Every retail marketer knows the holiday rush all too well — and the pressure that comes with it. The ‘most wonderful time of the year’ also holds the biggest sales opportunity of the year.
That urgency often pushes teams toward generic, discount-heavy campaigns that may lift sales, but weaken margins, as they condition customers to wait for markdowns.
World Market took a different approach. They use promotional offers too, but focus on rewarding rather than discounting as the core principle of their holiday campaigns. Their goal is to encourage customers to join in and come back for more. By rewarding engagement instead of blanket discounts, the brand encouraged positive behavior and transformed seasonal shoppers into repeat customers, tripling reviews, deepening participation, and building a scalable and reusable campaign model with Marigold.
Here are four takeaways from World Market’s Multiply the Magic campaign that show how engagement turns a seasonal promotion into lasting loyalty.
Lesson 1: Extend the moment to encourage repeat visits
For most retail marketing teams, the holiday marketing campaign is a high-stakes sprint that fades fast. World Market recognized that the season’s potential extended beyond December.
“All of the seasonal holidays are really huge for us and growing year over year. But Christmas is really the biggest. So we decided we needed a promotion that would encourage people to come in and shop in September and October, build up value in their accounts, and then come back again and shop for Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
— Brian King, Sr. Dir. of Loyalty & CRM, World Market
By starting early, the team was able to stretch a narrow sales window into a months-long engagement opportunity.
The Multiply the Magic promotion created a foundation for stronger relationships by encouraging customers to participate early to build value ahead of peak shopping, and extended the season by creating repeat visits instead of one-time transactions.
Lesson 2: Replace discounts with engagements
Many retailers are caught on a promotions treadmill, competing for attention with one-size-fits-all discounts that erode margins and train customers to wait for markdowns.
World Market chose a smarter approach. Instead of “spend more, save more” thresholds, they focused on gamified engagement and limited-time, behavior-based rewards.
Using Marigold’s loyalty capabilities, they introduced punch cards, sweepstakes, and challenges that rewarded curiosity and participation.
“It’s a really competitive world out there,” says King, “so by bringing in more ways that customers can earn, giving them more ways to engage, and meeting their expectations to discover new things and share them with friends and family, we keep the experience fresh.”
This shifted passive engagement into active loyalty. Customers could earn rewards on non-transactional engagement like clicks, email or SMS interactions, and product discovery alongside purchases. For World Market, the focus on participation paid off and proved more powerful than the discount ladder.
Lesson 3: Connect seasonal success and year-round loyalty
Seasonal campaigns are often treated as stand-alone efforts, exciting but short-lived. This campaign demonstrated that a strong loyalty strategy has lasting benefits when seasonal and year-round campaigns work together.
Now that World Market focused their loyalty efforts on engagement, each interaction, from a click to a review, fed valuable data back into the system, strengthening customer profiles and fueling personalization for what comes next.
Their biggest long-term payoff came from product reviews. By incentivizing customers to share feedback, they drove immediate participation while creating a lasting source of insight and trust. The brand collected more than 17,000 reviews — nearly 300 percent above average — while maintaining a 4.7 average rating. Those reviews became a long-term asset, enriching profiles and strengthening brand credibility.
On an operational level, the team used Marigold to templatize campaign elements so they could reuse them for future initiatives without rebuilding from scratch. That turned their holiday effort into a blueprint for evergreen loyalty strategies.
“We built all of the functionality in a templatized way, and then you reuse all of that work that you've done, which then means for each promotion, you're getting a better return on investment.” — Brian King, Sr. Dir. of Loyalty & CRM, World Market
Lesson 4: Build internal capability for scale
Executing a multilayer loyalty initiative across channels — from campaign strategy to SMS to in-store QR codes — can overwhelm even seasoned teams. World Market approached it as a learning exercise, building the skills and processes to manage future campaigns more efficiently.
“We used Marigold’s professional services this first time around, and it was also a training exercise for my own team, so that we can do this ourselves in the future,” says King.
By turning collaboration into capability-building, the team launched faster, simplified execution, and created a repeatable model for future promotions. It was an exercise for growing internal confidence and speed.
Proof and success: The Magic Multiplied
When engagement leads the strategy, the impact lasts. World Market’s Multiply the Magic campaign reached more than six million members, drove 2.5 million SMS clicks, and inspired over 17,000 product reviews — a 300% increase, all while maintaining a 4.7-star rating.
The real success wasn’t in the numbers alone. Every review, click, and reward represented a customer choosing to engage, not just to buy. Those moments added up to something bigger: a stronger emotional connection between the brand and its audience, and a model for how loyalty can be sustained long after the holidays end.
“All of these features worked really well together and expanded the value our customers got — and we love that,” says King. “The number one thing is that we want them to enjoy it, because we know giving them these kinds of opportunities will strengthen that relationship over time.”
The results show how a single seasonal campaign can spark a loyalty engine that keeps rewarding customers, and the brand, all year long.
From seasonal moments to lasting loyalty
World Market’s story reframes what a campaign win really means. Success isn’t about how much you discount but about how well you connect.
In a time of discount fatigue and narrow margins, this is the blueprint for sustainable growth: reward participation, focus on engagement, and connect the sales season to the rest of the year by reusing templates and connecting data.
This way, every campaign moment turns into a long-term loyalty strategy and an opportunity to build trust and value.
Learn how to optimize your loyalty program to deepen engagement and drive revenue →
