This article is an excerpt from our 25 Best Tips For Successful Christmas Calendars ebook.
‘Tis the season to be jolly! The holidays are approaching at full speed, and we’re already feeling the Christmas spirit. We hope you are as well! To help you put the finishing touches on this year’s Christmas campaigns, we’ve gathered some of our best advice on how to use gamification to create and execute an eye-catching Christmas Calendar that engages your audience. And of course we want to share all our best tips and important things to remember with you – so here you can have a sneak peek on some of our best practice advice!
More and more companies use a pre-launch campaign in mid-November as a prologue to the Christmas Calendar.
It can be personalized for your industry or needs—some customers use a pre-launch to gather new permissions (by asking if they want to get a daily reminder for the campaign) while others do so to understand their customers’ buying decisions for that coming year.
Once December 1st comes along, be sure that you redirect your pre-launch campaign to the Christmas Calendar. If you don’t do this, you risk losing participants converting from the pre-launch to the Christmas Calendar.
This depends a lot on your industry and customer volume. What we have found to work well is a mix of small and medium prizes on most days with a larger main prize drawn at the end of the Christmas Calendar. This larger prize can be a lucky draw from all of your participants from the previous 25 days. You can even consider setting a minimum number of days played in order to win the prize.
We’ve found that often the desire to participate exceeds the potential gain for your audience.
That means that it’s less about the prize and more about participating. For example, one of our clients created a lucky draw for a gift card worth €125 that attracted thousands of participants. At another time, the same client scheduled a giveaway for a €1,500 gift card in exchange for email addresses only (no gamified element was added to the giveaway). This yielded a much lower engagement and less interaction, which shows that the interaction and experience matter more than the prize.
The data and interactions that a company receives during a daily Christmas Calendar is fantastic. In addition to the time they spend with your brand, you can also design the questions and experience so that you can use the findings as feedback on your product, offering, or experience.
What you gather from the campaign can also be used for content ideas. For example, a retail client of ours challenged their audience about their sustainability knowledge. They were surprised to see that only 40% knew about the retail company’s sustainability efforts, which then kickstarted a series of social media posts. This takes creative thinking, but it can help re-engage your audience once the Calendar has finished.
If you have the time, we recommend spending the first few days testing different processes, gifts, or questions before finalizing weeks three and four of your Christmas Calendar. For example, you can test whether you get the best daily conversion when users register before answering the questions or only after the questions have been answered. You can also test question difficulty, type of game, and other aspects of game flow to see what performs best. If you have the time to experiment, you might also see that a certain game is highly engaging, and then you can repeat the game more often than you had originally planned.
Remember that a participant in a Christmas Calendar will return to the Calendar several times (especially if you send daily reminder emails!). If participants are asked to share their name and email repeated times, then it will become redundant. This is not a good user experience. Therefore, take advantage of this and ask other types of questions that can give you more information about your audience.
We have seen customers successfully add registration fields that ask for gender, the nearest store to them, their phone number, and even more personal questions about family size or how often they shop. Once users have visited your Christmas Calendar a few times, then they will be more likely to provide more personal data.
Interested in getting more tips on how to engage and activate your audience with a Christmas Calendar? You can get 20 more tips by downloading our ebook The 25 Best Tips For Successful Christmas Calendars here: