How to find the right channel for your online advent calendar

Website, newsletter, social media or third-party platform? Here’s how to find the right channel for your online advent calendar – including their pros and cons.

Right, it’s time to get to business! You’ve made the decision: This year, you’re going to create an online advent calendar to delight your existing customers and get yourself in front of some new contacts, too. Whoop whoop, good choice! 🎉

You’re early enough to create your content and promote your calendar without having to rush, and thanks to my article on finding the right topic, you’ve already decided what your calendar is going to be about. So far, so good.

Which leaves just one question: Where are you actually going to run your advent calendar?

There are plenty of options, so let’s take a quick look at the most common ones, including the pros and cons of each.

The advent calendar via newsletter

Every day, you send a newsletter containing the day’s prompt or piece of content to a specific list.

Advantages:

• You communicate directly with your participants, and they can reply to you with a single click.
• You can make it personal and address people by name – provided, of course, that you ask for their first name when they sign up.
• You can reliably measure how well your calendar is being received by looking at open and click rates (assuming your newsletter tool gives you access to that data).
• You collect potential customers you can stay in touch with afterwards – after all, they’ve basically invited you into their inbox.

Disadvantages:

• You’re somewhat limited when it comes to formats: text and images work well, but video and audio can get a bit trickier.
• Some participants may feel that 24 or more emails are simply too much.
• There’s always the risk of ending up in the spam folder.

The advent calendar on social media

You publish a new door every day on whichever channel you choose – Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok and so on.

Advantages:

• Social media gives you plenty of reach and, if you’re lucky, the potential to go viral.
• You can make your calendar interactive, as most platforms offer additional features such as Stories or polls.
• You can use all sorts of formats: images, text, video and audio.

Disadvantages:

• You’re at the mercy of the algorithm.
• You’re competing with every other profile for the users’ limited attention span.
• Your existing followers might not actually be interested in your advent calendar.
• If your account is public, there’s little incentive for people to follow you specifically for the calendar – they can see the content anyway.

The advent calendar on your own website

Every day, a new door goes live on your website.

Advantages:

• You have complete control over the design and functionality.
• When it comes to formats, your imagination is pretty much the only limit.
• You drive traffic to your website.
• While people are hanging around on your site, they’ll also get to know your offers almost by accident.

Disadvantages:

• You need some technical knowledge to set it all up – or you get someone like me to do it for you. 😉
• You’ll need to remind participants regularly to come back to your website and open the doors.

The advent calendar on a third-party platform

You add your content to the doors of a usually commercial platform or app, which you can then share via a link or on social media.

Advantages:

• You’re buying a ready-made solution, so you don’t need any technical knowledge.
• The interface is often intuitive because it’s been tried and tested countless times.

Disadvantages:

• There’s usually a noticeable cost involved.
• Your options for customisation are often limited.
• You miss out on website traffic and new contacts.

Finding the right channel for you

To figure out which channel is the right one for you, ask yourself these questions:

• Where does your target audience prefer to hang out? And which channel feels most comfortable for you personally?
• What time, money and technical resources do you have available? What can you build on, what are you already using, and what are you willing to learn?
• What do you want to achieve? Make your existing contacts happy or connect with new people?
• Which formats work best for your topic – text, images, video, audio, downloads?
• How important is it to you to be able to measure the success of your calendar?

My quick & dirty channel finder for you

And, of course, you can also combine different channels cleverly.

For example, this year I’m once again running my advent calendar on my own website, supported by my newsletter tool. I have a dedicated list for it, and every morning, everyone who has signed up gets an email with a link to that day’s door.

Just like last year, I’ll give participants a choice: Receive an email every day or get the last seven doors bundled together once a week, basically for a bit of binge-watching.

For promotion, I’ll use all the channels: My website, newsletter (to invite existing subscribers), social media, collaborations and advertising. New contacts can sign up via a dedicated landing page and are then added to the advent calendar list.

A few final tips for choosing your channel

Whatever you decide, there are two things I really want you to keep in mind.

Make it crystal clear where your calendar is happening

Tell people clearly and well in advance where they’ll find your advent calendar. Otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment when people sign up via email, only to discover that they suddenly need an Instagram account to open the doors.

Don’t add anyone to the calendar without asking

Only send the doors to people who have actually signed up for them. On social media, this is less of an issue. With newsletters, though, it’s absolutely essential.

Just because someone is already on your general mailing list doesn’t mean they’ve signed up to receive 24 or more extra emails from you in the run-up to Christmas ...

Once you’ve decided on your channel, it’s time to get into the actual implementation. In my next article, Which pages do you need?, I’ll show you which pages you need for your advent calendar.

And if you want to make sure your sign-up is set up properly so that your door-openers turn into actual contacts, you’ll find that in Lead generation through your advent calendar (article coming soon).

So, which channel would be your favourite for an advent calendar? Tell me in the comments!