Fall Promotion Ideas: How to Create a Profitable Seasonal Strategy

Now is the perfect time to use fall promotion ideas to help your online store stand out during the holiday season.

Whether it’s building up your email list or creating themed holiday content, fall promotions ensure your business doesn’t get left behind during the most profitable shopping season of the year.

9 Fall Marketing Ideas for Online Store Owners

Fall gives us cooler weather, pumpkin-spice lattes, and perhaps the greatest gift of them all: the holiday shopping season.

From local festivals to online shopping events dedicated to supporting small business owners, now is your time to shine — and rake in the revenue like fall leaves.

But if you want to see an increase in sales, you’re going to need a plan. Use the fall marketing ideas below to create a targeted seasonal strategy for your small business.

1. Identify Your Main Marketing Targets

Fall might be filled with bountiful opportunities for marketing campaigns — but unlike Pokémon, the goal is not to catch ‘em all.

Depending on what you sell and your target market, you might want to set your sights on some of the following major — and minor — dates.

Halloween (10/31/24)

47% of consumers keep their eyes open for good Halloween deals beginning in September, says National Retail Federation.

Use this Halloween marketing guide to create a plan of attack if this is a profitable holiday for your business.

Thanksgiving (11/28/24)

180 million people shopped in the five-day span between Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday in 2022, making this a boon for online sellers. Keep in mind that early-bird shoppers expect Black Friday deals to go live by midnight on Thanksgiving.

If you need help creating a strategy, use these Thanksgiving marketing ideas.

Black Friday (11/29/24)

While chains tend to dominate Black Friday, small businesses can stand out to existing customers (and new customers too!) with early-bird deals that start a week before the big day.

Small Business Saturday (11/30/24)

76% of consumers shopped over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in 2022. More importantly, 77% of Saturday shoppers indicated they shopped specifically for Small Business Saturday. 

But the key to increasing sales on this day is ensuring shoppers know you’re a small business. Highlight this fact everywhere, from social media graphics to your website.

Cyber Monday (12/02/24)

Shoppers are looking for exceptional deals on this day, as well as an outstanding mobile experience. 63.9 million people shopped on Cyber Monday in 2022, making this a potentially very profitable day for online sellers.

National Free Shipping Day (12/14/24)

While there’s an argument to be made for offering free shipping as a part of your seasonal strategy as a whole, you can also take part in Free Shipping Day regardless.

Use the hashtag #freeshippingday and promote this deal heavily through all your normal channels.

Holiday Shopping (Ongoing)

In 2022, 56% of consumers started holiday shopping in October. This means your holiday marketing strategy should be complete by early September to ensure you reap the benefits.

In addition to the big fall holidays, you can also hold shopping promotions for an end-of-season sale, a final summer sale, the first day of fall, and more.

2. Decide on Your Deals

How will your local business attract shoppers this fall? By making them an offer they can’t refuse!

In fact, 80% of consumers expect free shipping when spending a certain amount, and 66% expect it with every order regardless of how much they spend, according to Jungle Scout’s consumer trends report.

What does this tell you? That shipping needs to be at the forefront of your seasonal strategy.

Whether you offer free shipping intermittently or throughout, it can help e-commerce business owners get more sales throughout fall and winter. You may also want to consider a guaranteed delivery promotion in December to appeal to last-minute holiday shoppers.

And while big-box stores can offer rock-bottom pricing on products with 50% off sales, local business owners may not have the luxury.

Get your business noticed with limited-time offers of free gift wrapping or a small gift with purchase instead. You can also try smaller discounts for the fall season, like 10% off all orders or a gift card with purchase (for example: spend $75 get a $10 gift card for a return purchase).

3. Add a Bit of Seasonal Flavor

No matter how you personally feel about pumpkin spice — it’s a popular, well, everything for fall. Which means you might want to think about incorporating it (or another fall theme) into your product line.

Whether it’s a pumpkin-scented candle or a face mask made with pumpkin, it can be a smart marketing move to match your product to the season or come up with fall advertising slogans.

Keep in mind that creating something specifically for fall isn’t the only option — you can also just switch up how you promote your products.

Here’s how to incorporate fall marketing ideas into your product line for the holiday season:

• If you sell apparel, hold a sale on sweaters to celebrate the return of “sweater weather.”
• Offer 31% off the week leading up to Halloween using a themed discount code.
• Hold a Small Business Saturday promotion where customers who buy from you on this day and post their purchase on social media (and use dedicated fall hashtags) will get $5 off their next purchase.
• If you make homemade pet treats, bundle up best-selling flavors and call the gift package “Santa’s Good Boy.”

