How and why you should optimize your brand's online advent calendar this holiday season
Gone are the days of opening up a flimsy advent calendar filled with small dusty chocolates. Today’s consumers expect much more from brands - daily rewards, entertainment, freebies and dynamic content are the new normal. And retailers are capitalizing on this golden opportunity to remain at the forefront of their customers’ minds during the lucrative holiday season.
Reasons your brand will benefit from an online advent calendar ✨🥇
To inspire you, we’ve compiled a list of reasons and tips to make the most of an online advent calendar this holiday season!
1. Perfect for large or small businesses
A physical calendar is a cumbersome and costly endeavor and an impossibility for many smaller businesses and ecommerce companies. An online calendar, however, can be a simple, cost-effective and dynamic way to highlight special offers and/or interact with your customer base
2. Build and strengthen your community
The beauty of an online advent calendar is that you are giving your customers a reason to interact with your website, social media and brand on a daily basis. A daily feed of visually engaging content, rewards, discounts and/or freebies lead to a strengthened, growing loyal community.
3. Cost-effective reach
We’ve already pointed out the obvious that an online advent calendar is much less expensive to create and distribute than a physical one. Once it’s up, it can be shared endless times, promoted on social media, and maybe even go viral.
4. Grow your social following
Many Flowbox customers choose to run a social media competition alongside their online advent calendar. This can be an effective way to get your customers into the holiday spirit, organically grow your social community and help strengthen your brand.
5. Chance to test new products and ideas
An online advent calendar allows you to create excitement around your brand, test out new product offerings or content, all whilst collecting live feedback.
6. Reuse top images from your customers to save time and resources
A dynamic online advent calendar can be made up of all kinds of content and offers. But a great tip is to look over your most popular user generated content and reuse these images. A tool like Flowbox can help you collect, analyze and schedule these images easily.
7. Increase the overall website traffic
24 days of attention. 24 days of returning user interaction. An online advent calendar is a golden opportunity to increase web traffic, funnel users to desired pages and capitalize on this engagement.
And finally, some tips to make sure your online advent calendar stands out amongst the crowd
The beauty of an online advent calendar is that you can play around with theme and motif and make it more dynamic. It should reflect who you are as a brand.
1. You don’t have to stick to a Christmas or holiday motif
Last year, Flowbox customers AIK, the Swedish sporting organization, used their advent calendar as an opportunity to show off their players. Each day of the month was represented by a player wearing a jersey with the corresponding number on it, and hidden behind each image was a highlighted product.
2. Ensure that you have enough content planned out to maintain interest
It’s a good idea to mix up the content to keep users interested. Highlight different products and offers. If you have a UGC collection tool such as Flowbox, you can incorporate your users’ images as well, to diversify the content.
3. If 24 days of content seems too challenging, make it a ‘12 Days of Christmas’ calendar
It’s better to do a stylish, well-thought-out calendar with 12 days than have customers lose interest by day 15.
4. Make the rewards truly surprising
Surprise your customers this season - give them something new and exciting to talk about. Instead of a simple giveaway or discount code, offer larger rewards for social shares, etc.
4. Run a parallel social media contest
It’s a good idea to encourage your followers to engage with your online advent calendar on social media. Why not promote a custom seasonal hashtag to get more traction? This user generated content can also be reused in a flow on your website or social media. Win-win!
As we head into December we can’t wait to see all the exciting online advent calendars out there!🌲🎁 In fact, we will be premiering our own Flowbox advent calendar on December 1st. Check out our Facebook and Instagram accounts for updates!
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For more information
Cecilia Rehn, Content Manager
cecilia.rehn@getflowbox.com
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