As a business owner or marketer, we don’t need to tell you how Easter promotions can help you grow your business, make more sales and reach new audiences.
But, coming up with new Easter promotion ideas and Easter marketing campaigns every single year can get tiring, right?
You know where we’re going with this…
Below, you’re going to find some fun ideas (golden eggs, if you will) for your Easter promotions, including ways to drive sales, attract customers and even build up your long-term marketing audiences. We love a marketing opportunity that keeps on giving!
If you like these Easter marketing ideas and want more tips for other occasions and holidays (like Boxing Day), be sure to subscribe to the Localsearch Digital Newsletter. It’s free and full of helpful ideas.
11 Easter Marketing Ideas
- Host or collaborate in a giveaway.
- Run offers exclusive to your email subscribers.
- Offer a refer a friend discount.
- Bundle products for easy Easter hampers or gifts.
- Hold a virtual Easter Egg hunt on your website.
- Boost an Easter promotion on Facebook.
- Go live with Easter trivia, how-to tips or idea guides.
- Promote in-store random giveaways.
- Sponsor an Easter egg hunt or community event.
- Update your trading hours online.
- Ask for reviews!
1. Host or collaborate in a giveaway.
Let’s start with the obvious — people love free stuff. If you’re in the position to give a product or service away (even Easter gifts), it will not only help attract customers but also give you so much content you won’t know what to do with it.
To get the most bang for your buck, team up with other local businesses to do a group giveaway. You’ll want to ensure each business posts about the promotion regularly on their social media, tagging all businesses involved.
Remember to remind people of the contest draw date and of the prizes to really make your competition irresistible, especially if there is money involved.
Make your Easter giveaway eye-catching for people scrolling.
Where to advertise a giveaway:
- Social media, including in posts, stories, lives and reels.
- Google My Business (now Google Business Profile) as a post.
- Flyers in-store.
- E-newsletters.
- Public relations, such as community papers, news or radio.
- Banners on your website.
- Blog posts.
Before you run a promotion, make sure you brush up on the regulations around running a competition in Australia, particularly on social media.
Read: Running a Competition on Facebook — What You Need to Know
2. Run offers exclusive to your email subscribers.
Email marketing is reportedly the second most used channel for brand awareness, second to social media. So, it works.
The reason more businesses don’t utilise email marketing themselves is due to the belief building an email list can be tiresome — which it certainly can be…
However, aside from utilising your existing customer/client list, you can build your email subscriber list quite easily around Easter specials and other holiday occasions.
For people to want to subscribe to your email list, they need to be getting something they can’t get anywhere else (such as offers) or by making their life easier (such as offering ideas and tips).
So, over Easter, run an offer exclusive to your email subscribers — but don’t just send the email and be done with it.
As part of your Easter campaign on social media, include posts about how you have a discount code for anyone who subscribes to your email list before Easter Sunday. Include a link to where they can subscribe and setup an automated email to send a creative welcome email with a code to those people within seconds of them subscribing.
Outside of the holidays, you can also add the link or a QR code to your invoices and receipts to subscribe. You may even want to put up a post at your checkout, if you have a physical shopfront, to catch some of your foot traffic too.
How to keep your email subscribers:
Now, these are easy options for building your long-term audience, but don’t forget to keep them engaged. For example, if you run a restaurant, send them an email with your weekly special or promotions. Plumbers, send out seasonal tips and remind them you have no call out fees (if that’s true for you). The list goes on.
3. Offer a refer a friend discount.
If you notice your foot traffic or online sales are a bit quiet over Easter, try drawing people in with a ‘refer a friend’ offer. Not only do you gain that one sale, it acts as word of mouth to the friend too.
How you run your offer depends on your products and services, of course, but a great option may be:
- Bring a friend for free this Easter Sunday/weekend/week.
- Refer a friend weekend, where if their friend signs up, buys or performs another action, they get a discount code, free product, cash etc.
- Refer a friend and get entered into a competition to win a fabulous prize or free product/service from your business (or collection of companies).
Of course, there are many more ideas and tips, so have a think of what may work for your business and give your profits a bit of a boost when it may typically be quiet.
4. Bundle products for easy Easter hampers or gifts.
Saving time and money are typically the basis of the best promotion ideas. It doesn’t even specifically need to be an Easter basket or goodies.
Think about what products or services you offer that work well together as gifts. Put together some marketing materials in a fun way (social posts, physical posters, etc.) and promote them as a way to celebrate and share with family and friends.
Another way to tackle bundles is by utilising where you have excess stock and promoting a two-for-one or a discount on bulk buys.