4. Have a Local Presence

Go local with your marketing ideas this fall season. From farmer’s markets to holiday shopping events, fall events of all kinds will occur throughout the fall season.

And since building a local presence can increase your exposure and sales, getting a booth at a festival (or two) in your city could be beneficial to your business.

Here’s how:

• Set up Google Alerts with ‘daily’ frequency so you don’t miss any announcements
• Check with your local association (if you’re a member)
• Follow local event and business websites on social media so you can easily keep track of happenings in your city

Once you’ve got a few festival prospects, research past attendees to ensure they’re in your target market and compare booth pricing. If your budget is low, post in forums for the event or on the Facebook event page to see if anyone would be interested in sharing space with you.

If your business is service-based, consider partnering with a product-based business owner selling at a festival with a raffle. The prize could be a free service from you or a service up to X amount. (In exchange for their email address, of course.)

5. Bulk Up Your Email-Subscriber List

Email marketing (when done right) is a money-making tactic for businesses of all sizes. In fact, you can expect an average return of $36 for every dollar you spend on email marketing.

But you’re going to need subscribers if you want to see that kind of ROI with your fall promotional ideas.

From gift guides to sale announcements, a strong subscriber list will see you through the end of the holiday shopping season and hopefully account for a significant number of transactions.

Follow these steps to get more subscribers quickly for your fall promotions:

• Research the best-performing pages on your website/blog — look for the ones with the highest traffic and longest time on site.
• Design popups, alerts, page takeovers, and more for each of your top pages using a tool like Hello Bar to collect email addresses for email newsletters. Describe the value readers will get by signing up in detail to help build up your list faster.
• Click-triggers (a hyperlink within the content of a blog post or in site content) can also perform well if you can offer a content upgrade in exchange for an email address (like a checklist, ebook, or how-to guide). Readers will provide their email address in exchange for gated content if they see the value.
• Create newsletters and product emails throughout the season to take advantage of your new subscribers and get more sales.

6. Make Engaging Graphics

Graphics are an important part of any seasonal strategy. and you’ll probably end up needing quite a few, from Facebook covers and Pinterest graphics to photo collages (for gift guides) and blog banners.

But if you don’t have the funds to hire a pro, you’ll have to get graphical yourself. Luckily, there are a couple of affordable sites that let anyone make a variety of graphics that look professional enough to share.

Here are a few fall marketing ideas for graphics:

Canva

Canva has a free option that will work well for most business owners looking to create a variety of graphics from professional templates. If you need more features/options, like the ability to upload custom font, check out their Canva Pro option, which is $119.99 per year.

PicMonkey

PicMonkey is $72 per year (and a good choice if you need to do a lot of quick resizing/file-size reduction) and allows you to create graphics from templates.

If stock images are what you’re after, try these sites:

Unsplash

The best free site out there (in my opinion) for great shots that never look ‘stock.’ Crediting the photographer is appreciated but not required. Selection is limited, but it’s an awesome option when it works!

Burst

Burst by Shopify is another great site for free stock photos that are both attractive and professional. However, you can’t choose between small, medium, and large sizes like with Unsplash — you can only select low or high resolution.

High resolution often means massive file sizes that can slow down your blog, so resizing and reducing file size is a must.

Stocksy

You’ll find artistic, beautifully shot images at Stocksy that rival anything you’d find over at Getty or another stock site. However, if you use a lot of images, a plan at Getty would be more affordable than buying individually on Stocksy since they charge by image size ($15–$125 per image).

7. Use Seasonal Language

You don’t need seasonal products to take part in marketing ideas for fall. Instead, use seasonal language on social media throughout the holiday season — just switch it up depending on the holiday or event that week or month.

Here are some examples for fall holidays you can use in posts or stories (or both), along with photos of products or services:

• September: Last day of summer (9/22/23) – “Say goodbye to summer with our final summer sale. Get 50% off all our hot-weather favorites.”
• October: Halloween – “We’re scaring up deals this October that you won’t want to miss. DM us now for a new discount code every week!”
• November: Small Business Saturday – “We’re a proud local business, and we appreciate every single one of our customers. Take 10% off your order Thanksgiving weekend with the promo code LOCALLOVE.”
• November: Thanksgiving – “We’re giving thanks for our customers all November long. Use promo code THX for 15% off any order over $50.”
• December: Christmas – “Yule love these savings — take 25% off all orders today only!” or “Dread holiday shopping? Let us make it easier on you and your wallet. Buy any item from one of our gift guides and get 25% off now through Dec. 25.”

