12 Days of NOT Christmas Campaign

58% marketing opt-in rate

1 hr 6 mins avg. engagement time

Avg. 21 games per player

Summary

Our 12 Days of NOT Christmas competition proved branded games and digital advent calendars to be an interactive dream team, engaging our B2B audience for over an hour per player.

The campaign was designed to showcase our new interactive advent calendars ahead of the Christmas marketing season. We wanted to show marketers what they could do to inject some fun into their festive campaigns (because, boy don’t we need it!).

We knew branded games and advent calendars were an interactive dream team, but we never could have guessed the level of engagement we received, alongside plenty of positive feedback.

So here’s what we did and how we got results.

Getting set up

Getting our campaign set up couldn’t have been easier, using our off-the-shelf ready-to-go games service.

We started with our Premium Match-3 game and created a custom ‘12 days of Not-Christmas’ logo. We chose this one in particular because as a multi-level game, it offers an opportunity to give players a different level each day.

All that remained was to edit the in-game copy, adding details of each day’s prize and the supporting prize imagery to appear behind each daily door.

Once the game and advent calendar were built, everything was set up with its own easy-to-share URL.

Peek & Poke Branded Digital Advent Calendar

12 Days of NOT Christmas Branded Game Menu Screen

Promoting it

This is where the fun starts!

We utilised some display advertising to appear on sites frequented by our target audience, and allocated advertising budget to specific targeting on LinkedIn to help generate new leads via the game.

Of course, we also sent a launch email to our mailing list to engage our existing audience and posted organic content across our social channels.

We included links to the game from all of our Christmas-related landing pages too, to help divert relevant traffic from existing campaigns and capture their details.

Keeping the momentum

The main objective for having a daily advent calendar is to engage your audience everyday!

Now, we didn’t send out an email each day to our full mailing list – that might get a bit annoying for those who didn’t want to play in the first place (believe it or not, there are a few).

So in line with GDPR, when players submitted their score to the leaderboard, they were asked to opt-in to updates about the game.

Those people were sent daily email notifications on daily winners, doubling up as a prompt to click the link to play again. On average, across the campaign, these emails had a 61% open rate and a 40% average CTR to play again from the email.

Social conversations

Each day we posted the winner on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. We also continued to engage with every social interaction to increase reach and have a little fun in the process.

"Love this - but losing too much time as it's eating out of my work time!!! :-) Great work!"

Player, 12 Days of NOT Christmas Game Competition

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