Instead of simply including an elf in your Christmas creative, turn the character into part of the promotion. Hide an elf on your website and reward visitors who find it, challenge your Instagram followers to spot where it is hiding, invite customers to share their own festive scenes, or bring the experience into your physical stores.
In this article, we explore five Elf on the Shelf marketing ideas that brands can adapt to generate website traffic, user-generated content, social media engagement, recurring participation, and store visits with Easypromos.
Why Use an Elf-Themed Campaign at Christmas?
Elf on the Shelf is becoming an increasingly recognizable Christmas trend, which gives brands a timely theme that audiences already understand. The concept is distinctive because people expect the elf to move, hide, create surprises, and appear in a new setting throughout December, making it naturally suited to interactive and recurring campaign mechanics.
The idea originated in the United States in 2005, when Carol Aebersold and her daughters turned a family holiday tradition into The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition, a children’s picture book sold with a Scout Elf figure. The book shared their family tradition of the elf appearing in a different place each day with a much wider audience. Since then, the concept has expanded internationally, with families around the world adopting the tradition and creating their own playful elf scenes throughout the Christmas season.
That behavior translates naturally into interactive marketing. Finding the elf, voting on festive scenes, returning for a new challenge, or following its latest activity are simple mechanics that audiences can immediately understand. With Easypromos, brands can turn those familiar behaviors into Christmas campaigns designed to generate social interaction, website traffic, repeat participation, user-generated content, or visits to physical stores.
Below are five ways to turn the concept into an interactive Christmas promotion.
How to Turn Elf on the Shelf Into an Interactive Marketing Campaign
1. Hide an Elf on Your Website and Reward Visitors Who Find It
Turn your website into a simple Christmas treasure hunt by hiding an elf image on one of its pages. Encourage visitors to explore the site and look for the character, using clues through social media, email, or other campaign channels to help them along the way.
Make the elf clickable so that finding it unlocks the next stage of the promotion. The image can link directly to a promotion where visitors register to enter a giveaway, participate in an Instant Win promotion, or receive a discount or coupon.
For example, an ecommerce brand could hide the elf somewhere within a particular product category and use social media to publish clues about its location. Participants explore the website until they find the elf, click it, and access the promotion.
This approach turns the search itself into part of the campaign while driving more visits to the website, increasing time spent on page, and directing attention toward specific products, pages, or content the brand wants customers to discover.
2. Invite Customers to Share and Vote for Their Favorite Elf Christmas Scene
Turn the elf theme into user-generated content by inviting customers to create their own festive scene. Participants could photograph their decorated living room, Christmas tree, office, storefront, or another seasonal setting with an elf incorporated somewhere into the image.
With an Online Voting Contest, participants submit their photos to a public gallery where visitors can browse the different Christmas scenes and vote for their favorites. The elf could be hidden or not, but the objective is that the elf provides a common creative theme for all the entries.
Voting adds another layer of participation beyond the initial submission. Entrants can share their individual gallery entry with friends and family to encourage votes, helping the campaign reach audiences beyond the brand’s existing community.
To increase participation further, offer incentives to both groups: reward participants who upload photos and run a separate prize drawing among voters. This gives people a reason to contribute content as well as return to the gallery and take part in the voting.
The final winner could be determined entirely by public voting, selected by a jury, chosen through a random drawing among eligible entries, or decided using a combination of these methods.
Try our Christmas Decoration Online Voting Contest demo to experience the promotion from a participant’s perspective.
3. Create a Recurring Find-the-Elf Christmas Challenge
Instead of asking participants to find the elf once, turn the idea into a recurring Christmas challenge with a new hiding place to discover over several days.
Create a series of Hidden Objects games featuring different festive scenes and hide the elf in a new location in each one. Participants might search a Christmas market one day, a toy shop the next, and Santa’s workshop later in the campaign.
With Easypromos, you can create a multi-stage promotion that divides the campaign into separate stages, allowing participants to return and complete a new challenge at each one. For example, you can organize the experience as a Multi-Game promotion running a short series of challenges or extending the campaign across the full 24 days leading up to Christmas.
The recurring format gives participants a reason to return rather than completing the entire campaign in a single visit. Brands can reward participation in individual challenges, recognize participants who complete several games, or enter eligible participants into a final prize drawing.
This makes the idea particularly useful for Christmas campaigns focused on repeat engagement and maintaining audience attention throughout December.
Want to see how a recurring Elf on the Shelf campaign could work? Try our Elf on the Shelf Multi-Game demo and explore how several Christmas challenges can be combined into one interactive experience.
