total retail sales.

But getting cut through the noise in vacation marketing requires more than holiday visuals and discounts; it requires a strategy. As an app marketer, you are not just competing for clicks; you are competing for attention, trust, and memory. The challenge lies in creating campaigns that match emotion with measurable performance.

In this guide, you will learn seven proven strategies for mastering Holiday Marketing — from understanding user psychology, to creatives, to what to measure with them. You will learn how to take holiday browsing users to holiday loyal users and how data, time, and neglect creating a narrative make each campaign count.

Because holiday success does not happen simply because it’s the holidays; it’s by design.

Because holiday success does not happen simply because it’s the holidays; it’s by design—and with the right tools like aaptrove, that design becomes even more powerful.

The Continued Importance of Holiday Marketing 

Every year, as the world shines bright with celebration, brands all over the globe prepare for the biggest spectacle — the holiday season. From Diwali to Christmas, from Singles’ Day to the New Year countdown, the stretch of holidays isn’t just festive, it’s electrifying financially and emotionally. For app marketers, this is the ideal time when audiences are generally more active, engaged, and emotionally receptive than any other time of the year. 

What makes holiday marketing still hold its relevancy is its dichotomy of being both expected and surprising. You know the holiday comes every year, yet there is always a new set of trends, tools, and user expectations each year. The emotional and cultural need during the holidays crosses markets and geographies. In India, Diwali triggers an increase in e-commerce, travel, and fintech app activity as families prepare for the celebration. In western markets, Christmas and Black Friday spike gifting, gaming, and retail app installs. Meanwhile, across Asia, the Lunar New Year creates its own surge in cultural relevance due to community, gifting, and mobile-first engagement. 

Ultimately, holidays are tapping into something that goes beyond the event — they are tapping into an emotion. Consumers are not just shopping; they are celebrating, reconnecting, and reflecting. This is a time of year when the feeling of generosity and belonging is heightened, making the audience more receptive to emotional stories and personalized offers. When you harness that emotional energy in your campaign — versus just a seasonal promotion — you create not just visibility, but resonance. 

And in a digital-first world, the whole discovery experience happens on mobile. Whether users are looking for last-minute gifts, booking a trip, or searching for holiday meals, the experience begins — and usually ends — on an app. This is why the holiday marketing campaigns that are successful are the ones that represent how users behave in the palm of their hand. Short-form videos, festive push notifications, location-based offers and smooth checkout flows have become needed ingredients for discovery and conversion.

Mobile-first shopping is now the dominant mode: during the holiday season nearly three-quarters of online sales were made via smartphones, and engagement on social & shopping apps rises by around 30–40% from October through January.

But it is not just the scale of this attention shift that matters; it is the mindset behind the attention shift. During the holidays, consumers are predisposed to act. They want to be inspired by brands, compare brands, and make decisions faster than any other time. And this is what marketers dream about during the holidays: higher intention to purchase, more emotion, and more opportunity. 

For app marketers, this means that the holidays are all about preparing ahead of time and not creating on the fly. The brands that win the holidays are those brands that start early, understand local differences, and create a campaign that combines celebration with personalization.

Ultimately, holiday marketing is not about following fads ─ it’s about embodying the moment when users will most be ready to connect. The holidays remind us that behind every metric is a moment of human connection ─ and that’s where the real magic in marketing occurs.

Grasp The Psychology Behind Holiday Marketing Campaigns

Every successful holiday marketing campaign begins with empathy instead of data. The best campaigns are not just seen, they are felt. Users are not making decisions during the holidays based purely on logic; they are using emotions, memories, and the shared traditions of the season. People buy things emotionally and then rationalize them logically. Therefore, it is a fundamental principle that understanding the psychology of holiday behavior will lead to campaigns that will resonate.

