Everyone’s favourite Irish holiday is just around the corner. While merry makers are busy searching for where the best place to score some green beer will be, online retailers should be busy preparing their marketing initiatives.

St. Patrick’s Day, believe it or not, is a huge shopping holiday. In the U.S alone, Americans spend over 4 billion dollars on decorations, drinking and of course, consumer products. This presents a huge opportunity for your eCommerce business. The good news is that you don’t have to be a seller of bagpipes or Guinness beer to join in. All you need to do is offer fun contests with a gaelic spin.

To get you started, we’ve rounded up a few St. Patrick’s Day contest ideas your customers will love.

Random Draw Contest

The four-leaf clover is a rare variation of the common three-leaf clover and according to Irish folklore, such clovers bring good luck. Each separate clover leaf is believed to represent something: the first is for faith, the second is for hope, the third is for love, and the fourth is for luck. It’s also been said that if a clover is consumed, a genie will appear to grant three wishes.

One clever online retailer utilized the story of the four leaf clover for their St. Patrick’s Day sweepstakes contest. JewelScent, an eCommerce business selling products such as candles, hand soaps, and body scrubs that contain jewels inside, made their contest extremely simple. They chose to give away a candle to “four lucky” entrants.

Setting up a contest like this is an easy, low-cost and low risk marketing initiative; perfect for collecting email addresses for future email marketing.

Instagram Hashtag Contest

St. Patrick’s Day is an extremely social holiday as large crowds gather at local pubs and fairs to celebrate all things Irish. To prove this point, there’s currently over 2.1 million results that appear when searching for #stpatricksday on Instagram. Then of course there’s offshoots of that: #stpatricks #stpatricksday2016 #stpattysday etc. So an Instagram hashtag contest is perfect for online retailers selling something visually appealing.

The ASPCA created an engaging St. Patrick’s Day Instagram contest called “One Lucky Pet”. While they’re not an online retailer, their hashtag contest was brilliant and would be perfect for eCommerce merchants selling products for animals.

People love sharing their pets on Instagram as well as admiring other animal lovers’ fur babies. It’s the reason why “Cats of Instagram” and “Dogs of Instagram” are two of the most popular accounts on the social network.

So for their contest The ASPCA encouraged their followers to share a photo of how lucky they were to have found their pet and use the unique hashtag #OneLuckyPet. The winners received a bag full of pet swag.

Facebook Contest

While green beer is commonly associated with St. Patrick’s Day, there’s many more palatable Irish drinks and eats. In fact, the Irish cuisine is known to be quite hearty and delicious. And on St. Patty’s day you can bet that from stews to puffed pastries and of course the classic Shepherd’s Pie, will be cooking in kitchens everywhere.

This is a great opportunity for online retailers selling anything food related as well as household items or kitchenware, to run a Facebook contest to engage their current audience and attain new customers.

Using Irish food as a theme, create a recipe contest that allows participants to upload videos and photos of their favourite recipes. Encourage your community to involve friends and family and allow customers and visitors to vote on their favourite recipes. Make sure to pick a unique hashtag for the contest so contestants can follow along.

Contest Time

Well blimey, that’s the end of our list. But as you now know, creating a contest for St. Patrick’s Day isn’t as hard as finding a pot of gold or a four leaf clover. It’s quick, easy, and can be done with Strutta. However, if you’re still looking for a few more Irish ideas, check out our other “St. Patrick’s Day Contest Ideas” article.

Create your St. Patrick’s day contest with Strutta. You’ll be gobsmacked at how easy our marketing tools are. No foolin’.