2017 Advent Calendar Marketing Campaign

Every marketer is always after a different and unique marketing campaign when Christmas is looming. OK, so we have done our Advent Calendar for the last 3 years now, but it seems to work and it’s Christmas, so giving out presents only seems right!

The idea first loomed around 4 years ago, long before my time at Conscious. David and the team decided to give it a go & we haven’t looked back.

The idea is there’s 24 days, 24 doors and of course 24 prizes (or in our case more).  Luckily we have many friends in the industry who kindly donated prizes and even people offering us prizes half way through the month, so our doors filled up quickly.

We had £17,029 worth of prizes from various suppliers and ourselves, with 32 winners in total.  There were tickets to shows, training sessions, food and copious amounts of champagne, including a Balthazar of Veuve Clicquot!

Now yes, the concept is simple, but in your eyes it may look like a lot of work. However, the real questions are, was it successful and should you think about maybe doing a 2018 Advent Calendar yourself?

Here’s what we did.

We had a database of 5,052 business contacts that were already on our ‘Santa’s Nice List’, made up of clients, prospects and partners from our email marketing lists. These people could unsubscribe on a daily basis, with an average of 16 people a day unsubscribing, meaning we had close to 5,000 people stick with us throughout the whole month.

Each day we would send them an email reminding them to go to our website and open that day’s door.  In the email we would state who won the previous day’s prize, what the current day’s prize was and information about the supplier of our prize, including their logo and pictures of the prize. With 32 prizes to give away, there were sometimes multiple prizes on any given day.

We were also active on social media and posted to our 2,594 followers on Twitter and the 940 followers of our LinkedIn company page about the prizes.  We had tweets back from prize-winners including Lesley Davies from Stephensons, who sent us a picture of her and her wine, donated by Quill, next to her Christmas tree!

So what impact did this have? This campaign increased the sessions on our website, compared to the month before, by as much as 88% on some days.  One day saw our page views increase by 109.51% compared to the same day in November! We also had users increase by 66% on some days compared to the previous month! On average users were up by 40%. So the stats look good and have increased traffic to our site.

Take a look at our entries per day and some of the findings. 

So from our results you can see that anything you can eat, drink or play with had a higher uptake then any soft/services prize. Clearly you all enjoy a tipple or two.

Strangely though a Balthazar of Champagne costing £1,000 only had 309 entries less than two Gin Advent Calendars, valued at £125 each, that received 320 entries.

From the results you can see that any drinkable prize often had entry numbers in the hundreds apart from the 23-Dec (a Saturday) when a bottle of champagne only got 41 entries. Another observation made is that entries whatever the prize value, are significantly lower on the weekends, for example a prize valuing at £240 only received 20 entries on a Sunday.

Throughout the results you can see the dips in entries where the weekends occur, we still sent out daily emails but many people would not be checking these over the weekend, so would have simply forgotten to enter.

So was it worth it? Take a look at the stats below and let us know what you think in the comments below!

Our 2017 advent calendar marketing campaign “in numbers”:-

• 24 days
• 24 daily email reminders
• 24 tweets
• 12 LinkedIn posts
• 26 prize sponsors
• 32 prize winners
• 15.8% average email open rate
• 3.08% click through from email
• 16 unsubscribes on average per day
• 404 unsubscribes across the month
• 115 average entries per day
• 2,768 entries in total
• 4,648 recipients
• £17,029 worth of prizes given away to our lucky winners!