The Christmas holiday season is a crucial time for business profitability. During the last month of the year, they can achieve up to 20% of their annual sales.
One of the keys to engaging consumers during this sales period is to anticipate your campaign by multiplying contact points. Indeed, it takes an average of 8 interactions between a prospect and the brand before a sale is concluded.
In this article, we’ll take a look at a marketing mechanism that’s particularly relevant to Christmas campaigns. This is the Advent calendar, which allows you to multiply the number of interactions with your audience. Here we share tips for creating a memorable digital Advent calendar, as well as concrete examples to inspire you.
The mechanics of the Advent Calendar
The Advent Calendar is a particularly popular marketing tool during the Christmas season. It’s a simple principle: every day, participants discover a new animation through “boxes” to be opened. It can be a competition or an interactive animation such as an Instant Win, through which users can unlock free rewards and gifts.
Creating a digital advent calendar is a great way to boost your Christmas marketing campaign because, in the minds of consumers, this mechanism is directly associated with the end-of-year festivities. It’s also a great way to capture and hold your audience’s attention, by giving them a daily appointment and offering new surprises with each new slot.
What’s more, this marketing activity is ideal for animating and rewarding your customer community. During the Christmas period, consumers are on the lookout for good deals and discounts to save money on their gift purchases. By distributing discount vouchers and attractive gifts every day, the brand can build customer loyalty and convert new prospects, generating more sales.
3 tips to create a digital Advent Calendar
The Advent Calendar is the perfect way to animate your community during the Christmas holidays and multiply the points of contact with your audience, but it also requires a great deal of planning. Here are a few tips to help you succeed and keep up the pace.
1. Plan your content for the 25 squares of the digital advent calendar
Brands that choose this marketing game for their Christmas marketing campaign will have to share interactive games and content every day, from December 1 to December 25. It’s therefore important to plan your content so as to diversify the animations, interactive mechanics and prizes shared with your community, in order to hold the attention of participants throughout the month of December.
2. Customize animations and prizes
The Advent Calendar will be more effective in achieving the strategic objectives the brand has set itself if it is personalized. This means, in advance of the Christmas campaign, refine its customer knowledge, for example by collecting data and product preferences. This will enable the company to offer targeted content and rewards that are more effective in engage audiences and generate sales.
3. Diversify distribution channels
To engage as many prospects and customers as possible, brands also need to think of their digital Advent Calendar as an omnichannel animation. The different Playable Marketing formats are particularly relevant in this context. The brand can engage its audience across all these channels with native animations that adapt to its website, shopping application or advertising campaigns (interactive ads).
5 inspiring examples to create a digital Advent Calendar
Now let’s get down to business with 5 examples of brands that have created a digital Advent Calendar and leveraged this format to achieve a variety of business objectives.
1. Floa Advent Calendar
With its “Gift Box” operation, the Floa brand took advantage of the year’s most important event to raise its profile, while promoting its partners. The operation enabled the bank to recruit qualified leads to collect and retarget all year round.
With attractive prizes (Airpods, connected watch, smartphone, champagne), it attracted over 64K participants.
2. Galeries Lafayette Advent Calendar
Galeries Lafayette’s Advent Calendar game aimed to engage customers and prospects via a multi-channel campaign. By showcasing its famous Christmas windows on all its digital channels, the animation functioned as a sales generator. It also enabled the chain to capture customer data via a lead recruitment form. This data then enabled Galeries to effectively retarget its audience throughout the year.
3. Ouest France Advent Calendar
The digital Advent Calendar can also be used in culture and leisure marketing. Here, the objective is not to generate sales but to encourage its audience to create a Ouest France account. Indeed, only participants with an account could access the game and try to win attractive prizes (vacation stays, household appliances and high-tech, leisure activities, shopping vouchers).
The campaign enabled Ouest France to animate its audiences throughout December and recruit 81K subscribers.
3. Carrefour Advent Calendar
5. Kiabi Advent Calendar
Conclusion
