Having had its beginning as a religious holiday, nowadays, St. Patrick’s Day is a celebration becoming popular all over the world. It marks the beginning of spring and promotes Irish heritage and parties. For merchants of most business sectors, March 17th is a huge opportunity to boost sales and attract buyers as an estimated $5.9* billions are to be spent on the celebration and events this day.

St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated by 149 million people. It paves the way for your business to make this day lucrative. For sparking some creativity, we’ve gathered several St. Patrick’s Day marketing ideas to make your business prepared.

All You Should Know about St Patrick’s Day

• 82%* of St. Patrick’s Day customers are going to wear green apparel for celebration.
• The highest average spending category among the holiday participants is 25 to 34-year-olds. They are planning to spend $42* to participate in spending patterns.
• The most popular products that consumers will spend on are food (50%), beverages (41%), apparel items to wear for St. Patty’s (31%), decorations (26%), candy purchases (16%)*.
• 73%* of buyers aged 18-24 are more likely to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, choosing to go out for fun.
• It is observed a 137% increase in consumer spending on this holiday in the last 10 years in the US.
• 13 million pints of Guinness are consumed worldwide on St. Patrick’s Day.

Following St. Patrick’s Day statistics, you should try hard when implementing holiday marketing ideas for your business to make your customers associate your brand with a positive experience and differentiate yourself from competitors.

St. Patrick’s Day Marketing Ideas 

Create St. Patrick’s Day Atmosphere

It is possible to reflect the upcoming holiday and create a festive mood for your buyers by decorating your store properly. As green is the main color of St. Patrick’s Day, you can sparingly use it to create a certain atmosphere on your website staying true to your company’s brand. With the help of holiday-themed images and banners with St. Patty’s phrases like ‘Lucky’, ‘Leprechaun’, or others you can also stay festive. Otherwise, you can add some falling effects or imagery as gold pots, shamrocks, etc. One more way to add some St. Patrick’s Day spirit to your store is to make temporary edits to your logo, just like Google does it.

When entering the Dollar Tree store, hardly any customer won’t feel the upcoming celebration. The retailer has used green color intensively, as well as St. Patrick’s Day-themed images, shamrocks, and leprechauns.

Focus on Green Merch

Another St. Patrick’s Day marketing idea is to focus on the green as it is a huge part of the holiday. For businesses selling green apparel, it’s a great opportunity to increase profits and attract customers by creating certain holiday-themed categories of green products and displaying them on the homepage. 

For retailers that don’t have anything related to St. Patrick’s Day, promoting green merch could be a solution. For example, selling items with a multi-color choice, you can offer a discount or any attractive options such as free shipping or a small gift for a green one. The easiest way to implement product variations in a Shopify-based store is with the help of the Advanced Product Options plugin by MageWorx. 

Offer Customization

St. Patrick’s Day is a day associated with funny slogans and creative designs of the holiday-themed stuff. The wearer of the most outstanding designs and funny statements can win during the celebration. As 80% of consumers are ready to pay for a personalized experience, offer your buyers to customize the goods added to their shopping carts. It will help increase your St. Patrick’s Day sales. For instance, you can provide shoppers with an option to choose from a list of printouts with holiday-themed images or funny slogans, or your buyers can select their own design.

Create St. Patrick’s Day Content on Social Media

In the modern world, it’s crucial to be social. Only then you’ll be able to attract more followers and subscribers and, as a result, extend the number of potential customers. The best way to do it on St. Patty’s is to create fun content and share it on your site and social media. It can be a list of creative ideas for the best slogans or designs for their holiday apparel. Otherwise, it can be some funny video of your staff celebrating this day or dancing to Irish music. The funnier your content, the more chances for it to be shareable on social media and become noticed by potential buyers.

Guinness is quite good at creating funny St. Patrick’s Day content. The humorous video ‘Round up your mates for a Guinness’ is one of the best examples.

Hold a Contest 

‘Luck’ is one of the main themes of St. Patrick’s Day. Thus, one of the surest ways to boost brand awareness and sales is to hold holiday contests. To entice your customers to participate, you should offer a reward that is worth it. For example, it can be a free add-on, gift certificate, or a coupon, promotional items like a special mug with St. Patrick’s Day print, etc.  

There are a great number of ideas for the holiday-themed contests. One of them is for the best St. Patrick’s Day outfit. Participants are offered to share their photos with the tag of your brand. Otherwise, it can be a tag-to-win contest according to which customers should leave a comment or tag a friend under your special post to have a chance to win. ‘Like the post’ contest is also a simple way to select a random winner. To increase your social media following, you can hold a ‘Hashtag’ contest. 

For example, in 2018, Goody Hair offered its subscribers to tag people they feel lucky to call besties in the comments, be @goddyhair followers, and have a chance to win a $50 prize package from the retailer. 

Motivate Customers with St. Patrick’s Day Freebies and FOMO

Provide your consumers with some freebies to motivate them to shop in your store on St. Patty’s. According to Inc, 80% of buyers make purchases even from an unknown brand if they are offered a discount. Thus, giving your consumers a St. Patrick’s Day discount, you increase your chances for more sales this day. As a holiday idea, you can give a discount only for green merch. 

Using time-sensitive offers is also an effective St. Patrick’s marketing idea. For instance, you can use incentives like ‘Shop March 17th before 5 PM to get 25% off, after 5 PM to receive 20%’. Fear of missing out is a great stimulus for buyers to make purchases.  

You can also provide St. Patrick’s Day customers with some small gifts or free shipping just this day. 

To make your offers more attractive and noticeable, create motivation banners with the help of the Free Shipping and Promo Bars app by MageWorx.

Don’t Forget about Holiday-Themed Emails

Email marketing is an effective tool to connect with your buyers, VIPs in particular, and provide them with discount codes, special offers, and giveaways. St. Patrick’s Day isn’t an exception. 

In its St. Patrick’s Day emails, 47 Brand makes a tempting offer to ‘buy one Shamrock ‘47 CLEAN UP, get one free’. Moreover, the merchant guarantees delivery in time for the holiday.

Final Thoughts

In spite of the fact that St. Patrick’s Day isn’t a gift-giving holiday, there are still a lot of opportunities to come up with creative ideas and make your business relevant to the celebration as well as increase customer engagement. When implementing the offered St. Patrick’s marketing ideas in your store, you’ll be able to make this day even more profitable.

What of the St. Patrick’s marketing ideas are you going to implement? Share your ideas with us.
* All the data are taken from Muchneeded.com.