The Advent Calendar can be edited throughout December. It doesn’t have to be entirely complete when it goes live on 1 December.
Your advent calendar has already been published with us. The link is found under Publish Options > Link and is composed of the name you have chosen as your subdomain and e.g. adventcalendar.com. If you need to install the advent calendar on your website, you can use the script from Publish Options > Embed.
Settings > General: Check that everything is correct here and also check Advanced to enable Allow search engine indexing and Activate daily reports.
Settings > Preregistration: In order to ensure a high participant rate, you must enable Preregistration. This builds expectations up until the point at which the advent calendar goes live. Share the pre-registration link on Facebook and your website’s blog or newsfeed. You can find this link by clicking Publish Options > Link.
Results > Preregistrations: If you have obtained consent elsewhere, for participation in the advent calendar, you can import valid preregistrations from a CSV file that has the following information and order: email, first name, last name, mobile.
You should enable email reminders for all pre-registered participants so that they receive daily emails from December 1st. This reminder will be sent on a daily basis throughout the 24-day period unless participants choose to unsubscribe. Use Include daily content: Question and Prize to automatically show today’s calendar question and prize with photos in the reminder. Registration for the email reminder after December 1st takes place in the confirmation window following participation.
You can choose when the email reminders are sent. The time it takes to send to all reminders depends on the number of participants and traffic.
Settings > Sharing: Choose the Social Media channels across which you want the participants to be able to share the calendar and questions of the day. Upload your own share image (if necessary) or use the automatically generated image.
Publish > Link: Share the calendar using the link in a post on Facebook. In Settings > Share it’s also possible to activate Share individual days to share the daily prize and prize image instead of sharing the calendar itself. E.g. use https://mycalendar.adventcalendar.com/1 to share the 1 December window directly.
In order for the advent calendar to be as effective as possible, you can encourage participants to like and share and then reward those who have recruited the most participants. To do this, go to Results > Referrals where you’ll see an overview of people with the highest number of recruits. Don’t forget to announce that the chance of winning increases for those who recruit the most.
Use the confirmation message to present the daily offer or discount code. Add a link to your website and encourage participants to share your calendar on social media.
Settings > Registration form: Choose the fields that participants must fill out to register which give you the most relevant information. You must obtain consent if you subsequently want to send the participants offers. Choose whether consent applies to both email and SMS and whether it’s required to fill in this information to participate in the calendar. It’s possible to use several different consent fields.
It’s also possible to add Extra fields if you want to obtain more information from the participants.
Settings > Registration form: To encourage participants to participate in your advent calendar again next year, you can enable Obtain invitation consent. An email reminder will then be automatically sent out on 1 December next year to those who request an invitation. This can either be activated from 1 December or later during the period.
Settings > Auto draw: Draws will take place at 1am after the selected day and winners will appear under Winners from the frontpage within the calendar. Here you can change, delete and manually draw more winners. Winners will also appear in the daily email report sent to you each morning. Important: winners are NOT automatically published or informed. A window must be set up with questions and answer options in order to draw winners automatically.
