5 steps to make the most of Veganuary
Each year we promote our Vegan Business Tribe members’ Veganuary offers to our wider audience. Submit yours here!
What is Veganuary?
Veganuary is a registered charity which challenge people to eat vegan every January.
In 2024, 1.8 million people officially signed-up through the Veganuary website, however it’s estimated that globally 25 million people took part in the challenge providing a huge marketplace for vegan products and services.
If you have a vegan product or service, Veganuary is a great time to leverage the extra visibility that there is on veganism, especially with non-vegans and flexitarians. The Veganuary organisation also makes it very easy to collaborate with them, giving you access to their branding and business support toolkit so that you can create your own, official, Veganuary campaigns. Download the full business support toolkit here:
Click above to download the official business support toolkit
Why get involved with Veganuary as a business?
As vegans, we all want to make an impact with our businesses. But if you sell to non-vegan customers then sometimes we can be unsure about how ‘vegan’ we can be as a business. Veganuary is a time when many mainstream businesses are promoting veganism and a plant-based diet, meaning that it’s an easy time to practice business activism without fearing putting off your core customer base.
You should always include a link for people to officially sign-up for the Veganuary challenge in any promotions you do around the event. It’s an easy detail to miss, but people are far more likely to make it to the end of the 31 days if they are receiving the daily tips, recipe ideas and emails that Veganuary provide so make sure to direct people to the link:
Plus, with so many people being open to trying vegan products and services in Veganuary, it’s a great time to find extra customers for your business who might not be as willing to engage at other times of the year. Follow our five tips below to get your business ready for the Veganuary campaign.
1. Start planning early
Don’t wait until January rolls around before planning your business’s Veganuary campaign. By the time you get your landing page online and your emails out to your mailing list you’ll already have missed half the month.
You should preview your Veganuary campaign to your customers and audience in the run-up to Christmas and the new year, and be ready to hit people with it the first week of the month. Have your social graphics ready to go and maybe even record some video of yourself talking about your Veganuary offer. All these will take time to produce, so start your planning in November and make sure you’ve got all your emails and graphics created and scheduled before you close your business for the Christmas break.
Consider what might make someone try your product or service who might not normally. Money off? A free gift? Four months of your service for the price of three? Or a donation to a good cause for every sale during the month?
2. Use the official tools & channels
Veganuary make it easy to partner with the campaign and give you access to their logo files when you download the business support toolkit. They even give you graphics and templates you can use to tie your promotion in with the official campaign.
Veganuary also have a special offers page where you can submit your offers to be listed on the website, just fill out this form on their website. And if you have a press release, you can email it to corporate@veganuary.com for them to use on their socials.
Make sure that you tag the official campaign in all your Veganuary promotions, and if you have a particularly innovative campaign or offer (or sometimes if you just have a great photo!) you might find it being shared by the Veganuary team to their entire online audience.
3. Consider co-promotions with othe vegan businesses
Lots of other vegan businesses will be running promotions during January, and if you link up then you can share advertising costs or reach even bigger audiences together. For example, if you sell a product you could collaborate with other vegan manufacturers to create a bundle and co-promote it to your own mailing lists.
Or you could find someone who offers a complimentary service and run a joint offer, for example a health coach and a life coach. Or you could come together as two businesses that don’t have a lot in common but it still works, for example giving out a voucher for a free vegan donut with each haircut!
Get creative and share marketing efforts and costs on a single joint campaign to reach even more people.
4. Promote Veganuary's campaign alongside your own
More than 80% of the people who complete Veganuary make a permanent change in their diet and eating habits – and if people sign-up to the official campaign then they are far more likely to complete the challenge. As such, make sure you invite people to take on the Veganuary challenge themselves when promoting your own campaign. It’s an easy way to use your business to promote veganism and you never know, you may create some life-long converts.
If you have employees then introduce the Veganuary Workplace Challenge or challenge your suppliers or customer companies to introduce the challenge to their team too.
5. Don't stop when Veganuary ends!
If you got new customers to try your product or service during Veganuary, then ensure they now become long-term customers too. Make sure that you are collecting email addresses and contact details throughout your promotion so that you can get these people onto your regular mailing list. Continue the new relationship so that they know you are not just a supplier for Veganuary, but the whole year round too.
Sometimes it can take a long time for someone to go from first hearing about you to buying your product – so keep that conversation going with them after your Veganuary promotion ends. And if you ran a collaboration with another business in Veganuary, then can you expand that collaboration for the rest of the year?