The holidays elicit mixed emotions, nostalgia for the past, excitement for the present, and hope for what comes next. When your marketing connects with these emotions, you are no longer marketing something to them but instead, you are engaging in a celebration with them. Nostalgia can take users back to an emotional connection with a sense memory, like the smell of food cooking at home, the sound of joyous laughter or the joy of giving. A marketing campaign that can evoke this type of feeling does not just gain willingness to share time on attention; it built connection.

Then there is the powerful sense of belonging. The holidays are inherently about connection — a time when some people want to belong with others and feel an important part of a community. Brands that authentically represent shared values or amplify social connection throughout the holidays often have seen significantly more engagement and trust in the brand. Whether that takes the form of a simple, trustworthy “Happy Holidays” post to their feed or a local holiday greeting with some cultural warmth, users are generally more responsive to emotional authenticity than to perfection with no feeling.

Another strong driver, which is surprisingly often overlooked, is urgency — the ticking clock of a limited-time offer, a countdown banner, or the advantage of early access. During the holidays, urgency feels less like pressure and more like joining in the fun. When done correctly, urgency creates momentum and moves users through the steps of curiosity to conversion.

Last but not the least is being generous, the emotional center of the holiday season. Whether it’s giving gifts to friends and family, donating to a worthy cause, or treating yourself, generosity is the engine that drives action. Campaigns that match this spirit — charitable tie-ins, gifting bundles, and using messaging rooted in gratitude — motivate not only purchase, but goodwill.

Emotionally-led creatives do not only get eyeballs; they drive installs, engagement, and loyalty. Research shows that ads evoking strong emotional responses are 3.5× more likely to be watched again and 2.35× more likely to lead to purchase intent compared to neutral ads. In app marketing, this equates to retention and lifetime value — because users remember how your message made them feel.

When you come intent on designing your holiday marketing campaigns centered around emotion, you are not selling — you are sharing a story. You are providing users with a reason to engage that is natural, pure, and meaningful. And, in spaces that are crowded with vendors, emotion is one thing that cannot be copied or commodified.

Think Ahead — Designing a Successful Holiday Marketing Plan 

Every successful holiday marketing campaign starts with very detailed planning – the type of planning that’s done months prior to the holiday lights being hung up. During the holiday season, those marketers that plan, know their audience, and can act quickly when demand surges are the ones that win. You cannot ad lib your way through the most competitive quarter of the year, it needs to be planned for.

Begin with audience segmentation – early. The core element of any strong holiday strategy is to know who you’re speaking to. Instead of broadly messaging holiday items, peel back and really explore your audience clusters. Determine first time buyers, loyal customers, lapsed customers, and season browsers. Each of these segments has different motivators, spending power, and engagement patterns. For example, loyal users of your product may respond well to early bird specials or exclusive first-look notifications, while new users may be further activated by a free trial or a gift bundle. By using behavioral data you can create personalized creative and messaging flows that fit with the user journey rather than just creating generic and mass holiday sale notification. Indeed, personalised content has been shown to create an average 20% increase in sales opportunities during the holiday season.

Once you’ve identified your audience, you can move to creative and performance stress-testing. This is not the time of year to experiment blindly; be sure to test creative variations, ad formats, and calls to action several weeks ahead of peak holiday performance. A/B test your visuals, tones of voice, and placements to find what resonates with your audience. You may find what worked for you in July might not work in December, and, for example, festive emotion might require a festive design temporarily. Take your findings into consideration and pre-select the best performers, so you can make for a quality scaling of campaigns once you allocate increased spend.

Then, consider how you’re going to plan your budget. During the holiday seasons, you’ll see an even higher cost of media and the biggest increase will be around media restrictions, since your competitors are competing for the same user attention. To ensure you are getting good value for your dollar, you want to consider spacing your spend, allocating more in early November to awareness, and once early November is over moving toward conversions. It’s also a best practice to assure an overall budget cap for each stage so you do not overbid but can remain engaging and visible with your audience. Organic engagement and paid engagement do also play a factor in comparative cost and appeal.

