Like many other holidays, Easter is one of the best for app owners and others to market around. Plenty of people celebrate Easter Sunday and Easter Monday, making this holiday a lucrative opportunity for marketers. If you’re wondering whether it’s worth marketing around Easter, there are multiple reasons why you should take advantage of this particular holiday.
Meaning and Importance of Easter for App Marketers
Easter marketing campaigns offer a number of advantages for app marketers. One of the main reasons to launch these campaigns is the ability to connect with audiences in the Spring after a winter full of holidays, giving you the chance to continue your holiday marketing efforts long after the more popular holiday season has ended.
Many people enjoy Easter, from children who eagerly await the chance to engage in an Easter egg hunt to adults who are excited about the potential commercial and religious aspects of the holiday. This means it’s a great time of year to connect with audiences of all demographics as you acquire new users and maximize retention.
This year, Easter falls on April 17, making it 13 days later than last year’s Easter. The reason why this holiday falls on a different day every year is due to the fact that it relies on the moon’s cycles and the seven-day week. As a result, Easter Sunday takes place on the first Sunday after the full moon that shows up after March’s Spring equinox.
Today, many countries celebrate Easter, though the time when they celebrate it isn’t universal. All countries only celebrate Easter simultaneously when the two main calendars in the world align, which won’t occur again until the year 2034. Specifically, the two calendars include those followed by the Oriental churches and Greek and Slavic churches, respectively. Different countries also celebrate this holiday in various ways.
Ultimately, this holiday remains one of the most ideal for marketers to target as they can attract a lot of business and align their businesses with this special day.
Which Verticals Should Marketers Develop an Easter Strategy for?
The simple answer to this is that every vertical can benefit from Easter marketing in 2024 and beyond. While you may initially think that Easter is all about the religious meaning and symbolism of the Easter bunny, eggs, and baskets, the fact is that it’s also about commercial opportunities. This makes the holiday suitable for every industry with the right Easter marketing strategy in place.
If you’re not sure how you can connect your business to Easter, there are plenty of ways to do so, regardless of the vertical you’re in. For instance, you could:
- Take the opportunity to announce a rebrand, new product, or general refresh to reflect the holiday’s theme of resurrection and a new beginning.
- Send gifts to your customers and users as surprise Easter eggs
Generally, there are plenty of ways to go about reaching audiences through Easter marketing campaigns.
7 Highly Effective Marketing Strategies for Easter
If you’re interested in marketing this Easter, there are plenty of marketing ideas for Easter that can help you establish a strong connection with audiences ahead of and on this holiday. To get you started on your next campaign, the following are some helpful Easter marketing strategies that can give you some clear direction:
- Offers, Discounts, or Giveaways
- Sponsor an Event, Competition, or Create One Of Your Own
- E-mail Campaigns
- Social Media Marketing Plan for Easter
- SEO Strategies for Easter
- Organize an Easter Egg Hunt
- Last-Minute Promotion
Offers, Discounts, or Giveaways
As Easter approaches, you can launch certain offers, free giveaways, or discounts on certain items in your app. This could entail giving users free in-app items as little gifts to boost engagement, or you can initiate a sales period when people can save on products, in-app currency, or a variety of other items.
If people have items in their carts, you can also let them know of discounts or send out promo codes to encourage people to complete their orders.
If you want to use giveaways to appeal to users, you can do so by turning them into a contest. For example, you can encourage people to share their app experience on social media in exchange for a chance to win a free item, with a branded hashtag attached to all posts to help you track them and pick a lucky winner. This would help share your app through your audience and word-of-mouth marketing while bringing more value to your users.
Sponsor an Event, Competition, or Create One Of Your Own
To further connect with audiences around Easter, you can also sponsor an event or a competition. For example, you can sponsor Easter egg hunts or virtual Easter celebrations, such as Easter-themed livestreams. Additionally, you can sponsor online competitions that other businesses host, including social media contests.
Another way to engage audiences is to create one of your own events. Apart from online celebrations like live streaming events, you can launch events within your app. For example, your app can feature an in-app Easter-related game in which people can “scavenge” for eggs containing gifts. Each gift can consist of a small discount or a free item. You can also run this event all through Easter Monday to maximize engagement throughout the month.
E-mail Campaigns
Around Easter, you can use e-mail campaigns to your advantage in a couple of key ways.
If you publish a newsletter, you can include an Easter-themed update. Through your newsletter, you can promote a new Easter product, sale, or discount. Be sure to highlight these benefits at the top of the newsletter.
Even if you’re not planning anything specific for Easter, you can still send a “Happy Easter” marketing e-mail that celebrates this holiday and gets people into the Easter spirit. Using Easter-themed imagery such as bunnies, eggs, baskets, and chocolate, you can send your e-mail recipients a colorful, friendly message that engages them with your brand and entices them to revisit your app. This can also help remind people to consider shopping for gifts during the holiday season.
