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Working advent calendar email campaign?

Abby Wentzel-Elison posted 2016-11-25 06:14:48

With the holidays quickly approaching, I'm assuming most B2C companies have their holiday email campaigns planned and designed. I'm just curious - does anyone have a working advent calendar email design? If you do, I'd love to see how it works! Post or link code, or send me a link to subscribe.

If not, and it sounds like an idea you would be willing to work on, let me know because I'd love to collaborate!

Note, there are plenty of ways to implement this on a web page. I'm curious if anyone is building one in an email body.

Cyrill Gross replied 2016-11-10 12:45:18

Hi Veronica
I'm Cyrill, the guy who has created the adventcalendar ;-)
Here you can see it online: http://bauknecht-cdn.mayoris.com/go/sv8pn2dd/zip7fnuy/537
There was Litmus testing done, but way more than just Litmus tests ;-) Based on my testing experience from this campaign I hold a speech about the topic at TEDC16 in London earlier this year. Here you can see the details and content: http://www.mayoris.com/testing-interactive-email/
If you like to learn more about it, mail me at cyrill.gross AT mayoris.com
I'm currently working at a new implementation for a leading credit card company (but only for the Swiss branch).
BR, Cyrill

Reply to Cyrill Gross

Veronica Williams replied 2016-11-10 13:17:16

That is fantastic! Thank you so much! VW

Cyrill Gross replied 2016-11-10 22:24:08

No Problem.
Keep an eye on the images in the grid. they change by the hour. We switched the intervall from days to hours for showcase reason ;-)
Just drop me a line if you like to get some more insights.
BR, Cyrill

Abby Wentzel-Elison replied 2016-11-14 18:47:18

I'm late to my own party, but this example is fantastic! I was looking at a more traditional design, which is a single image and the "doors" are hidden in the image, rather than a grid view like a calendar. But you could easily build out a design like that using your interactive framework.

Cyrill Gross replied 2016-11-17 07:38:57

Hi Abby
The trick about this email is, that it updates on a daily basis (in the example on hourly basis as 24 days can be perfectly represented by 24 hours in a showcase version ;-) ). All past windows are open (the thumbnail image is shown), the current and future ones are closed (number is shown) and only the current day is clickable. This way, the email needed to be sent only once a week, but the daily contents were still available the right time. Sending an email every day was not an option here as this usually leads to a significant subscriber drain as most customers don't like to be bombed by a daily email.
This year we are going to run a similar campaign for a major credit card vendor here in Switzerland. Unlike last years version, all past windows will be clickable so you can even see the contents of the past days.
Fallback for static client is crucial here: In fossile-clients such as Outlook you can click all windows. This opens the online view of the mailing with the content of the current day already opened: http://bauknecht-cdn.mayoris.com/go/sv8pn2dd/zip7fnuy/537#open
This way, the user experience for those clients is not worse than a classical button > landing page approach.

Your approach with the hidden windows would be feasible too, just a proper responsive version for mobile phones could be a bit challenging. In your case I'd use a background image which is changed on a daily basis showing the closed / opened windows by day. Labels / anchors to open the days content could be placed over the main Background (this would make the scaling nicer on Mobiles). Alternatively the calendar could be sliced into 24 pieces that are placed in frameless table cells. Each image has the trigger label/anchor around. The disadvantage of this solution will be moiree effects at the edges of the images when scaling on a liquid mobile version. You'd rather have to work with fixed break points for mobile with seperate day-images per breakpoint...

If you are interested in interactive email, check out the blog post Jaina was referencing below or our own blog (see above; mainly in German) :-)