12 Christmas contest ideas to make your festive marketing campaign sleigh

From Black Friday through to Christmas Eve, you have 30 days of commercial carnage – presents, parties, food, experiences – you name it, people are buying it, and in great numbers.

It’s undeniably the busiest time of year for most businesses, meaning everyone is competing to make the most of the sales opportunities it presents. But with all your competitors putting just as much hustle into their campaigns as you, how do you stand out from the crowd?

The answer is gamification – specifically through marketing games and contests that are more playful 🛷 and engaging than traditional marketing materials, and as such, so appropriate and adaptable to the demands of Christmas campaigns. The fun, interactive experience is a vessel that captures audience attention and drives it towards conversions through branded messaging.

Here are our top contest ideas to make your next Christmas campaign 🎁 the best ever.

1. A branded Christmas calendar (Advent Calendar)

Forget about chocolates 🍫 – your audience will already be fighting temptation against the variety of selection boxes piling up at work and at home. Give them a guilt-free treat while engaging them each and every day in the build up to Christmas with a series of contests and branded games unlocking on each day of December – just like a classic advent calendar.

Get the (snow) ball rolling ❄️ on December 1 by giving them a (guaranteed) chance to win a promotional code to incentivise purchasing with an instant win game. Day 2 and it’s on to a trivia Quiz to test their knowledge of pop culture. Day 3, and you give them 5 penalty shots on goal to get as many points as possible…

Include a mix of instant win games and mini-games that accumulate points on a leaderboard for variety – on December 24, enter the top 100 into a draw for a grand prize.

2. The 3 wise men quizmas challenge (Quiz)

Adapt a Quiz around your brand, niche, industry, or campaign, and invite your audience to show off their knowledge for a chance at a prize!

People love trivia, and even more, they love to win. Use this to capture customer data, distribute targeted campaign messaging, and put a spotlight on your brand at the busiest time of the year.

3. A Christmas jigsaw (Jigsaw Puzzle) 🧩

Is anything more on trend at Christmas than a jigsaw? You know the drill: the Christmas dinner, crackers, presents, Buck’s Fizz, and eggnog, and-or any other Christmas traditions have all gone down a treat, so it’s time to zone out, crank up the fire, and put the pieces together on a monster jigsaw puzzle.

With Drimify’s Jigsaw Puzzle, you can customise this engaging digital format to your branding and your specific promotion, inviting customers to put together as simple or as complex a picture of your hot new high-ticket product for a chance to earn a promotional code to incentivise spending.

4. The wool, the plaid, and the snuggly: a Christmas jumper contest (Photo Contest)

Christmas jumpers are an inevitable expression of how people celebrate and mark the festive season. Stylish Christmas jumpers, chic Christmas jumpers, obnoxious Christmas jumpers, and of course, Christmas jumpers so darn ugly they’ll put you right off your turkey dinner… (There are no wrong answers.)

Capitalise on this with a best and worst Christmas jumper-themed Photo Contest, where entrants are invited to proudly share pictures of themselves wearing their most fun, most garish, or most embarrassing Christmas jumpers… 👀

Pro tip: Enable submissions to be put into specific categories on your Photo Contest and connect it to a Voting Gallery. Then when more of your target audience comes to vote, you can truly crown the best, worst, and most creative Christmas jumpers people are wearing.

Remember, some of your audience wants to have fun, some of your audience wants to look good, and some will take joy in wearing super wacky jumpers that just wouldn’t be appropriate at any other time of year – the categories reflects this in the voting, broadens the contest’s appeal, provides even more user generated content (UGC), and allows you to reward more winners.

5. Jinglebell jackpot (Slot Machine)

Invite your audience to pull the lever on a branded Slot Machine for a chance to win big.

If they line up 3 icons of the hottest gift at the top of everyone’s Christmas list this year, they win it! If they line up 3 festive icons, they win a promotional code and they’re that much closer to making a purchase.

6. Bauble buster (Bubble Shooter) 🎄

Simple, addictive, and fun – Invite your target audience to take a break from the stress of Christmas shopping and prep, and break some baubles instead!

They shoot a selection of baubles, tree stars, fairy lights, and other ornaments with the aim of combining 3 or more to cause them to break and explode! The more damage they do, the higher their final points tally.

Run a leaderboard to track your top 50 players and at the end of the campaign, hold a prize draw to reward 1 (or even a few) of your best bauble busters.

