It’s that time of year again where bunnies lay chocolate eggs and retail managers look for inspired marketing ideas to hippity-hop their conversions to new heights. Why is it important for retail marketers to create an “eggscellent” Easter marketing ideas? Simple. Easter has become one of the most profitable retail holidays of the year. But what about retail stores? Don’t worry we’ve got some Easter marketing promotion ideas for them as well!
When it comes to inspiration for creating your own hoppin’ 2023 Easter marketing campaigns, we’ve got you covered! In this post, we’ll look at the latest consumer trends and statistics during the Easter season. Then, we’ll take a “peep” into the success story of Zara fashion retailer, and Zara retail strategy. Finally, then we’ll share with you our top examples of the awesome Easter marketing campaigns.
It’s clear that every marketer needs to take this opportunity to kick-start an eggscellent Easter marketing campaign — no matter what products or services you offer. Let’s hop over to the latest consumer trends to help you plan a sweet Easter marketing plan!
In case you want to jump ahead:
- Hoppin’ consumer trends for Easter 2023
- Easter 2023 and COVID-19
- What goods are consumers buying?
- 8 Easter Marketing Ideas to hack your online revenue
- 8 Easter Marketing Ideas to boost your in-store revenue
- Easter Marketing Slogans to get inspired from
- Easter Case study: How Zara’s springtime campaign nails it
- “Break an egg” (Conclusion)
Hoppin’ consumer trends for Easter 2023
Yes, it’s true that Easter baskets are always a sure-to-please gift. According to the consumer buying trend data, in 2017 many children got the gift of a sugar high. 87% of parents gave their kids an Easter basket filled with chocolates and sweets, while 80% of those same parents treated themselves to some of the candy! At the same time in the UK, around 80 million Easter eggs are sold every year.
However, this holiday is not only for brands in the candy business. Consider that this popular this holiday brought in whopping $18.4 billion spent by American consumers during the Easter 2017 season. That’s a 6% increase, year-over-year! And, this boom was not the result of purchasing Easter baskets and chocolate bunnies. That’s right! Only $3 billion of 2022’s Easter expenditures was spent on candy.
The Easter holiday craze is not only a North American shopping phenomenon. In 2018, 75% of the population of the UK celebrated the Easter holiday while in 2022, the amount of money spent on Easter celebrations in the UK was $1.3 billion. When it came to Easter gift giving, 75% of those celebrating the holiday planned to give gifts. On the top of the Brits’ lists? Sweets and chocolates at 84%, flowers and plants at 15%, and colored eggs at 13%. More than half (52% to be exact) of Brits celebrating planned to spend more than £15 in gifts for the holiday.
Easter 2023 and COVID-19
Now that the pandemic is over and there are no more restrictions, we steadily expect that economies will get back to normality and Easter spending will reach higher level vs last year, as markets and societies are more mature against the pandemic’s effect in our lives.
What goods are consumers buying?
Here are the top gifts shoppers added to their gift list for Easter 2017:
- Candy 88.7%
- Food 87%
- Gifts 60.9%
- Clothing 49.6%
- Greeting Cards 48.4%
- Decorations 42.5%
- Flowers 39.2%
Sweets and chocolate were the most commonly purchased gifts by consumers in the UK for the Easter holiday in 2022.
The online Easter Egg hunt for Egg-cellent deals
Consumers have become accustomed to shopping online for holidays. In 2018, over 76% of shoppers planned to buy over ¼ of their gifts online throughout the entire year. A 3% increase from 2017. At the same time, consumers are spending more on average. Online sales grew in the first three quarters of 2018, to 15.5% –a year-to-date growth higher than the three previous years– and during 2022 online retailers had at least one purchase made by over 2.3 billion consumers.
The convenience of online shopping means that, just as Valentine’s Day morphed from a holiday for sweethearts to a major annual retail event, nowadays the Easter bunny delivers more than candy-filled baskets. Shoppers also are looking for the best deals on Easter decorations, new spring outfits, and extra groceries for the holiday.
8 Easter Marketing Ideas to hack your online revenue
As the Zara retail strategy demonstrates, Easter has moved way beyond Easter baskets filled with candy and chocolate bunnies. With the growth of eCommerce, holiday sales contribute to a higher percentage of online profit. Holiday marketing, consequently, has become more competitive than ever.
We can’t emphasize enough that three key factors to a successful email campaign are great Easter slogans, subject lines, and marketing automation. Here are some tips to help you create an Easter marketing campaign that converts:
1. Define the main concept
There are a lot of Easter Bunnies out there so you need to create an Easter marketing plan that is interesting and original. Better yet, use a marketing automation platform to segment your audience and develop messaging that targets each group with relevant content. For each group offer incentives and develop an appealing Easter pitch for that audience.
