No matter when you read this post, the next Christmas season is just around the corner! It is the best season to generate new leads and sales, as people are often at home and browsing the web for Christmas gifts. Give them something to return to your website daily by running an interactive advent calendar with a new, fun game every day from December 1st until Christmas Eve.
Creating an advent calendar with Riddle is easy and requires no coding or technical skills. All it takes is a creative mind to develop 24 ideas for mini-games and quizzes. The Riddle AI tools will help with most of that work, and we also have formats with hotspots to spot differences between two images or find hidden objects that you can build in minutes.
Why create an advent calendar?
An advent calendar on your website will help you with these goals:
- Get repeat visitors during the most significant shopping time of the year.
- Increase dwell time on your website, as quizzes are highly engaging and will keep your visitors on your site longer. Time spent on your website is a major ranking factor for Google, so more time spent on your site due to a quiz will increase your Google ranking. If you want to learn more about the importance of dwell time, please check out our dedicated post on “time on site.”
- Collect email addresses from participants for your newsletter.
- Sell products from the quiz result pages with call-to-action buttons.
Ideas for advent calendar content
Here are some ideas for your advent calendar content and suggestions for creating them.
Quizzes
These quizzes can all be generated using the Riddle AI quiz builder, and they will only take a few minutes to create.
- Holiday traditions around the world: Ask questions about unique Christmas traditions from different countries.
- A quiz about famous Christmas movies like Home Aone, Elf, or The Grinch
- A quiz about famous Christmas songs: Guess the lyrics or identify a singer. You can build this quiz using our free text answer option, play a sound bit, or show a YouTube clip with a song and ask the quiz taker to enter the singer’s name.
- Festive food facts quiz: Ask questions about popular holiday dishes and ingredients,
like “What is a traditional pudding in the UK?” - Christmas carols quiz: Show the opening line of a popular carol and use the free text answer quiz block type to have the quiz taker type the carol’s name.
- Famous people’s winter birthday quiz: Show pictures of celebrities and ask which of them was born in December.
Image-based games
Use the Spot the difference or the Tap and find block types to create image-based quizzes. You can create these images using AI tools like Midjourney or ChatGPT.
- Hidden star quiz: Create an image of various Christmas objects and hide one or many stars the quiz taker needs to find.
- Spot the difference: Create a Christmas scene loaded with ornaments and make subtle changes to one image using a photo editing tool like Adobe Express or Canva. Ask the quiz taker to find the differences.
As these Riddles are fast and easy to create, mix them with the Christmas quizzes to create 24 different Riddles for your advent calendar.
Second example
Create a placeholder for your advent calendar Riddles
Using the embed placeholder feature in Riddle, you can schedule your advent calendar all in advance. Create the placeholder and schedule one Riddle daily for the 24 days leading up to Christmas Eve.
Once set, you do not need to do anything other than download your leads or connect Riddle to your CRM, such as Brevo, Active Campaign, MailChimp, etc., to add new leads to your email marketing campaigns. The Riddle embed placeholder will handle all the scheduling and swap out the Riddles on the set date for you automatically.
Advanced techniques
Leaderboards
To make the advent calendar more engaging, consider adding a leaderboard. You can connect all 24 Riddles to the same leaderboard and give a grand prize at Christmas to the top three spots on the leaderboard.
Email automation
Set up an email automation in Riddle to send an email to each participant after the quiz is completed. Use this to promote your products. If you are using the leaderboard, also add a link to the leaderboard asking the user to check their place and reminding them to come back the next day to get a shot at a top leaderboard position.
CTA buttons
Add a call-to-action button to the quiz result page promoting Christmas specials.
Use tags
Add the tag “xmas” to each Riddle in your Your Riddles list to make them easy to find. You can also use tags to add Riddles based on the tag to the embed placeholder.
Further Reading
12 Days of Christmas – Advent Calendars, A Marketing Tool. This article gives background and examples of offline- and online advent calendars.
