How Retailers Can Leverage the Calendar as a Marketing Tool This Holiday Season

With the holiday shopping season upon us, retailers are planning the best ways they know how to connect with consumers and build brand relationships that will extend beyond a single purchase — including, ideally, well after the holidays have come and gone.

The rub for retailers? Many embrace the same consumer outreach strategies as one another, creating a glut of similar tactics that come across to shoppers as white noise during the busy holiday season. Or retailers may spend big money to rise above the competition for what winds up amounting to incremental results in penetrating or reaching a wider target audience.

However, there are simpler, more affordable ways to draw, and hold, the attention of shoppers that can be easily integrated into your existing holiday marketing strategies. To cut through the clutter of the competition, consider leveraging a resource that is ubiquitous across both your consumer base and your workforce, an intuitive tool that each of us turns to multiple times every day: the calendar.

The Importance of Embracing All Platforms

Consumers are embracing an omnichannel approach to holiday shopping, with 76 percent of U.S. consumers expected to use three or more media channels when holiday shopping in 2024. For brands, this makes maintaining a consistent and connected experience across all platforms — mobile, desktop and in-store — critical to holiday sales.

Even in our modern digital age, one of the most effective ways retailers can elevate their holiday marketing is by hosting engaging in-store events, such as pop-up shops, exclusive product launches and experiential showcases that drive foot traffic and build brand loyalty. Even today, getting customers through the doors of a brick-and-mortar store and into a branded and curated environment remains one of the best marketing tactics available to retailers.

But as valuable as that physical presence and foot traffic still is, the customer journey may start with an online purchase, a subscriber email or a visit to a retailer website. Additional tactics such as new product drops, customer reward programs and limited-time or day-of-only coupons can help retailers connect and create long-term relationships with consumers. The initial touchpoint — and often many in between — typically occurs on a computer, tablet or smartphone. And that’s the moment when the calendar can become a retailer’s best friend.

How the Calendar Marketing Tool Works

Whether it’s a pop-up or a product launch, photos with Santa or a toy train ride for the kids, retailers have plenty of options for enticing shoppers into their brick-and-mortar stores this holiday season. To ensure that these events are well-attended and successful, retailers can:

• Utilize calendar marketing tools to seamlessly promote in-store events across multiple platforms.
• Send timely reminders and updates to increase attendance.
• Use embeddable calendars to showcase specials and sales, with details outlining when offers begin or end. This tactic keeps your customers informed without requiring them to search for deals.
• Integrate event details with mobile and desktop shopping experiences to create a unified customer journey.
• Streamline event RSVPs and participation to boost engagement and ensure a smooth experience for attendees.

What’s more, adding this tool to the calendars of a retailer’s workforce reinforces the timing and importance of an event. And because new details or changes can be updated seamlessly across all users, the tool ensures a level of connectivity and quality control that no billboard or commercial can deliver. By including a simple, intuitive and flexible “add to my calendar” button to a web page or email, retailers are only a click away from placing their event — and their brand — front and center on the main switchboard of daily life for most every consumer.

Michael Nilsson is CEO and founder of AddEvent, a San Francisco-based software company that offers cutting-edge calendar, appointment and event management solutions to enhance customers’ event and appointment engagement.