The IKEA Christmas calendar is quite famous in Germany. In 2015 more than 150,000 had already been sold by early November. But Germany didn't know that there is such a thing as an online customizable IKEA Christmas calendar tool. Where you could order a personalized IKEA Christmas calendar by uploading your own JPG.
To help sell the customizable Christmas calendar product via social media, we came up with the idea of making our promotion look like an actual product in itself. And since our IKEA Germany Facebook strategy is also all about creating fun content from everyday truth, we created "EMÖJI - The Jolly True Christmas Calendar". Using emojis within the design to communicate the three famous Christmas emotions that everyone knows at this time of the year: the 'I'm on top of it' smirk, (Dec 1st to Dec 20th), the 'Oh I'm not' scream (Dec 21st to Dec 23rd) and the 'Phew, finally made it' tada! (Dec 24th)
Leading by example, we ordered the calendar from IKEA and photographed it in our content lab. Then posted it, and for 1 hour and 16 minutes we rode the wave of social media success. Right up to the moment where the IKEA Christmas calendar server crashed due to too many simultaneous users within the tool, forcing us to take the post down prematurely. Oh, bittersweet success!
We achieved 50,000 visitors simultaneously using the tool, 6.6k likes, 950 comments and 230 shares for the post. And consequently a calendar order volume of 4,699, with each calendar costing 20 EUR. Mission aborted. Yet mission accomplished.
Achievements in Detail:
+749,903 organic reach
+42,035 link clicks to calendar landing page on IKEA.de (5.6% of organic reach)
+4,699 calendars sold (20€ each)
+6,600 likes
+950 comments
+230 shares
