Annual reports are dead – long live personalized recaps. End of year campaigns have evolved from a newsletter (or worse: a printed report) listing business KPIs into insightful, personal experiences tailored to customers.
In this article, we'll showing you some great examples, how to go about planning and tips on how to create personalized, shareable throwbacks.
Examples of Year in Review campaigns
First, let's take a look around – what kinds of campaigns could we draw inspiration from?
Spotify Wrapped
Everyone's darling is Spotify's yearly Wrapped campaign – it's basically the best example for a Year in Review campaign done well.
In the past years, they presented stats about music and podcasts you listened to in a beautifully designed Story format. Including: A personalized "soundtrack of your life", your "audio aura", top songs/genres and more. You probably have seen them on your Insta feed.
Fitbit's Year in Review
Super informative: Fitbit sends personalized recaps of your annual sleep, health & activity habits in an email campaign every year and also summarizes global stats on their blog.
Top 9 and Playbacks by Meta
Instagram and Facebook offered automated look-back videos of your year's content (Playbacks) in 2021.
In the past, Instagram has generated the popular Top Nine photo collages with the user's best 9 photos of the year. Those were posted by everyone and their dog, including Kim Kardashian or Ariana Grande.
As Instagram hasn't been offering this feature in the last years (why!?), some services popped up that generate your Top 9 for you. It's definitely something that people liked to see!
Reddit's end of year recaps
Reddit presented personalized recaps of their user's habits. They included fun stats like the length of how many bananas you scrolled on Reddit that year. (Too many, probably!) A very cute part of the campaign were their personalized "trading cards" for every user, featuring their favourite subreddits (topics) and their secret ability.
Google's Year in Search
Googles Year in Search campaign videos are stunning to watch. They connect their business (search) with things that happened during the year through great storytelling.
Why you should plan a Year in Review campaign
The examples above are inspirational, and these companies obviously invest a lot of time in their campaigns. Some have even reached kind of a cult status and are eagerly awaited by their users every year.
A Year in Review campaign can:
- Visualize your value to your customers
- Increase customer loyalty
- Leave a lasting brand impact
It reminds users of their accomplishments, happy memories and their habits – and shows how you contributed to them.
You probably don't have the same budget as Google or Instagram, but you can create such a campaign at every scale. We have some tips up our sleeves to help you create them without a large team of developers or videographers. (Read on!)
3 rules for great Yearly Recap campaigns
1. It's focused on your customers, not your business
If you look back on your year, you probably think of all the ways your business grew: New features, new customers, new partnerships. I hope you're proud of all that! The thing is: It's just not that interesting for your customers.
Rather, use this opportunity to show your customers what they accomplished this year with your help! The best Year in Review campaigns are proof of how valuable you are for them.
2. It's personalized
Imagine you subscribe to the digital issues of your favourite newspaper. The number of articles they published this year might be interesting, but how many of them did you actually read? Personalized elements can add a lot of value to the overall statistic.
By personalizing your Year in Review campaign, you make your impact on your customer's life visible. You want to remind them that their subscription really pays off for them.
3. It's shareable
If you followed the first two rules, your customers are already likely to share your campaign. People like to share their own accomplishments and "highlight reels". Now it's your job to make sharing as easy as possible for them:
- Make sure you provide your campaign in a shareable format (e.g. an infographic in a format used on social media, a video or link)
- Provide social sharing functions to make sharing easy
How to create a personalized Year in Review campaign
First, think about what data you could use to visualize your value. It could be the user's "top 10", their growth stats and milestones, how active they are in your app (posting, liking, sending or creating things) or other facts about touchpoints between them and your business.
Some ideas:
- A community for book lovers could recap how much time their users spent reading, how many books they read, and maybe how many trees they saved by reading digitally
- A fitness app could show their users how many tons they lifted and how many calories they burned during what total amount of workouts.
- A photo platform could show them their best three posts and how many likes they got.
The hard part is over once you have gathered your data. There are a lot of tools available to automate the rest for you.
We at Placid can help you with generating personalized creatives like infographics, throwback videos or more. Together with automation tools like Make or Zapier, our nocode integrations or with our API you can build custom workflows.
Here are some tutorials on how your creative automation setup for your campaign could look like:
- Generate personalized visuals for Year in Review campaigns with Placid & Airtable
- Create personalized Year in Review campaign visuals with Placid & Zapier
- Create personalized infographics for Year in Review campaigns with Placid & Make
Do you have more ideas or need support with your Year in Review campaigns? I'm curious about what you're going to build, and I'm always