Our Seasonal Calendar gamification feature is a fun and effective way to engage and retain your audience through daily interactions and exclusive offers.
The Seasonal Calendar is especially relevant during holiday seasons, such as Christmas or Black Friday/Week, but you can use it to promote any daily offers you run throughout the year, such as:
- Valentine’s Day offers
- Easter sales
- Halloween deals
- Weekend-only campaigns
- And much more
To get started, select the “Collect Email Addresses” campaign type, and then check “Christmas Calendar” under “Gamification” in the template filters in the left-hand menu. Now you can choose one of our templates, or build the calendar from scratch like we do in this example. The start-from-scratch template is sized to fit desktop screens and the builder, so you can start designing straight away.
Click “Continue”, choose the position you want, and move to the Design step.
Design your calendar
The calendar design includes a Form, a Calendar, and a Teaser. The form displays as an overlay, and visitors submit their email address to unlock the calendar doors. They only need to submit their email once to return and open a new door each day.
The Design step opens with the global styling sidebar already open, so you can style the whole calendar right away. Styling is split into collapsible sections, so you can unfold only the settings you need.
You can customize your calendar by adjusting its size, adding text elements, setting a background image, or rearranging the doors. All available elements are in the right-hand menu under “Add elements”, where you can drag and drop the elements you want to include. On desktop, you can also add free images to the Calendar, Form and Teaser steps and place them anywhere without breaking the layout. To add more doors, drag the “Door” element onto the calendar.
To line your doors up neatly, unfold “Calendar styling” and check “Snap doors to grid”. A grid appears on the calendar, and doors snap to it as you move them, so it’s easy to line them up and space them evenly. Use “Grid size” to set the grid spacing in pixels.
💡 Hint: The form step follows the size of your calendar. If you resize the calendar, the form resizes with it.
Style your calendar with a background image, border, rounded corners and more by unfolding “Calendar styling”.
💡 Hint: If you want to use the calendar as an advent calendar with 4 doors, a Black Week campaign with 7 doors, etc., you can delete the doors you don’t need and adjust the dates on the remaining doors. Door dates default to the year your campaign runs. After you delete doors, the door list in “Layout” updates straight away.
Style your doors
To style all doors at once, open the “Layout” tab, select “Calendar”, and unfold “Door styling — global”. Here you choose the opening animation and style the door layers, text, borders, width, height and more.
Door styling is shared between desktop and mobile, so you only style your doors once. The exceptions are door width, door height and font size, which you set separately for desktop and mobile. On mobile, these start from the template’s sizes until you change them.
To style a single door differently, go to “Layout”, select the door, and expand its styling. Any setting you change there applies to that door only and is no longer linked to the global door styling. Settings you don’t change stay linked. To link everything again, click “Use global styles”.
A door can look different depending on its state, and you can style each state individually:
- Closed door: Add an image or color to all closed doors.
- Opened door: Define how the door looks once opened, with an image or a background color.
- Current door: Highlight today’s door with an image, color or border color.
- Expired door: Show visitors which doors have passed by adding a color or image.
Use “Select a state” in the bar below the calendar to switch between closed, opened, expired and current, and see how each state looks on the calendar.
Choose when doors can be opened
“Door access” is in the “Settings” section of the Calendar sidebar. It decides how long a door can be opened after it unlocks. Choose one of three options:
- Only on its day: Each door can be opened on its own date. After that, it closes.
- Until the next door opens: The latest door stays open until the next one unlocks, and the last door stays open until the calendar ends. This option is only available for Advent calendars, where there isn’t a door every day. For example, if your advent calendar has one door a week, visitors can open the latest door all week, not just on the day.
- Any time after it opens: Every unlocked door stays open for the rest of the calendar, so visitors can go back and open doors they missed.
💡 Hint: “Door access” replaces the old “Allow opening previous doors” checkbox. Campaigns that used the checkbox have been moved to the matching option automatically.
Calendar layout on mobile
On mobile, you can display the doors in four different ways:
- Desktop layout, scaled to fit: Shows every door at once, like a scaled-down version of your desktop calendar.
- One Row: Shows the doors in a single row that visitors scroll through sideways.
- One Column: Shows the doors in a single column that visitors scroll through vertically.
- Parallax: Shows one door at a time and opens on today’s door.
In the scrolling layouts, the calendar starts at today’s door, and visitors can scroll back and forward between doors. To change the layout, switch to the Mobile view, open the “Settings” tab in the right-hand menu, and choose a layout under “Scroll Mode” in “Mobile Calendar Settings”.
Remember that door width, door height and font size are set separately on mobile, so check them in the mobile view.
Calendar campaigns
Behind each door is a new campaign. To edit a campaign, click directly on the door in the calendar, or go to “Layout” in the right-hand menu, select the door, and click “Edit door content”. A new campaign editor opens, where you can drag and drop elements from the “Add elements” section. You can include a discount code, show a specific offer, add input fields, or add interactive elements like a Spin-to-Win wheel or a scratch card to give visitors a chance to win a prize or different discounts.
To use the same design for several doors, open the door and go to the “Settings” tab. Under “Copy content”, select the doors you want from the dropdown, click “Copy content to selected doors”, and confirm with “Yes, I’m sure”. This replaces the existing content in those doors. You can also copy a door’s content to all doors at once. The builder tells you how many doors the content was copied to. Copying content means you don’t need to design 24 individual campaigns.
Every door always opens its own content, including doors you’ve copied to and doors whose date you’ve changed.
💡 Remember to design the “Success step” as well as the mobile view.
When you’re done, click “Exit door” in the bottom left corner to go back to the calendar.
💡 Hint: Use preview to check your calendar before you go live. Preview shows the correct door states (current, opened, expired and closed) as soon as it loads.
Calendar analytics
Calendar campaigns have their own analytics section, built around how visitors use a calendar over its whole run, not just the first sign-up. The metrics follow the visitor journey:
- Total visitors: Visitors who saw the calendar. Teaser views are not counted.
- Sign-ups: Visitors who submitted their email to unlock the calendar.
- Returning visitors: Signed-up visitors who came back to open more doors.
- Total door opens: How many times doors were opened.
- Average doors per visitor: How many doors each visitor opened on average.
- Revenue: Revenue from visitors who engaged with the calendar in the same session, based on your revenue attribution settings.
Set up your integration
To pass the calendar data on to your email system, set up an integration with your email provider. (Check out our step-by-step guides to learn how to connect Sleeknote to your email system.) Use the mapping step of your integration setup to match your Sleeknote campaign fields with your ESP fields.
In the Integration step, each door has its own door mapping. Map each door to a field in your ESP under “Custom Integration fields”, and click “Save integration”. The door date is then sent to that field when the door is opened. That way, you can see which of your subscribers opened which doors.
Now save your campaign and activate it when you’re ready.