Yet creativity and budget are not enough; success in the present day requires an omnichannel to support your efforts. The best holiday marketing initiatives rely on orchestrated use of multiple touchpoints, such as paid social, display, influencer content, email, and in-app experiences, to be presented as one cohesive story. To put it simply, a user may see your advertisement on Instagram, click a link to your app store page, then be converted through a personalized in-app message. Making that transition between platforms seamless builds trust and continuity. Make sure to keep the messaging similar wherever users are operating.

Marketers want this to happen smoothly and should consider whether you are attribution and privacy ready, especially as it relates to Apple’s SKAdNetwork (SKAN), as well as a number of other emerging privacy frameworks. Given the fact that the holiday spikes will cause massive levels of data inflow, measuring and ensuring attribution are key, while still respecting user consent. Measurement solutions from the likes of Apptrove, provides a way forward in order to understand the true performance outcomes through SKAN compliant – or in some cases other aggregated insights, without sacrificing compliance. As such, you can still make decisions driven by data even if limited user level tracking.

And don’t forget about timing, either. Holidays are not a single point in time; they are a nearly constantly shifting series of peaks in different regions and cultures. For example, Diwali in India happens weeks before Black Friday happens in the U.S., which in turn happens before Christmas in Europe and Lunar New Year in East Asia. If you’re able to reset your marketing calendar with these cycles, you can achieve sustainable momentum across markets as you peak once and then fade away quickly.  As you plan more closely around these local trends, paydays, and shopping traditions, you’ll see an effective increase in your retail outcomes.

In conclusion, the best holiday marketing campaigns can be built similarly to orchestras — with each channel, creative, and metric working in harmony with the others. The line between a good campaign and a great campaign is frequently about timing, coordination, and insight. The earlier you plan and adapt, the more adaptable you can be to a shifting trend — and it will shift.

The holiday rush feel more like a sprint, but in reality it is a marathon that awards preparation. If you are able to give yourself enough time and measure often, while remaining nimble, you will not only be ready to succeed during this holiday, but many holidays ahead.

Inventive Optimization — The Secret Sauce behind Holiday Campaigns

In a space filled with glimmering discounts, eye-catching ads, and festive noise, creativity can be your silent superpower! The most effective holiday marketing campaigns don’t just do the loudest talking — they do the talking the fastest. And that talk happens first and foremost through creative optimization: making the visuals, copy, and experiences feel personal, timely, and emotionally right.

Let’s start with the obvious — visuals sell the story before the words do! During the holiday season, your creative assets need to evoke emotion and meaning in that moment. The visuals used should reflect whatever sentiment your audience is already experiencing — joy, togetherness, anticipation. Use warm tones if the holiday season is comfort-based, bright experiences and contrasts if the holiday season is exciting, and warm requested gradients if your experience is more elegant. Even include elements of the theme with a holiday identification point — using fairy lights/snowflakes/diyas/red envelopes creates instant recognition, so use those elements — but only subtly. You’re not looking to decorate your ad — you want to design an emotion to have people immediately feel it with seconds.

Next is cultural personalization, which converts a festive campaign into a human campaign. The way holidays look and feel are different in every culture and, therefore, so should your marketing. For instance, a user in India during Diwali will connect with marigold colors and family around a gift-giving experience, versus a user in Japan during New Year, who might resonate more with minimalism and reflection. When you adapt symbols of holidays, greetings, and experience verbal sounds and even background sounder to local cultures, you are telling your users, “We see you”. This level of thoughtfulness equals higher engagement and increased trust, because personalization is more than strategy, it’s respect in action. 

However, visuals alone cannot carry the campaign. You must leverage copywriting to ignite action, while perpetuating the emotional state. A holiday call to action, or CTA, works ultimately best when they sound more human, meaning warm, direct, and tied to a timeframe. Instead of “Shop Now,” use “unwrap your offer” or “Celebrate the savings”. When doing so, you are replacing the notion of transaction into experience. Similarly, using a time-sensitive night or day, like, “Ends Tonight” or “This Week Only” is excitement, not forced urgency. This notion can and should be paired with an emotional anchor, like “Share the joy,” “Gift happiness,” “Make this season yours,” to use your copy not to just convert, but create a connection. 