Seasonal Marketing Language Ideas

Still need more help? Here’s a list of verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and nouns for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas/holidays. Choose a word and work it into a themed social post, blog content, or email subject line.

For example: If you chose the word “bewitching” for Halloween, your email subject line could be “15% off bewitching baubles — today only 🔮!” or if you chose “yule” for Christmas, you could use “Yule love these festive deals 🎄”

Halloween	Thanksgiving	Christmas/Holiday
Fa-boo-lous	Thankful	Cheer
Wicked	Grateful	Merry
Fang-tastic	Appreciative	Yule
Spooky	Gobble	Magic
Bewitching	Baste	Sparkle
Freaky	Feast	Joy
Creepy	Carve	Festive
Scary-good	Pumpkin	Holly jolly
Frighteningly	Stuffed	Snow
Witchy	Churn	Mistletoe
Haunting	Drum	Naughty/nice
Chilling	Pluck	Deck

8. Create Seasonal Content

You gotta love free fall marketing ideas that are just as effective as some paid tactics, right? From social media sites like Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and Facebook, to interactive content like quizzes and polls, you have ample opportunities to use seasonal content in your autumn marketing campaigns this year.

Use these fall marketing ideas to get started:

Make Fall-Themed Products

Create special fall products and promote them on social media channels — but don’t just post on your timeline. Use stories and TikTok videos to engage your followers and highlight these products individually. Link each story to your online store, where followers can instantly buy each item.

Create Themed Content

Use a tool like Woobox to create engaging seasonal content, like quizzes, for your followers.

Create quizzes like “Find the perfect gift for your [parent, partner, cat, dog, friend, sibling, etc.]” and polls to find out what your existing customers (and new customers) would like to see from your business this holiday season and share it on your blog, social media channels, and email newsletter.

Write Seasonal Blog Posts

Create seasonal blog posts that teach, inform, and entertain (not just sell). For example, if you sell jewelry, do a mix of promotional content and non-promotional.

Think: “10 Trendy Winter Accessories You’ll Want to Buy Immediately” (promotional) and “5 Chic Ways to Style Chunky Chain Necklaces This Fall” (non-promotional, but you should include a blog banner somewhere in your post that links to your online store).

9. Consider Paid Advertising

If you really want to see sales skyrocket this autumn season and throughout the winter holidays, you should budget for paid ads. Choose whichever social media accounts make sense for your business, but Facebook and Pinterest make paid advertising pretty simple, even if you’ve never used it before.

Here are some tips for a successful fall advertising campaign:

Set Clear Goals

Define your fall advertising goals, such as increasing website traffic by 20% and achieving a 5% conversion rate during the campaign.

Target the Right Audience

Use Facebook Ads Manager to target your ideal customers. For example, if you sell workout clothes, you might target women between 25-45 years old, interested in fitness and wellness, who have made purchases from similar online stores in the past six months.

Leverage Retargeting

Set up dynamic product ads on Google Ads to remind users of specific products they viewed on your website but didn’t purchase, offering a 10% discount to encourage conversion.

Create Compelling Ad Creative

Design visually appealing carousel ads showcasing your best-selling holiday gift sets with festive visuals and ad copy emphasizing the joy of gifting.

Optimize Landing Pages

Create dedicated landing pages for each product category with clear CTAs, product descriptions, and a user-friendly checkout process for your fall advertising campaign.

Offer Exclusive Deals and Discounts

Launch a “12 Days of Christmas” campaign, offering a different daily deal on popular products, along with a “Spend $100, Get Free Shipping” promotion throughout the holiday season.

Promote Gift Guides

Showcase a “Holiday Gift Guide for [Tech, Food, Wellness, Pet, Book, Makeup, etc.] Lovers” on your website and promote it through Instagram Story ads.

Email Marketing Integration

Send personalized emails to customers who abandoned their carts, offering a one-time 15% discount to encourage them to complete their purchase as part of your fall advertising campaign.

Fall Into More Profit This Year 🍂

Now is the perfect time to put your fall marketing strategy together to ensure you see more profit with the upcoming holidays. Use these promotion ideas to encourage customers to do their holiday shopping with you throughout fall and winter.

With a seasonal marketing strategy all mapped out (and an iconic pumpkin-spice latte in your hand), this just might be the most profitable fall of them all!