Christmas is a time of joy, love, and unity. Embrace this special time of the year to create excitement around your brand and get your community in a festive spirit with an online advent calendar! The idea is simple: count down from the first to the final day of Christmas with a small surprise revealed every day, for example through a discount, a mini-game, a contest, a new product, extra special content, etc. Oftentimes, consumers who don’t celebrate Christmas still enjoy advent calendars too.
A Christmas advent calendar doesn’t have to be a monumental task that leaves you feeling overwhelmed. With Flowbox, you can not only create, but also track the sales impact of your advent calendar with ease. Plus, you'll save a ton of time with our currency and language support.
Why you should include user generated content (UGC) in your Christmas advent calendar 🤩
Cost-effective approach
Creating an online advent calendar featuring UGC is an effortless, cost-effective, and dynamic way to launch a Christmas campaign. By looking over your most popular UGC and highlighting them, along with your special offers, Flowbox can help you diversify your content. An online advent calendar also works perfectly on a variety of different channels, from websites and email to social media. Once you've activated the campaign, all work is done from your part – you can just sit back and relax while your calendar is reaching and connecting with a large audience.
Build and strengthen your community
Grow your online community
With advent calendars, you can share rewards, visually engaging content, discounts and much more. This gives your visitors a reason to interact with your brand on a daily basis and unlock the opportunity for you to build a strong relationship with them.
Boost engagement with a seasonal hashtag
It’s a good idea to encourage your followers to engage with your advent calendar on social media by promoting a custom seasonal hashtag. This way, you can get more and more authentic followers, plus plenty of mixed and diverse resources to keep your community interested and happy.
Inspiration: excellent advent calendar examples from our Flowboxers
Get inspired with these appealing and creative campaigns below and let them help you make your brand advent calendar both fun and easy to pull off.
Vertbaudet advent calendar (ecommerce)
Vertbaudet Germany published a dedicated advent calendar Flow in December 2020. Each day unlocked a new prize: an attractive discount code (from 20% to 40%); behind each image in the calendar hid an instant win. When visitors clicked on the calendar door of the day, they were presented with a shoppable link corresponding to the product shown in the image, making it effortlessly easy to purchase the discounted item. The best part of this advent calendar is that it made visitors intrigued to come back daily to check out the new deals, since they otherwise would miss it as each offer was only available for one day each. With this idea, this children's fashion brand saw amazing business results: more website traffic and conversion increase during December.
Visit Blekinge advent calendar (non-commerce)
Taking advantage of the Flowbox visual marketing platform, the Swedish tourism brand Visit Blekinge also published an advent calendar on their website to drive more engagement onsite, generate more traffic to their web shop and showcase their wide range of products and services. Throughout the 24 days in December leading up to Christmas, visitors were able to explore new, interesting and useful tips for outdoor activities, gifts, food & drinks in the province of Blekinge – a great way to get your brand discovered and to develop your community.
Bonus tip: Drive more engagement with an advent calendar on Instagram stories
With Instagram stories, you can make your advent calendar more exciting and lively with stickers, filters, live call-to-action buttons and more. Posting to Instagram stories will not only help you reach more followers but also allows you to directly interact with your community. As you know, stories disappear after 24 hours from when they’re posted, but you can feature them permanently in your story highlights at the top of your profile. That way your followers can go back and check it out whenever they want!
How to create an advent calendar with Flowbox
If you made one last year, don’t publish the same advent calendar this year. Instead, use this short tutorial to create a new, exciting advent calendar for Christmas 2021 with ease.
Here is how to do it step by step:
Select 24 personalized or authentic images for the 24 days of surprise that you want to offer to your audience in this Christmas campaign.
Visualize your stunning calendar with Flowbox’s custom CSS set-up and styling. In your Flow settings:
Make sure that you choose Grid view under Theme.
Customize your banner.
Choose your color theme to match your calendar with your brand color(s) by using customized CSS. If you want to change the background color, add this CSS code in tab CSS:
.bzfy-feed {
background-color: #f19f7f;
padding: 20px 0px 20px 0px
}
Change '#f19f7f' to the color code that you want. In this example, it's light orange.
4. Make every surprise in your calendar shoppable by tagging the products and adding Call to action buttons.
Lastly, there are a few things to consider when working with an advent calendar:
If you work with discount codes for specific days, you either need to make sure that the link to the discount page is only available on particular days or only show that particular post in Flowbox from that day onwards. This is important as you do not want people to have access to the discounts beforehand (ruining the whole concept of a calendar).
If you're not a fan of the "discount calendar", think about featuring a mix of nice tips and tricks for your end-users instead.
More examples