If your audience is coming to you for a trades service, don’t think you can’t try this technique with your customers. Mechanic? Offer a year’s worth of pre-booked car services with a discount. Electrician or plumber? If you don’t already, offer free estimates or call out fees for the weekend.
Whatever offer you put together, don’t forget about advertising your promotion across your social media channels, website and other platforms. Word of mouth is also a natural effort-free outcome of these offers too.
5. Hold a virtual Easter egg hunt on your website.
Does anyone else get obsessed with Dreamfarm’s annual ‘Find Walter’ Easter competition?
For those who have never heard of it, kitchen utensil manufacturer Dreamfarm runs an annual competition over the Easter long weekend where random ‘Walter’ rabbits will load in random places on the weekend. When you find Walter, you receive one of every single item they make — and there are several Walters to find. However, there are fake Walters that will give you discount codes if you provide your email address (building that email subscriber list).
Now, this particular production is just that — a production. You’d likely need a website developer and offering every one of your products may not be viable. But there is an easier, less dramatic way to run this competition if you want to boost your website visitors and email subscribers to boot.
In random places on your website, add in an image of an Easter egg, ideally with a transparent background. Hyperlink the image to a landing page letting the user know, “Congratulations! You have found an Easter Egg. Submit your details in this entry form to receive your discount code!”
You could even hyperlink different Easter eggs to different landing pages with different discounts.
Just don’t forget to remove the Easter eggs after the weekend and unpublish your landing pages.
Now, we all know Facebook Ads are more effective than boosting a post in most circumstances, especially if you’re wanting to generate leads.
However, with only one month to Easter at the time of publishing these ideas and inspiration, a lead generation Easter marketing campaign wouldn’t have enough time to give you worthwhile results.
This is one of those occasions where boosting a post is better than nothing. Whether you’re running a photo contest, an offer or whatever it is you’re doing, you’ll have a target audience. Create your fun post, input your audience as accurately as possible and publish your campaign.
Remember to set an end date!
7. Go live with Easter trivia, how-to guides or tips.
Stories, Reels and Lives are huge trends for boosting your engagement and growth on social media in 2022, and likely will be well into the future.
They’re also great for supporting an Easter promotion by giving something back to your audience — and make it easy to do too.
A simple way to create video content on social media this Easter is to show how to use your products, other ways to use them or answer questions. You can save these in your reels wheel or story highlights, or even go live.
If you’re more of a go-big-or-go-home person with your Easter campaigns, why not host an Easter trivia event online? Now, you could do this simply with a few polls on stories or run a live event where you give out discounts or fun prizes to those who answer first.
The best part is (besides the engagement and growth), you can take snippets from the videos or results from the polls to use in content down the track!
Now, maybe you’re growing quite well on social media but you need to get more foot traffic in-store. Instead of running an offer or discount on social media or to your email subscribers, promote in-store random (or not-so-random) giveaways on these social media channels instead.
For example:
- “The Easter bunny will be here at 1pm on Easter Sunday with free eggs for kids! Come on down!”
- “We’ll be giving away this product or giving 50% off to every 10th store visitor this Easter long weekend!”
- “Free entry to win this amazing prize with every in-store purchase this weekend only!”
There is nothing like giving back to customers and the community.
This Easter, if you have the means to do so, run (or get involved in) a community event or host an Easter egg hunt — ideally in front of your store or where you can have your branding visible.
You may get involved by offering a prize, sponsoring a competition, running a booth or even just by being there in your branded business shirt or merchandise.
Broken record here, but be sure to promote whatever events you run or get involved with on your social media and wherever else you’re running your Easter campaigns.
10. Update your trading hours online.
Are you closing over the Easter long weekend? Be sure to let people know!
This may not specifically be an Easter promotion, but it will ensure you don’t get negative feedback following the long weekend from people who tried contacting or visiting you, and you weren’t available.
Alternatively, if you’re open, make sure you shout it from the rooftop. “We’re open this Easter long weekend for <insert whatever it is you do>!” It’s an easy way to plug your products, services or something special.
11. Ask for reviews.
Let’s say you try some of these Easter marketing ideas and you’re like a kid in a candy store with sales — yay! But don’t stop there.
Don’t forget to ask your new customers or clients to leave you a review on your Localsearch.com.au business profile, Google and any other platform you receive reviews.
Online reviews are essential in 2022 for gaining consumer trust and are also great for your search engine optimisation (search engine rankings) too.
Plus, it’s a simple way to get even more from your Easter marketing campaign.