The next layer of optimization is through testing and iteration. Your design may be polished, but it won’t matter if it doesn’t result in an effective response. Implement A/B tests for various creative varieties such as images, colors, headlines and CTAs to see what resonates with each audience segment. For example, a holiday image with family moments may resonate better with existing users, while a bright image with discounts may draw in new users. The insight here is not just winning creatives, but actually learning about user intent – as it relates to creative performance. 

Modern campaigns can also benefit from Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) – where your ads adjust automatically to the user’s real time context performing.  During the holiday rush, DCO will make personalization scalable – helping your campaign remain relevant during a busy time when your audience can be disparate across regions, time zones, and devices.

Above all, maintain message consistency across every touchpoint. Whether in an in-app banner, an email header or a push notification, your festive tone should be cohesive. This is how users recognize you amid the noise — the fact that your creative voice remains consistent becomes your brand’s calling card. Whether users are scrolling, tapping or shopping, they should feel as though they are experiencing a campaign, not just a series of messages.

When it comes to holiday marketing, creativity is more than just design — it is strategy. It is how you take data and turn it into delight; how you take performance and turn it into personality. From a sale perspective, when everyone is holding a sale, the only way a brand can stand out is if it can tell a story. And that story begins with how you make users feel the moment they experience your ad.

Measure What Matters — Assessing Holiday Campaign Performance

You cannot improve what you cannot measure.

That is the marketer’s mantra and, during the holidays, a must. When every impression is a highly contested one, the ability to measure what is or isn’t working is the differentiator between smart optimizations vs. wasted dollars.

Let us start with the most critical metrics: ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), retention, LTV (Lifetime Value), & attribution.

Installs and clicks may be popular numbers in dashboards, but they are only the tip of the iceberg. The story happens after the install; the install is where users become your loyal customers or seasonal customers. ROAS indicates whether your ad spend is leading to profitable conversions vs. a short-lived traffic boost. Retention rate indicates how many of those users are still with you after the holiday season. If January shows a dip in retention after the holiday rush, your acquisition-based holiday campaign worked, but your actual engagement did not.

Next, we have LTV – short for Life-Time Value – an invaluable north-star metric that captures the full value of your holiday users. Even if you had success with a spike in users during the peak, be mindful that seasonal spikes tend to throw off averages. It is imperative to measure not just how much these users pay you immediately, but how much value over time you can generate from the users you acquired over the holiday season. A user obtained during Black Friday who was still engaging with your app in the spring is far more valuable than someone who installed your app, paid you $4.99 during the holiday, then disappeared.

This leads us to attribution, the invisible thread tying together all of the performance data throughout the user’s journey. Knowing the points of attribution are critical; without clear attribution – even the best metrics become meaningless. The challenge is that in this privacy-first era, where user tracking is not an option, it can be challenging to know which channel, campaign, or asset drove actual conversion, and there are actually smarter measurement frameworks – like SKAN (StoreKit Ad Network) for users on iOS – present a framework to attribute installs and post-install actions through group given user privacy. This isn’t just about compliance; it’s to give clarity about a new marketing framework.

Certainly, SKAN has its limitations, such as delayed data, fewer postbacks, and a drawback in granular data. This is why many brands will also use probabilistic modeling and aggregated measurement techniques. These methods utilize anonymized signals and statistics to estimate conversions when tracking isn’t available. When done properly it will enable you to bridge the gap between privacy and precision, and help you inspect trends and variations without violating the trust your consumers place in you. 

