Holiday Sampling Campaigns
The Christmas season is the biggest opportunity of the year for brands to reach new customers. Shoppers are actively seeking festive treats, beauty products, and gifts, making it the ideal time to run Christmas sampling campaigns. But with competition high, success depends on one thing: planning early.
At Gems Sampling, we specialise in helping brands deliver high-performing holiday sampling campaigns. Here’s why early preparation is essential to ensuring your brand stands out.
Secure Prime Time Slots
The most valuable sampling time slots during the festive period get snapped up fast – especially those that coincide with when consumers are actively shopping. But it’s not just December in which you need to think about driving festive shopping, in fact, over 40% of consumers have started ticking items off their list by September1 with a whopping 88% wanting holiday offers early, and 59% preferring them more than a month in advance2. Locking in your sampling during these key moments during the build-up to the season ensures your product reaches shoppers when they’re in “buy mode.”
Not only that, but a well-timed and executed campaign during the final key weeks before the big day can have an oversized impact on consumers, whether they’re a forgetful boyfriend looking for a last minute gift, or a parent looking to surprise their family with something new – getting brand-to-hand will take away any hesitance.
Build in Time for Creative & Logistics
Strategic planning gives your campaign the breathing room it needs – whether that’s creative, messaging, or logistics. Ahead-of-season planning lets you craft campaigns that are cohesive, high quality, and far ahead of competitors3. As anyone who’s ordered something a little too close to the big day itself can attest, everyone from suppliers to couriers are stretched, meaning delays are inevitable. Booking in holiday sampling campaigns early ensures all these fears are negated, and you can rest assured that your activation will have maximum impact on consumers.
Collect Actionable Data & Feedback
Whether you’re looking to gather real feedback, adapt messaging, and optimize your campaign before peak season hits – or want to understand what Christmas shoppers are thinking in real-time – consumer data and feedback are priceless in ensuring you’re able to drive sales and awareness of your product. With consumers begin shopping so early, and continuing their shopping throughout the festive season, it’s important to understand what you need and want to learn about your potential customers at each stage.
At Gems Sampling, we have a team of data-experts just waiting to help you create the perfect campaign, through any channel, and will take you through every step of the process to ensure you gather the information you need to make the biggest impact.
Win Attention in a Crowded Holiday Market
The festive season is the noisiest time of the year for marketing. Shoppers are bombarded with endless sales, adverts, and brand messages. That’s where sampling has a huge advantage. While an advert might grab attention for a second, actually getting your brand into a consumer’s hand creates a memorable, tangible experience that is far more likely to lead to future purchase. Research consistently shows that product trial drives conversion at a much higher rate than advertising alone, with 89% of our sampling network surveyed stating they’ve purchased one or more of the products sampled through us in the last year.
And the impact doesn’t stop at Christmas Day. Retailers reported 25% more conversions after Christmas in 2024, showing that shoppers keep spending into the new year4. Extending your sampling strategy to capture both the pre-Christmas rush and the post-holiday sales window means your brand maximises exposure during the most profitable period of the year.
Ready to Plan?
At Gems Sampling, we love helping brands create memorable festive campaigns that land in exactly the right hands. Whether you want to reach office teams, students, or consumers out-of-home, we’ll make sure your product makes a big impact this Christmas.
📩 Let’s talk about how we can bring your Christmas sampling campaign to life.
🔑 See our key-features and how they help elevate any activation
📈Understand the impact sampling can have and the results it’s driven for brands like yours
Footnotes
- https://research.mountain.com/trends/2024-advertisers-are-capitalizing-on-christmas-creep/ ↩︎
- https://www.mytotalretail.com/article/engage-early-for-holiday-marketing-success/ ↩︎
- https://www.dionmarketing.com/blog/2025/8/15/why-it-pays-to-plan-your-holiday-marketing-ahead-of-time ↩︎
- https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en/blog/post/may-2025/holiday-2024-wrapped-advertising-trends-that-defined-the-season?utm_source=chatgpt.com ↩︎
