Competition guide – tips and tricks

Create an advent calendar that will generate more customers, likes and new followers on Facebook

Get out early

Planning is the be-all and end-all of a successful advent calendar! Take time to consider what you really want to get out of your advent calendar and set concrete goals along the way. Then identify the right audience for your calendar and devise a strategy on how to best reach that audience.

Start registration

Open for calendar registration straightaway to ensure you get as many participants as possible. Use pre-registration as a means to send reminders before the advent calendar is launched on December 1st. Make announcements using the calendar on the company’s website and Facebook page to reach as many prospects as possible. Another way to quickly collect new registrations for your newsletter through the advent calendar is to require entrants to enter an email address as part of the registration process.

Remember the red thread

It’s important to choose a theme for the advent calendar that’s relevant to your business. Be sure to choose issues with a clear context that can encourage participants to learn more about the business, and make sure the the answer’s easy to find – possibly on the company’s website. If the difficulty level is too high, you run the risk that many participants will drop out before the advent calendar has run its course.

Checklist for building contact lists with an advent calendar

Below we have outlined the most important criteria for a successful advent calendar:

  • Get started with advertising your advent calendar as early as possible (about three weeks before)
  • Promote the advent calendar on social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Ads, X)
  • Allow participants to tick ‘Yes please’ to newsletters
  • Make the calendar easy to share with others and reward the participants for doing so
  • Include special offers and special bonuses for those who participate frequently
  • Send daily reminders via email
  • Collect relevant information about the participants with their consent


If you follow the above tips, you’ll have at least 24 chances in December per participant to collect/gather dedicated subscribers to your newsletter. Then you’re ready to start the new year with a bang!

 

Tips for marketing your advent calendar

Prizes

Offering good prizes will automatically make your advent calendar more appealing (to participate in). And ff you choose to increase your winning chances by offering more than one prize, you’ll naturally attract even more participants. Try to stand out from other competitions and choose a prize that reflects your company’s values ​​or products. If you prefer to offer attractive deals over prizes, that’s also a good option.

Pay attention to the advent calendar

Give subscribers the chance to sign up today to maximise the participation rate from December 1st. Remind participants that there’s a new door to open in the calendar, on email, SMS, or as a post on Facebook. This will help to maintain the participants’ interest for a longer period of time. You can also use the reminders to make attractive deals or Facebook ads to reach even more prospects.

Learn from your mistakes

It may be necessary to make changes along the way as the advent calendar progresses. By using the results from Google Analytics, you can continuously refine and improve the calendar with the growing usage data available to you, thereby ensuring optimal end results.

 

How to design and share the advent calendar

Design

A nice stylish design helps to give your advent calendar a professional look. You’ll find a wide range of modern templates in the program that you can easily customise with your company’s own graphics, colour schemes, font and logo. You can choose to design your advent calendar completely from scratch, using one of our templates or a combination of the two. For more good tips on how to design your advent calendar, have a look at our design guide.

Questions and answers

You can insert questions and answers into the advent calendar by clicking on a specific door and specifying the question alongside possible answers. Feel free to choose engaging questions that are fun to answer or that encourage participants to learn more about your business.

Availability

Make the advent calendar as widely available as possible on your website and Facebook. We have made it simple and straightforward to insert the calendar on both the website and the company’s Facebook page – you simply press a button! The calendar also has customised display settings for mobile phones and different browsers.

Share your advent calendar

When everything’s set up, it’s simply a matter of spreading the message to as many people as possible on social media. This will expose your advent calendar to more potential participants. The number of shares will be recorded and afterwards you’ll be able to view the complete statistics of calendar shares through social media.

 

Tips for the next step when the advent calendar is completed

More newsletter recipients

Through the advent calendar you’ll have got a bunch of new registrations for your newsletter that you can follow up and convert to loyal customers. A good tip for maintaining interest and preventing resignation is to make appealing offers in the period between Christmas Eve and New Year. Subsequently you can continue to send out regular newsletters which include useful information and more attractive offers.

When it comes to designing your newsletters, our super simple program Make is an ingenious tool that offers the same practical functionality as our advent calendar. The program is also an integral part of the advent calendar, so you can easily transfer the participants from the calendar to the registration list for your newsletter.

Segmentation

If you choose to segment your subscriptions, you can communicate much more effectively with your customers. If, for example, you divide them into target groups based on age, gender, place of residence, you can tailor your offers to the individual target group. The more information you collect about your customers and their interests, the better.

Use social media

The advent calendar will have led to you gaining a lot of new followers on social media. It’s now important to make yourself visible, retain as many followers as possible and ultimately convert them into loyal customers. It’s therefore important to be active on the media where the advent calendar’s been shared and to make regular updates with relevant bulletins, information and offers. Make good use of the many new visitors to the website and Facebook page, and focus on maintaining their interest.

Good luck with this year’s Advent Calendar!

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