Putting The Wraps on Our 2020 Holiday Contest

At the end of 2020, we invited our users to showcase campaigns they sent over the holiday season. They could nominate their favorite campaign touchpoints —any email, web modal, web push, SMS, or MMS message— in three categories: Outstanding Design, The Best Adoption of a Zaius Recipe, and The Best Use of Personalization.

Our users’ submissions did not disappoint. Our panel of judges was amazed at the variety of campaigns they’d seen. Our users’ creativity and ingenious application of Zaius features made for a tight race. However, after thoughtful deliberation, we identified our three winners, and we are now excited to share their campaigns and discuss what made them take home the prizes.

Outstanding Design

We received the most submissions in the Outstanding Design category. The nominated emails, web modals, and MMS messages evoked a surprisingly wide range of emotions and tones, from humorous to festive. As we tallied our judges’ votes, it was Fox Rent-A-Car’s retro campaign that emerged as the winner.

Fox Rent-A-Car is a leading car rental company serving budget-conscious travelers in the U.S. and around the world. Their Back to the 90s Black Friday campaign and scratch-off-style animated GIF worked like a time machine and took us back to a time of bold neon colors, Lisa Frank designs, Tamagotchis, and Top Gun. Charlie Brensinger, our Principal Solutions Engineer, voted for this graphic for its fun, eye-catching design, adding that the 90’s theme came across cohesively, both in the graphic as well as its message that referenced 90’s pricing.

The Best Adoption of a Zaius Recipes

Zaius Recipes help our users get their campaigns out the door faster by providing them with templated campaign setups they can install and launch within minutes. In preparation for the peak Black Friday/Cyber Monday season, we created Holiday Recipes to make campaign creation faster and easier for our users. Selecting a winner in this category, we were looking for a campaign that took advantage of one of these recipes. 

“What we want,” said VP of Engineering Rob McDonald, “is a campaign where our user took the core idea of the recipe and tweaked it just enough to make it work better for them.” Our winner, Shamans Market, did exactly that and submitted an email campaign that hit the balance between out-of-the-box convenience and customization. 

Shamans Market offers fair-trade, eco-friendly, artisan-made, organic, and natural products for a spiritual, harmonious living. After installing Zaius’ Seasonal Gift Shoppers recipe, they customized the email’s copy and design to align it with their branding. They also updated the recipe’s Best Selling Products recommendations and replaced them with Zaius Recommendations to further personalize their product recommendations in the email.

The Best Use of Personalization

Our motto at Zaius is that every customer interaction matters; therefore, the category focusing on personalization was very close to our hearts. Our users also believe in bringing relevance to their shoppers at every stage of the customer journey too, so their nominated campaigns were rich in personalized touches. We’ve seen personalized subject lines, first names dynamically populated into text messages, personalized offers based on abandoned carts, and target audiences segmented based on their interactions with the brand. The Zaius team did not have an easy job selecting one winner, but after careful consideration, we selected Maine Lobster Now.

Maine Lobster Now has been selling the best quality Maine lobsters for over 30 years. “They never fail to make me hungry,” shared Annalita Vizcarra from our Support team, as she was evaluating the brand’s campaign. And we all admit it, it’s easy to get swooned by the images of lobster, shrimp, and other goodies in the brand’s emails. However, it was the brand’s targeted segment of holiday shoppers and brilliant use of past purchase data as well as Zaius’ Product Recommendations that won them the most votes. “Leveraging previous purchase data around seasonality is a winning combination,” said Mike Angoff, Sales Manager. Rob was also a proponent of this email touchpoint: “I like the callback to last year’s purchases. It feels very personal, like something I would benefit from if a brand sent me that message.”

Special Mention Award

Finally, we wanted to specially call out our client, Health Products For You, who received a Special Mention Award from our judges. “Health Products for you was a top contender in each category,” suggested Charlie, “and deserves recognition for the depth and breadth of their campaign coverage. They showed immense expertise in creating their audience base and activating their messages across all of their channels: email, web modal, and MMS.” 

Health Products For You is a health and wellness store offering a wide range of products from wound care to rehab & therapy. They shone in personalization, recipe usage, and design skills alike, and we simply had to award them for their excellence in working with Zaius.