2. Schedule one Easter newsletter per week
Timing is crucial in executing an effective eCommerce marketing campaign. A hoppin’ newsletter, once a week is a great way to entice shoppers to check out your eShop. Make them personal, relevant, timely, and easy for you to track — and be sure to use the best Easter slogans and subject lines. And, don’t forget to add gifs and some Easter emojis as well!
Tip #1: Plan ahead of time so you can run a pre-sale drip campaign. This way, when it’s time to make their purchase, consumers will be informed and ready to shop in your eCommerce store.
Incorporate multiple reminders alongside your newsletters with information about sales, cute Easter videos, or, if you have physical stores, you can even include an invitation to store events.
Tip #2: Freepik’s impressive Easter graphics library offers a wide range of engaging resources that can enhance your content strategy.
3. Run an Easter giveaway on Social media
Every eCommerce manager needs to consider creating a fun, fresh and interactive social media initiative for Easter. Here are some examples to get you hopping in the right direction:
- Promote an Easter sale, such as a discount on selected items or personalized offers.
- Ask users to post their most creative Easter craft ideas to share on your social media channels.
- Run an Easter contest on Instagram and Facebook and give away free prizes to the winners.
- Create an awesome discounted Easter basket with your best-selling products.
- Create a virtual reality social media marketing campaign and host a virtual Easter Egg Hunt as Cadbury did in 2018 when it teamed up with Facebook360 and Ogilvy Melbourne. Give away hidden prizes for the participants!
4. Write a blog post and promote it
Reaching shoppers with blogs that offer them relevant and useful information creates value for your brand. Wiring a blog post and implementing catchy, fresh Easter subject lines in each email automation you set up is crucial. Did you know that as much as 47% of email recipients open an email based on its subject line?
Here are some sweet Easter Subject Line ideas to inspire your subject lines:
- Get Hoppin’ – Our Spring Fever Sale has Arrived! Take 15% Off Our Products! ?
- We’ve Got an Eggscellent Deal for You!
- Treat EveryBunny with Our Sale!
- ?Enjoy a Taste of Easter on Us (Free Giveaway)?
- Big Easter Savings Are Only a Hop, Skip, and Jump Away! ?
5. Create an Easter-themed dynamic pop up
Tap into the Easter Bunny and design an Easter-themed pop up to capture emails or promote your Easter offer. Don’t forget to use color popping Easter email templates.
Let’s Help You Scale Up
6. Schedule Push Notifications
Ecommerce push notifications have 3 to 10 times higher click rates compared to standard email newsletters.
Push notifications enable marketers to reach users with special updates, sales, and tailored reminders to lapsing customers. When used properly, this channel, which is not subjected to spam filters nor any other form of inbox restrictions, is “pushed” at the point where users are active on their devices.
You can feature a product category on sale that the user previously viewed, showcase new collections, suggest products, and announce giveaways to increase your engagements.
Tip: A best practice is to keep the reminders to under 3 per week.
7. Schedule an SMS campaign
As a part of your automated triggered multi-channel marketing campaign, be sure to include this marketing tactic. Remember, you can’t afford to overlook developing and scheduling an SMS campaign to re-engage with your existing customer base. This channel works perfectly with time-sensitive promotion. Just be cautious of the frequency and timing of deployment.
8. Create a funny Easter Cart Abandonment Automation
Every online marketer knows that cart abandonment accounts for a major part of lost revenue on Easter. Don’t forget to spice up your regular cart abandonment emails with relevant Easter copy that captivates shoppers and converts them to purchase.
Tip: For everything from Cart Abandonment Reminders to Push Notifications and more, marketing automation moves beyond mass emails to a system that allows you to segment, retarget, track, analyze, and make corrections based on your brand’s goals. It’s that simple!
8 Easter Marketing Ideas to boost your in-store revenue
Below we’ve also collected some Easter marketing ideas for retail stores to create a more omnichannel and coherent Easter marketing strategy.
- Use QR-codes to feature Easter products and unlock secret discount coupons & exclusive freebies: Scarcity and exclusivity work like a charm so use them in combination with QR codes to “educate” your customers for future branded QR code campaigns and drive awareness towards your featured easter products.
- Send an ‘Easter egg’ direct-mail postcards to your VIP customers: Spot your top 1000 customers and send them nicely designed Easter postcards. (ContactPigeon is one of the very few omnichannel marketing automation platforms which actually also supports postcard marketing for retailer as well)
- Run an in-store Easter Giveaway to boost stores’ traffic: Offline contests and giveaways are a great motive for consumers to visit your retail stores, so don’t lose this opportunity to boost your instore visits.