4. Run a Find-the-Elf Instagram Giveaway Through DMs
A find-the-elf challenge also works well on Instagram, but asking participants to post the answer in the comments creates an obvious problem: once somebody identifies the elf’s location, everyone else can see it.
Instagram Messaging Automations provide a way around this. Publish an image or Reel with an elf hidden somewhere in the creative and ask followers to interact with the post to participate. An automated direct message can then invite them to submit their answer privately.
For example, participants could comment FOUND IT on the giveaway post. This triggers an automatic DM asking them where the elf is hiding. Participants reply through the private conversation rather than revealing the answer publicly.
This setup combines the visibility generated by comments on the Instagram post with a private participation experience through DMs. The automated conversation can also be used to confirm participation, provide additional campaign information, send participants to a registration page, or deliver a reward.
5. Send Customers on an In-Store Elf Hunt
Take the campaign offline by hiding an elf inside a physical store and challenging customers to find it during their visit.
Once they locate the elf, invite them to access an Easypromos promotion and answer a simple question such as “Where is the elf hiding?”, with several possible answers to choose from. Add a geolocation requirement to verify that participants are physically present at one of the authorized locations when they take part.
This mechanic can work particularly well for retailers, supermarkets, shopping centers, restaurants, and businesses with multiple locations. A retail chain could place an elf in each participating store, for example, while using social media or email to announce the campaign and encourage customers to visit their nearest location.
Participants who answer correctly can be entered into a prize drawing or automatically receive a reward such as a coupon or discount.
The result is an online-to-offline Christmas campaign in which finding the elf provides a playful reason to visit the physical location, while geolocation validates the visit and the digital promotion manages participation and rewards.
How to Create an Elf-Themed Christmas Promotion
Once you’ve chosen your campaign idea, define the objective, participation flow, reward, and promotion plan before launch.
- Define Your Campaign Objective
Decide whether you want to drive website traffic, generate user-generated content, increase Instagram engagement, encourage repeat participation, or attract customers to physical locations. The objective will determine the most suitable mechanic.
- Decide Where Participants Will Interact With the Elf
Choose where the campaign will happen: on your website, Instagram, an interactive game, a public gallery, or inside a physical store. For recurring campaigns, plan how the elf’s location or challenge will change over time.
- Define the Participation Mechanic
Keep the action simple and closely connected to the concept. Participants might find and click the elf, upload a festive photo, vote for an entry, solve a Hidden Objects challenge, answer privately through Instagram DMs, or prove they found the elf in-store.
- Choose the Reward
The prize is one of the main reasons people decide to participate, so choose an incentive that is relevant to your audience and communicate it clearly throughout the campaign. Eligible participants can enter a random drawing, receive a coupon or discount, or win an Instant Win prize from your products or services.
- Create and Customize the Promotion
Build the campaign with the Easypromos product that fits your mechanic and customize the design, registration fields, rules, prizes, and winner selection process to match your Christmas campaign. You can also connect the promotion with your CRM, loyalty program, or other business systems to centralize participant data, automate rewards, and integrate the campaign with your existing technology stack.
- Promote the Campaign Across Your Channels
Use social media, email, your website, QR codes, and physical signage to explain the challenge and drive participation. For recurring campaigns, publish new clues or elf updates to encourage participants to return.
- Manage Winners and Rewards
Manage the reward according to your campaign mechanic. For giveaways, Easypromos can select winners and alternates randomly, publish the results, generate a Certificate of Validity, and automatically send winners a Claim Your Prize form to collect the information needed for prize delivery. For guaranteed rewards, you can distribute digital coupons, codes, or other digital rewards automatically. Easypromos can also integrate with loyalty systems so participation can trigger rewards such as points, stamps, or other benefits within the brand’s existing loyalty program.
- Analyze the Results
Review participation, traffic sources, devices, and other campaign data available in Easypromos to understand what worked and apply those insights to future promotions.
Turn Your Christmas Elf Into an Interactive Campaign
An elf can do more than appear in your Christmas content. Give customers something to do with the idea and it can become a campaign that encourages website exploration, generates user-generated content, drives social media interaction, brings participants back throughout December, or motivates visits to physical locations.
With Easypromos, you can turn these Elf on the Shelf-inspired ideas into interactive promotions with games, voting, giveaways, Instagram Messaging Automations, participant geolocation, rewards, and other participation mechanics. Promotions can also integrate with your CRM, loyalty program, or other business systems to connect participation data and rewards with your existing technology stack.
Have an elf-themed Christmas campaign in mind? Contact us via live chat or request a video call to discuss your idea. We’ll be happy to help you choose the right mechanic and participation flow for your campaign.