7. Grinch chase (Pacman)

There’s not just 1 grinch trying to steal Christmas this time, there’s 3! Pacman thought he could just casually stroll through the mall collecting Christmas presents for Ms Pacman, Pacbaby, Chomp Chomp, and Sour Puss, but instead he’s being chased by those mean-spirited spoilsports, and these ones don’t look like they’re in any danger of having a change of heart!

Help Pacman complete his Christmas shopping, and help him collect snowballs to fight off the mean-spirited grinches and save Christmas!

8. Gingerbread house competition (Video Contest)

Tap into your audience’s creative and competitive sides with a Gingerbread house competition!

To win, there’ll need to be more than 4 walls and a ceiling with a candy cane chimney. With a grand prize worth its weight in gold, frankincense, AND myrrh, it’s on every participant to go full-on Grand Designs-mode and wow with their creations, and take the best possible video walkthroughs to do them justice…

Turrets, multi-levels, helipads complete with chocolate helicopters – whose imagination isn’t already running wild with the possibilities? 🏠🍬🎥🏆

Pro tip: Connect your Video Contest to a Voting Gallery to double your engagement!

Many among your audience will love to take part and let loose their creativity, but just as many will enjoy watching and choosing their favourite. Make a shortlist of the best entries, share them on social media to promote the contest, then when the votes are counted, announce the winner!

9. The defending champs big Christmas Day game (Basketball)

The NFL plays on Thanksgiving, but the big Christmas Day sports fixture is when the defending NBA champs take to the court in a marvellous exhibition.

Engage sports fans by inviting them to demonstrate their nerves of steel by inviting them to make multiple baskets to win the big Christmas Day game.

Running a leaderboard to reward the best players? Up the ante, and include a moving backboard 🏀 and a time limit. Just like in the big leagues, only the best will prosper!

10. Murder on the Polar Express (Dynamic Path™)

At the last stop before the long haul to Lapland, an executive of a toy company is discovered murdered in his carriage on the Polar Express. The rest of the guests make an unlikely Rogues Gallery of suspects, but fortunately, Hercyule Poirsnow, the moustachioed and meticulous detective of international repute is aboard, and he’s more than up to the mystery… but are your customers?

What happens when you adapt the compelling whodunnit storytelling formula with an immersive gamification experience and apply it to the most wonderful time of the year? Murder on the Polar Express!❄️🚅

Players take on the role of Hercyule Poirsnow, endeavouring to find the murderer as they travel from one end of the Polar Express to the other, solving puzzles, playing through scenario-based Quizzes, until finally unveiling the culprit!

11. Reindeer riddler (Word Search – Wordle)

Give your audience hints and guesses at solving the 5-letter words on the Reindeer 🫎 riddler.

Every correct answer opens a pop-up to deliver branded information about your festive offers, and on completion of the game, players are rewarded with promotional codes as the final push towards a purchase.

12. Christmas gift finder (Product Recommendation Quiz)

Create a Christmas gift finder to help gift buyers this holiday season.

You know the challenges of buying presents for loved ones out of a niche or specialty you don’t fully understand, so take as much stress out of the crazy Christmas shopping as you can with this classic gamification concept.

Ask shoppers a series of questions, and from their answers, they’re recommended the ideal gift to purchase.

Pro tip: Embed this on relevant product range pages on your eCommerce site. Make it phygital by including a result profile that directs them to your store to speak to a product expert if their answers don’t clearly indicate an ideal product. This combines the speed of eCommerce with the added value of having a physical premises.

Expert advice

When it comes to Christmas, the opportunities are only limited by how hard you’re willing to go after your audience. If anybody was ever going to buy something, they’re almost never more likely to convert than during this period. With this in mind, the Advent Calendar format is hands down our recommended gamification experience for engaging target customers over the Christmas period.

Use it to combine all the game engines and ideas listed in this article (and more) to spread not only Christmas cheer, but your branded messages too, every shopping day right up to December 24th!

The name of the game in the busiest holiday season is standing out among your competitors, and in your marketing, that means being fun and in the spirit of the season!

Gamified campaigns are opportunities to be more playful and creative with your audiences, which is what Christmas is all about.

Take any of these ideas and adapt them to your branding and your campaign, and maximise what your business can achieve with the superior engagement capabilities of gamification.

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