Equally important is the analysis post-install. Your work does not end at the install- it starts there . Map user journeys; what behavior do they exhibit, when do they churn, and what brings them back to you? Event-level analysis tools (purchases, sessions, shares, etc) that track behavior off install reveal what your campaign truly returns value to. In the case that users from the same creative demonstrate better retention or in-app purchases than others, that is a creative insight repeating as data.

Holiday strategies also create a special challenge when it comes to measurement. Shorter conversion windows, overlapping promotions, and intense remarketing all detract from easily attributing conversions. Additionally, many consumers will browse on one device, install later on another, or see several ads before converting — all of which complicate your ability to accurately track conversions. In these cases, taking clean attribution practices is crucial. Think about consistent conversion windows, deduplication of overlapping touchpoints, and trustable data sources.

In summary, holiday marketing success is not about volume — it’s about validating value. When you track in a smart way, every number tells a story of where they came from, why they engaged, and what drove the conversion.

If you’re reconsidering if and how you might measure conversions in this changing landscape, take a step back and return to the foundations — your Attribution Window is the definition of what you write as every result. Because when measurement meets meaning, optimization is easy.

Convert Holiday Shoppers to Customers that Last 

The marketing campaign may have come to an end, but the relationship doesn’t have to.

The holidays feel like an all-out sprint — a race to capture eyeballs, clicks, and installs before time runs out. But in all honesty, the real growth occurs after the holidays are over. Each install during your holiday marketing program stands for more than a single sale — it’s the starting point of a potential long-term relationship.

To make that happen, you’ll have to move your mindset from conversion to connection.

You’ll want to start by focusing on lifecycle messaging. Once a user installs your app during the holidays, you will want to nurture them with purposeful, time-sensitive messaging. A friendly reminder of their previous purchase or a “Welcome back” note in January will help them re-engage while most brands stay quiet. In-app messages and push notifications provide an opportunity to stay top of mind – but not intrusive. This is simply a continuation of the conversation and not the start of a new one. 

Next comes reactivation – or renewing engagement among lapsed users. The post-holiday break is an ideal time to test re-engagement offers. Instead of providing a blanket discount, provide something that genuinely adds value for the user and feels somewhat personal: a reward for a milestone, a privilege of unique content or updates, or early access to features. When you remind users why they loved your app in the first place, they have a much higher likelihood of returning. 

Referral incentives are also extremely powerful. Inherent in the holidays is a sense of togetherness. People love to share their experiences, gifts, and recommendations. Turning that intrinsic love into action through a referral program allows a user to pass along what they engaged with to others, thereby multiplying your user base through reliance on “organic” engagement instead of simply advertising to new users. A user who refers a friend isn’t just increasing installs in your user base; they are reinforcing their own loyalty to your app (by promoting it to a friend).

However, the long-term sustained engagement beyond the season is through data-driven personalization. The data that you capture in your marketing and re-engagement campaigns, from where the user downloaded/purchased your app to their follow-up patterns, can be significant to future messaging. For example, the user purchased holiday gifts in December. Therefore, in January, the user may be more likely to respond to a self-care campaign. If the user simply browsed travel offers, you would also likely assume they were interested in your offers, and instead, a good campaign may be to focus on spring break offers for their school age children/family travel. Personalization of your engagement also sends a message to users that your app has more understanding of their journey and not just their transaction.

And last, but not least, loyalty is not established on discounts, it is established on delight. Rather than considering festive offers to be destinations, make them loyalty moments. Send thank you messages, congratulate users on milestones, and emphasize their contribution (such as the number of gifts they have bought or the number of unlocks they have made available). Emotional equity is formed off small acts of appreciation, and nothing can be purchased by a promotion.

Ultimately, holiday marketing is not merely a push button seasonal thing but rather the first line in a story of ongoing engagement. The most intelligent marketers understand that it does not require spending more to make a seasonal traffic a long-term commitment, but caring more.

