How to Use Christmas Surveys to Boost Holiday Marketing Ideas and Promotions

Q: Why should businesses conduct Christmas surveys?

Businesses should conduct Christmas surveys for deeper insights into customer buying behavior during the festive season.

Q: How can small businesses use holiday promotion surveys effectively?

Small businesses can solicit the help of professionals like Sogolytics to manage their programs from start to finish. This approach is less costly in the long run with fewer trial-and-error actions.

Feeling festive? If you’re a small business owner, marketing professional, or customer experience managers looking to leverage Christmas surveys for holiday success, this post is for you! We’ll cover this topic of Christmas surveys from end to end to deliver insights into the processes, timing, software deployment, and questions that get results. This article is a must-read if your small business or enterprise relies on Christmas and other festive events to energize your sales revenue.

Why Christmas surveys are essential for successful holiday marketing

What are Christmas surveys?

Businesses want to measure customer trends, preferences, and perspectives before, during, and after Christmas to streamline their marketing strategies and succeed in an intensely competitive holiday season marketplace. Who and what falls into the broad Christmas-centric marketing category? They include event planners, e-commerce and brick-and-mortar retail, education entities, non-profit and charity organizations, gift specialists, gaming apps, and toy distributors (to mention a few of many).

Christmas surveys create valuable customer feedback based on straightforward questions, many requiring simple “Yes” or “No” responses or scale ratings, sometimes asking participants to volunteer their feelings or thoughts around shorter quantitative answers. The more you know about how your audience switches to the festive spirit, the more chance you have of connecting to the customer experience (CX) with your brand emerging as a leader.

Benefits of collecting customer feedback during the holidays

Holiday season shopping involves unique pain points that remain buried or significantly less prominent during the rest of the year. You want to pinpoint them, get in fast, and be ahead of the pack with solutions that address the problems and promise an enhanced CX. The latter includes travel hosting or funding events at hospitality centers (or homes), reserving holiday concerts, NFL games, and other activities. In short, Christmas surveys allow you to gain peak-season perspectives that bolster customer loyalty and retention long after the Christmas and New Year celebrations fade.

Here are a few pain point opportunities waiting for you to take advantage of:

Complex website navigation to the most exciting festive bargains.
Limited availability of high-demand lines.
Overcrowded traditional stores.
Pricing structures that unnecessarily erase swathes of potential customers from the buying opportunity.
Disappointing gift wrapping or card options.
Messaging that fails to engage prospects with unique or thoughtful gift concepts.
Erratic shipping and delivery when timing is crucial.
Selecting gifts in complex family relationships.
Hosting visitors and entertaining large gatherings.
Extra-sensitivity to loneliness and lack of family support.
Integration with travel and hospitality pressures.
Holiday to-do lists that become overwhelming.
Food and alcohol over-indulgence.

Pain points indicate stress, lifestyle disruption, inconvenience, and disconnection at various intensity levels, providing you with detected gaps – through superior survey insights and innovative solutions – to emerge a holiday season winner.

Holiday survey insights shape marketing strategy

The 2024 Deloitte holiday retail survey discovered that surveyed shoppers plan to bump their festive season purchases in 2024 by 8% (versus 2023), with double that growth rate (i.e., 16%) if one accounts for experiential budgeting. Deloitte’s ConsumerSignals data showed that product selection is likely to take a backseat to the CX quality driving the journey from October into 2025.

Undoubtedly, the cost-of-living squeeze on the tail-end of the high inflation spurt that arose soon after COVID-19 weighs on holiday shoppers to this day. Survey feedback at all income levels points to two notable trends:

Enhanced frugality consciousness
Prolific bargain-hunting.

As a result, navigating the shopping experience is significantly less impulsive than in previous years, with 75% of respondents intent on planning their festive journey through regional malls, strip centers, and e-commerce sites – a massive leap from 61% in 2023.

Where is the buying energy coming from?

The $100K to $199K income group spending 17% more (Y-on-Y).
Almost everyone (70% of respondents) entering the holiday phase knows prices are up and the extra budget dollars won’t buy more than last year.

What did Deloitte’s survey reveal about your competition’s thinking and holiday promotion ideas for small businesses?

Traffic online and through brick-and-mortar outlets will accelerate (80% agree).
Early promotions will create a push-pull effect (78% agree).
Direct gift spending will be flat, with a 9% bump (Y-on-Y) for party apparel and decorations in the cards.
Self-gifting (massive in previous years) will drop (compared to 2023) by 16%, with retailers promoting more affordable brands catching between 48 and 62% of buyers’ attention
Promotional events will create the most respondent interest (i.e., 75% versus 61% in 2023).
A flashing yellow light is that most retailers (76%) expect price to trump brand loyalty in an overwhelmingly value-centric marketplace, which means:
- Every business with a customer loyalty program must go the extra mile to consolidate its membership ranks.
- Relying on one media channel to carry the day will likely fail to deliver the expected results. In other words::
  - Omnichannel marketing is the name of the game for strategists wanting to capitalize on the festive season shopping wave coming our way.

Critical types of Christmas surveys for businesses

1: Pre-Holiday Surveys: Understanding Customer Expectations

These surveys – as the name implies – emerge before Christmas or Thanksgiving to create insights into how your customers and prospects are going to shop over the next three months. They aim at unearthing go-to resources, preferred journeys, feelings, and thoughts toward the upcoming holiday shopping period. “Forewarned is forearmed” is the mantra stamped on this research phase, allowing you to prepare your marketing and sales strategies better and more professionally.

