End-of-year campaign Zwitserleven nominated for email design award
Customer case
In 2017, Zwitserleven asked us to help take their email marketing to the next level. From then on, we not only developed innovative email campaigns, but started collaborating in many other ways. For example, we helped Zwitserleven select the best ESP for their needs and, of course, implemented it. For this end-of-year campaign, Zwitserleven came up with the concept and we jointly worked it out to a design, resulting in a successful email. Previously, Zwitserleven sent an annual Christmas greeting with a single video to its participants. This year we were asked to surprise the participants in an original way. We certainly succeeded and this end-of-year campaign with interactive Christmas tree has been nominated for a DDMA EMAS award, Design category.
The reason
This year Zwitserleven did not want to send a standard Christmas greeting, but they wanted to surprise participants with an original, festive e-mail. The well-known advent calendar fits this theme perfectly and is a nice way to show the recipient in detail what Zwitserleven does.
The goal
Zwitserleven aimed to showcase, through this year-end campaign, their efforts in sustainability and their core values, with the goal of increasing engagement among their participants.
De results
Zwitserleven received many enthusiastic responses such as, for example, “Well done for a sustainable world, super nice job!” The recipients were able to see where Zwitserleven operates through this email. This increases engagement and creates a “us-feeling”.
Open Rate employers
Employers Benchmark Deployteq 2022
(signed by internal and external advisors)
COR = 36.75% COR finance = 49,32%
CTO = 21.02 % CTO finance = 6,47%
Participants (by Zwitserleven)
COR = 47.65% COR finance = 49,32%
CTO = 11.87% CTO finance = 6,47%
The case
The e-mail contains a Christmas tree with different boxes that you can open, after which you see a short video about what Zwitserleven does. For example, Chris Zegers takes you on a trip, just like he does in his travel shows on television. Thanks to the short conversations and different locations, you see what Zwitserleven does.
This interactive e-mail was initially developed for only one target group. Only in the final phase did we develop it for other target groups as well and send this e-mail to multiple audiences. Because the recipients of this campaign are both Dutch and English speaking, we created the email in two languages. For the personal touch, this email was signed by a contact at Zwitserleven, matching each, specific recipient and the email contains a personal photo.
The idea
In past years, we have sent end-of-year emails with a single video as a Christmas greeting. This year, Zwitserleven wanted to stand out more.
The email campaign in a nutshell: The recipient can open a box, watch the video, and when you open the next box, the other box stays open, so you know which video message you haven’t seen yet. The pulsating effect of the circles in the boxes grabs your attention, triggering you to click, to see what’s behind it.
Zwitserleven came up with this e-mail concept. They immediately thought of an advent calendar, where you see something of the new proposition per box and get an impression of the new house style. But we didn’t want to email the recipient every day and have them open one box at a time, so we decided to develop an email in which multiple boxes were shown. The first design proposal was a Christmas tree with round shapes. Our partner LiveWall (part of the group we’re part of, United Playgrounds) then fleshed out this concept, which we then went back to work on, resulting in this cool hotspot email with Christmas tree.
Because the corporate identity was still being developed, we only had guidelines for it. The videos still had to be created entirely, so all in all, the planning was a challenge. We wanted to show multiple videos, but at the same time the e-mail should not be too heavy. Therefore, we chose not to include the videos in the e-mail, but to show the videos via Youtube. Finally, the interactivity and the different versions for the different target groups were a challenge, especially since we were dealing with recipients in Dutch or English. Zwitserleven has its own system where the recipients and corresponding data are listed, so we could select a target group in a targeted way.
Why a hotspot email?
For this campaign, we chose hotspot. This technique is perfect for discovering and viewing something in email. The beauty of this hotspot email is that the boxes that are opened remain as opened. Also, a button was created to reset everything so that all boxes can be closed again. This e-mail is designed to display properly in most e-mail clients. In clients such as Outlook, in which this did not work, we used a fallback. Here you are redirected to the online version of the e-mail. Here the boxes that are open remain visible and you see an image, instead of a “hidden” message.
What started as a one off mailing, can just be used again for a new campaign. Because of the many enthusiastic responses, we are now looking at the possibility of using hotspot again next year in an entirely new and surprising year-end campaign.