The Future of Holiday Marketing — What 2025 and Beyond Will Bring

Each holiday season has its own magic, but also its own disruption. As user expectations shift and digital behavior becomes more fluid, the future of holiday marketing will rely less on tradition and more on intelligent, ethical innovation. The holiday campaigns that win the next few years won’t be the loudest or the flashiest; they will be the campaigns that simplify choices, respect user boundaries, and create value that has a personalized feel.

One of the greatest shifts on the horizon will be AI-led ad creatives. Rather than guessing what resonates, AI will be predicting it. From developing festive visuals to crafting contextual copy, AI enables you to create campaign and creative projects that evolve in real-time with users behavior. Predictive personalization will move from “nice-to-have” to “non-negotiable” in short order. Picture creatives that switch themes based on previous user actions automatically—winter styles for colder areas, gifting ideas for those who bought early, or festive greetings based on cultural themes. This level of contextual relevancy is what will define efficient holiday campaigns.

Voice search is another emerging influence. With smart speakers and voice assistants becoming commonplace, more people will be discovering brands through voice queries, such as, “Find me the best deals for New Year’s” or “show me holiday app offers around me!” Marketers should plan for this; a request like this will soon be commonplace. Marketers will need to be ready to optimize their apps and content around a more intuitive, conversational search mechanism, simply due to the new search experience.

Meanwhile, the future of holiday marketing is intertwined with ideas of sustainability and ethics. Users today are no longer thinking only about offers, they will start to care about impact. Campaigns encouraging thoughtful-giving, reducing digital junk or cost-effective campaigns where proceeds support social causes tend to create deeper emotional connections for brands. Not focusing on ethical marketing is affecting a growing number of consumers. With data use, a clear value exchange and responsible targeting, brands will be facilitated in deciding which brands they do and do not trust.

In fact, trust is becoming the new currency in marketing. As privacy regulations change, the expectation of consumers is for brands to be transparent, guard their data, and give them authentic control. The holiday season is usually an amplification of digital noise, and transparency will have the ability to cut through that noise as a differentiator. If your campaign is safe, helps the user, and feels human, consumers will lean in.

The future of holiday marketing campaign thinking is not just about the tools of the future, but the mindset of the future. It is about meeting the user, emotionally, behaviorally and ethically, where they are. If you can create that thoughtfulness, not only will you win for the season, you will win loyalty well past the tree comes down.

Your Holiday Playbook for 2025; Critical Lessons to Keep in Mind

As you move toward the next holiday upcycle, think of your playbook not as a prescriptive checklist but as a continuing narrative — one that gets sharper with every season. The best holiday marketing campaigns do not spring up by happenstance; they have been redesigned and iterated long before you put up the lights. Those campaigns emerge from strong planning in advance of the holidays, an understanding of your audience and their motivation to act, and a willingness to test and iterate (before the lights go up). When you have planned for a head start, the audience experience feels intentional to them instead of rushed, and they feel guided instead of being sold.

Emotion will always be at the core of the holiday experience. It is what fuels all of the instinct to share, shop, connect, and return. When your campaigns tap into joy, nostalgia, belonging, or urgency, they are not only seen but are meaningful. However, you cannot rely on emotion alone, you need the measurement to ground those emotional moments. Every metric we track, all of the possible ROAS you are tracking to retention, are a window into how users behave, what users value, and where your message resonates the most. The data allows emotion to have an objective target.

And maybe one of the key points to remember, is that retention is actually the true ROI of the holidays. The spikes you see during a special season are temporary, but loyal users, built from carefully crafted onboarding, personalized post-holiday classic events, and ongoing engagement, will take you much further than the season.

The holidays come every year, but the connections you make can last a lifetime.

“The holidays are a story your brand gets to tell once a year, make it worth remembering,”

If you’re ready to turn these insights into action, let’s talk. Connect with our experts at Apptrove to craft your next holiday strategy — one that blends data, creativity, and emotion into campaigns people remember long after the season ends.

from Apptrove https://apptrove.com/7-proven-holiday-marketing-strategies-for-success/
via Apptrove