Typical questions in pre-holiday surveys:

When do you expect to start your holiday shopping?
What’s your budget for:
- Gifts $_____
- Events and event accessories $_____
- Not sure, but my total budget is $________
How are you going to shop?
- Online ____%
- Traditional store shopping _____%
Do you intend to indulge yourself?
If so, for how much? $___________
How much do you intend to spend on others?
- In your family $______
- Friends $______
- Trusted service vendors $_____
- Workplace peers $________
Which are the five (or less) online or traditional stores you’re most likely to support during the holiday season?
1. __________________
2. __________________
3. __________________
4. __________________
5. __________________
What gift categories are you most likely to consider during the holiday season?
- Toys and games
- Hardware
- Home Decor
- Auto
- Apparel
- Footwear
- Jewelry
- Electronics
- Gift cards
- Other (explain) ____________________________________

Business Benefits:

Broad benefits emerge when you enter the holidays with the insights pre-seasonal surveys provide. They range from better inventory planning, speeding up distribution to meet identified deadlines, developing promotions with resonating messages, and more. The “more” includes:

Accurate customer segmentation.
Enhancing loyalty programs with meaningful incentives.
Structuring pricing policies to maximize ROI by generating volume while maintaining competitiveness.

2: In-Season Surveys: Real-Time Insights on Customer Experience

“Real-time surveys” during the holiday season aim to gauge customer sentiments and their impact on shopping behavior and detect significant deviations from pre-season predictions. This aspect of the survey program integrates with businesses’ ability to adapt to volatile trends around Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the ten days preceding Christmas, and other peak shopping periods.

Much depends on how much you know about the shoppers you’re surveying. For example:

Known loyalty program customers are significantly more receptive to specific brand questions around the discounts they’re encountering, the holiday promotions, and loyalty incentives in place.
On the other hand, surveys directed at prospects not yet in the customer ranks (or newly recruited) must be broader. Why? You can’t be sure your brand is even in their thinking.

Typical questions in the real-time holiday surveys:

TO PROSPECTS

Are you meeting your holiday budgets for:
- Gifts $_____ YES NO
- Events and event accessories $_____ YES NO
Where are you spending most of it:
- Online ____%
  - Which platforms?
  - _________
  - _________
  - _________
- Traditional store shopping _____%
  - Which stores?
  - _________
  - _________
  - _________
Which promotions are grabbing your attention?
- _________
- _________
- _________
How much are you spending on the following?
- Yourself
- Your family $______
- Friends $______
- Trusted service vendors $_____
- Workplace peers $________

In most cases, it simply involves changing the pre-season questions from “will you be spending” to “are you spending.”

TO ESTABLISHED CUSTOMERS

Are you buying (brand name or product category) this holiday season?
- If not, why not ______________
- If so, where are you buying it_____________
How much are (brand name) discounts helping your budget this holiday season?
- Rate it 0 to 10, where 10 is extraordinarily helpful.
- Can you tell us why you rated (brand name) the way you did?
How uniquely is (brand name) meeting your gifting needs this holiday season?
- Rate it 0 to 10, where 10 is exceptionally unique.
- Can you tell us why you rated (brand name) the way you did?

A seamless survey process depends on omnichannel adaptation with particular emphasis on mobiles, allowing shoppers to respond while shopping in real-time. Typical adjustment areas are pricing, promotions, inventory mobility, and customer support channels where flexibility and agility are vital considerations.

Everything highlighted above assumes customers and prospects participate in the surveys. However, they may find questionnaires popping up irritating or inconvenient during busy shopping, or if they do enter the process, they answer under pressure inaccurately without enough forethought to their responses (creating undesirable biases). Also, online traffic during the holiday season can slow down survey response rates. So, our best tips are:

Leverage the help of professional survey specialists like Sogolytics to position you in the best real-time data collection platforms with proven analysis capabilities.
Be realistic and keep your questions concise and specific to the insights you’re seeking.
Survey reminders through mobile push notifications and incentives (small gifts) connected to survey completions are indispensable motivators, encouraging survey participation during frenetic shopping.

3: Post-Holiday Surveys: Collecting Feedback for Future Improvement

Questions such as the following can help you plan better for 2026 and beyond:

How was our delivery speed in your recent holiday season purchase?
- Rate it 0 to 10 where 10 is extremely fast.
- Can you tell us why you rated (brand name) the way you did?
How was our customer support in your recent holiday season purchase?
- Rate it 0 to 10 where 10 is exemplary.
- Can you tell us why you rated (brand name) the way you did?
How well did (brand name) compete as a gift this past holiday season versus the following brands (rate it 0 to 10 where 10 is “highly competitive):
1. Brand A
2. Brand B
3. Brand C
Tell us more about why you ranked us as you did.

In more general post-holiday survey feedback, the following emerged in 2023:

Online and non-store sales increased by 8.2%, demonstrating e-commerce as an impactful holiday season option gaining rapid marketplace tension.
Irrespective of online or traditional shopping habits, the following product categories emerged as the leaders (with inflationary effect not discounted):
- Electronics and appliances – up 9.3%.
- Health and personal care – up 9%.
- Apparel and apparel accessories – up 3%.
Categories with staid or declining performances were as follows:
- Sporting goods – up 0.3%.
- Building materials and garden supplies – down 3.9%.
- Furniture and home furnishings – down 6.2%.