Standing out with a bold holiday campaign is always a huge challenge. You are not only competing within your industry, but also with all the other industries out there. Big retailers get a lot of attention during the holidays: everyone is looking for deals and the best place to find them is in your inbox.

As a luxury company that offers unique travel experiences, we wanted to give to our subscribers a unique holiday campaign, not only to amuse them but also to get something in return: data!

In our business, we find that promotions are overrated. We don't need to offer discounts to our subscribers, we need to offer them reasons to read our content and to engage with us. Inspiring them is a great way to grab their attention.

That's why we wanted to create a holiday campaign that could do everything at once: engage our subscribers, inspire them to start planning their next vacation, and obtain some relevant data in return that we could use at a later date.

The Big Idea

So after browsing multiple marketing blogs, and brainstorming ways to tie a holiday campaign in with travel, we came up with the idea of a New Year's resolution travel wish list. Everyone makes plans for the new year, and those plans nearly ALWAYS include travel.

Knowing that everyone wants to travel more, we helped our subscribers narrow down their plans using an interactive passport stamp game.

The User Experience

The email subject line did the first part of the work for us: Who says resolutions can't be fun?

After clicking the email, subscribers hit a landing page where they could stamp their virtual passport with all the destinations they wanted to visit in the next year.

After dragging and dropping destinations, subscribers were able to save their passports, share it with friends, and get a freebie that they were not expecting-free car rental for their next vacation.

The coolest part for the marketer starts here: now you have a database with all the destinations that your subscribers are thinking about going over the next year. And with that info we retargeted subscribers in January, with a very simple text email, coming from their Travel Luxury Advisor, to dig for more details on their vacation plans.

The game had done the hard work for us-we knew where subscribers wanted to travel without asking them directly. We were then able to take immediate action to get more information and convert that into leads.

Campaign Success

The results were great! We were able to convert 40% of the answers into leads that were worked directly by our sales team.

With a little bit of creativity we were able to turn a game into a "lead generator" to start the year with great numbers without bugging our subscribers.

We are already working on our ideas for the 2014 holiday season that will give us the precious data that all marketers crave and the fun and engagement that our subscribers are expecting at this time of year.

Do you want to see it for yourself? Check out the Luxury Retreats campaign here.