Last December we wrote about the joy of Wrapped emails. At the time, our message was pretty simple: Wrapped works because it makes people feel seen. It takes all those tiny interactions a customer has had with a brand and turns them into something personal, celebratory, and actually worth opening.
Then in January we took the conversation further with Email Love in our Wrapped emails webinar, digging into the strategy, storytelling, data, design, and technology behind the campaigns that do it well. So, are we really talking about Wrapped again? Well, yes. Simply because the best time to start thinking about your end-of-year campaign is nowhere near the end of the year it's NOW.
Your December campaign should start now
Every December, social media fills with colourful screenshots. Spotify Wrapped has become a cultural phenomenon, but the real story isn't about one platform's year-end campaign. It's about what happens when brands take behavioural data and turn it into something people genuinely want to share. The best Wrapped campaigns don't start in November when someone remembers they should probably do something festive. They start with conversations throughout the year, when there's time to think strategically about what customer data actually tells you and how to make it resonate.
Wrapped campaigns have since evolved beyond Spotify's annual music summary. Retail brands recap purchase journeys. Fitness apps celebrate workout milestones. Financial services platforms highlight savings achievements. What unites them is the recognition that customers accumulate meaningful data throughout their relationship with your brand, and when you reflect that data back in a thoughtful, personal way, it creates a moment worth sharing. The format has become a template for turning behavioural insights into engagement, and the brands doing it well understand it's not about copying, it's about understanding your own customers and what makes their journey with you worth celebrating.
The Gym Group: make progress the story
For The Gym Group, the goal was to celebrate members’ achievements while encouraging them to keep going into the new year. We created a personalised Wrapped email with a scorecard, carousel, and shareable stats that turned individual progress into something worth celebrating.
The takeaway? The data we had access to was leveraged to celebrate, motivate and retain customers.
Pret: make the value visible
Pret wanted to reduce churn, re-engage former Club Pret members, and show the value of membership through personalised year-in-review content. We built a multichannel campaign across email and in-app messaging, using savings, favourite products, and store visits to create a playful customer story. This is where Wrapped can get really useful, reinforcing value, encouraging referrals, and sending customers something they actually want to share.
Email Weekly: our Halloween edition
For our Halloween edition of Email Weekly last year, we partnered with Multiplied to turn our subscriber behaviour into a personalised ‘reading’. We used data including opens, clicks, join date, device, and email client to created individual tarot-style insights for each of our subscribers.
We turned familiar behaviours into playful storytelling, using group averages and simple logic to give each insight more personality and context. Dynamic templates, animated creative, and fallbacks helped make the experience feel individual without needing a huge amount of data. It’s a good reminder that personalisation does not need to mean complexity. Sometimes you just need a few useful data points and a creative reason to bring them together. You can see exactly how we built it in our behind-the-scenes Halloween Email Weekly post.
Wrapped doesn’t have to mean year-end
This was one of the big points in our original Wrapped post, and it’s worth repeating. It should be a mindset, not a date in the diary. Think:
- Customer anniversaries
- Loyalty milestones
- Membership achievements
- Seasonal recaps
- Company milestones
- Progress updates
-
100th orders
If there’s a meaningful moment worth reflecting back to someone, there’s probably a Wrapped-style idea in there and doing it outside December might help you stand out even more.
Whether you have access to endless customer data, or are unsure what you should be utilising, now is the time to start figuring out what your Wrapped moment could be. Bring us the chaotic spreadsheet or the 'could we maybe...?' thoughts, and we can create something great together. Because the best Wrapped campaigns start long before the wrapping paper comes out...
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