- Design Easter Print Ads to Stores: Print advertising can be really effective for building Brand Identity. An eye-catching easter print campaign can generate thousands of impressions from the walking by and bring in potential customers. So don’t underestimate this tactic in 2021.
- Include an Easter Freebie to every order (online & offline): Everybody loves Stickers! It is a great way to boost customer loyalty plus gain impressions on your customers’ office or house
- Create Impressive Easter Bundles near to your cashiers: The Queues are not the most pleasant part of your stores. Though, they are the perfect place to promote impressive product Easter product bundles and increase your Average Basket Size. Combine this tack with an upselling pop up in your eCommerce site and also see your online Average Order Value skyrocket.
- Use Local Social Media Marketing to increase awareness: Local Facebook & Instagram ads can help you spread the word of your Easter marketing campaign (Perfect mix = remarketing & customer acquisition ads). Google My Business marketing can be very effective as well!
- Build a consistent integrated Easter branding identity: Extent your Easter theming to every single aspect/asset of your offline and online marketing strategy. Avoid confusing the consumers by partly implementing your Easter theming. So make sure that your website, your newsletters, your paid ads on social media platforms and even your onsite popups will be coherent to your Easter concept, in order to maximize your chances to covert. Remember, most of your competitors won’t do this.
Easter Marketing Slogans to get inspired from
When it comes to creating your Easter slogans, have a little fun with them! After all, this is a holiday where we paint boiled eggs, hide them around the house and eat a lot of chocolate bunnies…a lot!
Here are some Easter marketing slogans to get you hopping in the right direction with your Easter marketing plan:
- Slogan #1: Special delivery from the Easter bunny!
- Slogan #2: Speggtacular savings all weekend!
- Slogan #3: Check out our EGGstra special deals!
- Slogan #4: Get hoppin’! These deals are EGGscellent and going fast!
- Slogan #5: Eggspecially great savings!
- Slogan #6: Hop on over to our Easter sale!
- Slogan #7: Put all of your eggs in one basket — we’ve got your Easter gift list covered!
- Slogan #8: We’re hoppin’ with joy! Sales! Sales! Sales!
- Slogan #9: Peep into our store for Easter savings!
- Slogan #10: We’ve got the perfect gift for you’re EGGstra special someone!
- Slogan #11: Follow the Easter bunny! He has the chocolate!
Easter case study: How Zara’s springtime campaign nails it
Speaking of new spring outfits, let’s talk about fashion retailer Zara.
Zara has about 2259 Zara stores in 96 countries around the world and is leading the fashion industry brick-and-mortar scene. Also, when it comes to eCommerce, Zara dominates that scene as well.
A look at how Zara eCommerce creates and rides the Easter sugar high
Zara eCommerce booms every year during the Easter holiday season as the online leader of the fashion industry tempts shoppers with trendy spring clothes — to wear on Easter and for the entire season.
Creating an Easter sugar high is simple when it comes to Zara retail strategy. The secret to the brand’s success? Consistently offering their shoppers affordable, new, trendy, must-have fashions which they highlight on their website’s homepage. The brand’s 21-day policy of turning over new fashion to the marketplace allows Zara to churn out new content and attracts shoppers who are looking for the latest upcoming fashion trends. It’s all about timing and appealing to the customers.
Who’s buying the most during Easter?
For Zara eCommerce, constantly introducing new trends appeals to the millennials between 18 to 34 of age.
It should come as no surprise Millennials are buying the most during Easter as well. Perhaps it’s because they have younger children, or because they are a generation raised on candy and treats themselves? Millennials spend around $2,000 annually on eCommerce — this level of spending is higher than any other demographic groups.
Now that we’ve gone through the latest consumer buying trends and looked at the secret sauce for success of Zara retail strategy, let’s hop on to how you can build an awesome responsive Easter marketing plan for your brand.
Tip: check out more of the best Easter marketing campaigns we’ve seen to get inspired.
“Break an egg”
Springtime is a fun time filled with new beginnings. For retail marketers, the season provides opportunities to bring their brand’s conversions to new heights and “break an egg” with their Easter campaigns. The future belongs to the marketers who are doers — those who hop to it and get their eggs in a row before Easter is upon us.
We’ve shared some awesome Easter marketing ideas to inspire you, and we are also presenting 8 Proven Easter Promotion Ideas for eCommerce to spark your creativity. Now, it’s up to you to go forth with your own responsive marketing campaign and create and ride your brand’s sugar high! Get crackin’.
Feel free to tell us if you liked our proposals!
Let’s Help You Scale Up
