Online Advent Calendars are a great way to create meaningful engagements for your audience during the busy holiday season of Christmas. Advent Calendars can be a great addition to your interactive Christmas campaigns.
What is an online Advent Calendar? It’s a digital version of the Christmas Calendar you grew up with. By creating a digital Advent Calendar, the flow, game concepts, and prizes are completely up to you and what makes sense for your brand.
For many of us, Advent Calendars are part of the holiday fun. They’re extremely popular in the Nordics as well as in parts of Europe, the UK, and the US.
The holiday season is also a season of big spending and bigger advertising. For 2021, ad spend reached £31.9bn in the UK and is anticipated to hit a staggering £35.3bn in 2022, according to the IAB.
Ad spend for 2019 was anticipated to reach £25.36bn in the UK. This is compared to £23.6bn in 2018. A significant portion of this happens during Q4.
Knowing that advertising spend goes up during the holiday season, marketers can leverage this and create a fun, timely, and engaging experience for their audience.
Increase channel engagement, website traffic, and the Christmas spirit with the Leadfamly platform. We’ve gathered 5 excellent examples — draw your inspiration from right here.
LEGOLAND, a chain of theme parks that are family friendly, wanted to gain new marketing permissions and communicate about park features. They decided to create a sophisticated online Advent Calendar and use a variety of game concepts. One great example was a 360°photo of Santa’s workshop where participants had to count how many elves were in the photo. It was innovative and got people to actively engage with the brand. The campaign was very successful and saw an average of 6,000 unique registrations each day.
Amsterdam-headquartered home and beauty company Rituals releases a well-known physical Advent Calendar each year; this year there are two versions and their cost ranges from £60-£90.
Rituals wanted to engage and capture new leads so they created an online Advent Calendar. They also assumed that these participants would eventually lead to quality traffic to their site.
Last year, Rituals registered 30,000 unique participants from their online Calendar. These participants visited the Advent Calendar an average of four times each, which resulted in Rituals having over 2,700 hours of engagement time with their target audience.
The European sneaker marketplace encourages their customers to purchase repeatedly and continually engage with the brand. They created a 12-day online Advent Calendar with daily games and daily prizes. Almost 12 months later, 54% of the participants were still engaging with the Klekt brand.
Danish supermarket chain Føtex’s KPI (key performance indicators) for their Christmas campaign was to increase their email database by 10,000 new permissions, continue engaging current newsletter subscribers, and create awareness of their online shopping feature. It worked! During the campaign, Føtex saw almost 95,000 visits, 22,000 unique registrations, and over 13,000 new permissions. They surpassed their primary KPI and were very happy with the results.
A news publisher in Denmark, Ekstra Bladet wanted to optimize how they advertise and generate high quality leads during the busy Christmas season. They created a daily Advent Calendar that lived on the front page of their news website. Results included 120,000 clicks (compared to non-gamified native advertising averages of 50,000-60,000) and hitting both branding and performance KPIs.
Online Advent Calendars can provide easily scalable reach. Because there isn’t a physical Calendar, it’s also accessible to your entire audience.
Before beginning to build your online Calendar, we recommend deciding on your KPIs first. Is the point of the Calendar to drive engagement, collect new permissions, or get customers to your store? Start by making this decision, and then let it dictate the Calendar design.
Create a fresh experience that draws on nostalgia and uses technology to expand its reach.
Read about Playable’s Online Advent Calendar game concept including the benefits and how to get started.
Check out our online advent calendars ebook, 25 Best Tips For Advent Calendars.