Additionally, you can use e-mail to send abandoned cart reminders to people who haven’t completed their purchases. This can supplement push notifications, SMS texts, and in-app messages to drive more sales and app engagement.
Social Media Marketing Plan for Easter
In addition to e-mail, you should use social media to reach your audiences, including prospective and existing users. Take the time to revamp your social media pages to get into the Easter spirit and schedule some posts around the holiday.
One great way to engage with audiences via social media marketing is to launch an Easter-themed contest on platforms like Twitter and TikTok, among others. People can make certain Easter-related posts and share them with a connected hashtag. Winners can receive certain gifts such as in-app discounts, giveaways, or more.
By posting regularly, you’ll connect more consistently with audiences and entice more users to jump back into your app while potentially acquiring new users. In the process, you can maximize reach and exposure by launching an Easter-themed ad campaign to further increase acquisition.
SEO Strategies for Easter
Optimizing your website’s SEO can also help your app as you market around Easter. On your website, consider building an Easter-dedicated landing page and optimizing it with relevant keywords to drive more traffic.
Be sure to target keywords that your audience is actively using. For example, some audiences might search for “Easter sales” or “Easter discounts,” while others are looking more specifically for “Easter egg hunts.” To get a better sense of what your audience is looking for, take a look at your competitors to see how they’re marketing for Easter. If they aren’t, you’ll be able to differentiate yourself by building an SEO strategy around the holiday.
You can link to your Easter landing page on social media to further increase traffic to it, and you can supplement it with Easter-themed blogs. On this page and in other content, you can discuss your brand and what it’s doing to prepare for the holiday. You can generate hype around an Easter sales period, Easter events that you’re sponsoring or hosting, a social media competition, and much more.
As you attempt to increase the ranking for your landing page, develop a link building strategy. You can find a list of relevant keywords to target and link this page to them in blog posts and other content. This will signal to search engines that your landing page has some authority around those target keywords and could help increase rankings.
To get the best results with your SEO campaigns, you need to start them as early as you can. Ideally, create your Easter-themed page in March and begin building it up from there. It can take as long as months for a page to rank in Google, so getting a head start is a more effective way to get your page in the spotlight.
Organize an Easter Egg Hunt
One of the most enjoyable things for people to engage in during the Easter holiday is an egg hunt. While you may not be able to launch a physical egg hunt, you can always create and organize a virtual one instead.
Cadbury is one of the most notable brands that have developed virtual egg hunts in recent years. This British chocolate company is known for its Creme Egg chocolate candies. As such, the company has effectively aligned its brand with Easter in a number of ways, including a virtual egg hunt that allows users to place an egg anywhere in the world via virtual maps. Participants in this Worldwide Hide can select any location for their eggs anywhere in the world and get family and friends involved. People can then share clues as to the whereabouts of their egg, initiating the hunt.
Even if you’re unable to launch something as elaborate, you can launch an egg hunt on your website, for instance, promoting a large discount for users who find eggs in hidden locations on certain pages. They could also simply pop up at random times as people browse your website or use your app, encouraging them to stay engaged for longer periods of time. Each egg that you send to users can count toward discounts or free items, or customers can fill virtual Easter baskets with their eggs to win a competition against other users. Feel free to get creative and have fun with these events.
Virtual egg hunts like these are a great way to get people excited for Easter while making your brand more memorable and favorable.
Last-Minute Promotion
In the last week or few days leading up to Easter, you can also launch last-minute promotions to maximize engagement around this time. Take this time to initiate some last-minute deals on certain items to generate more app usage and sales.
As you launch these promotions, make sure you’re notifying people via push notifications, SMS texts, e-mails, social media, and in-app messaging. In doing so, you can let people know they have a limited amount of time before those deals end, creating a sense of urgency and a fear of missing out. In your app, you can even include a countdown timer that ends after Easter Monday. This will further encourage users to take advantage of the opportunity while it still lasts.
Create a Successful Easter Marketing Campaign with the Right Strategies
Keeping these Easter marketing ideas in mind, you can launch a successful campaign that gets results and keeps your users consistently on your app.
If you really want to connect with users in a format that’s engaging, you can also benefit from developing personalized in-app stories. Using Storyly, you can present users in your app with custom visuals and text that promote Easter events, product recommendations, discounts, and more using consistently engaging content. These stories can perfectly supplement the rest of your Easter marketing efforts to establish a strong connection with new and current users around Easter and other holidays throughout the year.
Through the combination of Storyly stories and other innovative Easter marketing strategies, you’ll have the chance to make the most of the Easter holiday, with the ability to generate more buzz for your app and maximize its profitability.
