How to create your own Spotify Wrapped campaign  

If you use Spotify, you’re likely among the legions of customers who eagerly await the release of your Spotify Wrapped round-up each December. It’s that day when, after a year of grazing in Spotify’s music and podcast catalog, you’re served up a snazzy analysis of your listening habits for the past year. Not only does Spotify Wrapped reveal the soundtrack of your life that year, but it also spotlights the power of personalized messaging.

Amid the treasure trove of customer data you gather lies one of the most powerful tools for engagement: personalized storytelling. Spotify Wrapped masterfully transforms data into a compelling narrative, going far beyond the standard “Hi {{Customer.First_Name}}” greeting. Instead, it crafts an individualized and meaningful story about each listener’s unique experiences. The result? A viral sensation that captivates audiences because it’s entirely focused on them.

In a way, Spotify Wrapped acts like a personality test. Whether it’s the classic Myers-Briggs or a Buzzfeed “What kind of cupcake are you?” quiz, people love learning more about themselves—and sharing those insights provides a sense of belonging. Customers feel seen, appreciated, and connected when a brand offers that kind of experience. That’s how they quickly become your biggest advocates.

Whether you’re already using customer data for personalized messaging for just developing your strategy, you already have the ingredients you need for your own Spotify Wrapped campaign.

Read on to learn how it’s done.

The Spotify Wrapped strategy hinges on four key ingredients:

1. Customer data: a wealth of information about each customer’s preferences and behaviors you activate to create detailed, personalized content
2. Visual presentation: a design that communicates a meaningful story
3. Engagement tactics: use of multiple channels that spur participation from customers
4. Shareability: messaging that encourages people to share their data and elements that make it easy for them to do so

Let’s explore why each ingredient matters and how you can use them to craft your own Spotify Wrapped marketing campaign.

Every data point you have about your customers is an opportunity for personalization: the actions they take, features they use, milestones they’ve achieved, and much more. You have a tremendous amount of information to tap into when building your Spotify Wrapped campaign; your customer journey should inform the specifics you’ll want to include.

For instance, say you have a language-learning app. Your audience might want to see things like how many lessons they’ve started and the percentage they’ve completed, which languages they’ve studied, and their longest streak of daily usage. When presented together, those stats paint a highly personalized portrait of the customer as an evolving multi-linguist empowered by your app.

When you surface these hyper-personalized insights to your customers, you build a stronger connection with them. In turn, they’re far more likely to become your brand advocates. Just look at how many folks worldwide share their Spotify Wrapped each year: in 2021, Spotify recorded over 60 million shares of Wrapped stories and cards across social media.

A customer data platform (CDP) that feeds accurate, unified, real-time data into your messaging platform is crucial for successfully creating a Spotify Wrapped campaign.

The Spotify Wrapped campaign works so well because its appealing design makes data easy to understand. It’s colorful, fun, and places statistics into relevant contexts. What’s more? The images are consistent with the Spotify brand.

Get creative with how you display statistics. Numbers gain meaning when they show a story developing over time. For instance, instead of just telling the customer how many times they’ve logged in or used a feature, display the data as a colorful graph that takes an individual through their activity week by week.

Letterboxed, a platform for tracking and sharing the movies you’ve watched, is a great example of how this is done:

Combining various data points into an infographic can offer a holistic narrative.

For example, video sharing platform, YouTube starts their year-in-review campaign with an infographic of statistics and messaging that summarizes the actions of the video creator:

Ensure your captivating look and feel carries across every touchpoint—from your texts to emails, push notifications, and in-app messages. This gives customers a consistent journey, drawing them back into your campaign as they encounter it over and over in your app, on your website, and on social media.

Spotify’s Wrapped campaign is a masterclass in cross-channel design. It helps build brand awareness with an instantly recognizable look across web, mobile, email, and even billboards:

When using graphics to drive engagement, make sure they land correctly in your customers’ inboxes (on both desktop and mobile!) by following best practices for images in emails.

What makes Spotify’s Wrapped campaign so successful is that it pulls people into a deeply engaging experience. Don’t just present your customers with a summary of stats: invite them to delve into a journey of self-discovery.

• Email: Many Wrapped-style campaigns start with an email to showcase longer-form content. In addition to a snapshot of key stats, this provides multiple opportunities for customers to get into the details. With email, it’s best to hit the highlights and then entice them into a deeper dive.
• Push notifications: Mobile push is a quick way to alert customers that their year-end summary is available. Align the timing with moments when people are primed to want that information. For example, if you have an online payroll service, customers may be eager to dig into the data right after they receive their monthly invoice.
• SMS: Use SMS to deliver concise, engaging messages that capture your customers' attention instantly. These texts should tease the main highlights of your year-end campaign and provide a sense of urgency or excitement to prompt immediate engagement. For example: "Your 2024 insights are ready! 📊 Check how you shined this year: [link]"
• In-app messages: Make your Wrapped-inspired campaign an integrated part of the customer journey with in-app messages. Depending on where the user is within your app, you can customize the in-app experience to celebrate milestones related to key features. Imagine you offer an audiobook app. A customer’s library page could display how many books they finished that year; each book’s detail screen could let them know how many of that author’s books they’ve read. The possibilities to get personal are endless.

Interactivity is crucial for enhancing customer involvement. Instead of passively showcasing data, create opportunities for action:

• Quizzes and surveys: Engage customers with questions about their year-in-review, sparking curiosity and self-reflection.
• Reaction buttons: Allow customers to react to stats, such as liking or sharing insights.
• Interactive data visualizations: Give users control to sort, filter, or compare their data in meaningful ways. For instance, a fitness app could let users explore their workout trends month by month or compare activity levels across different times of the year.

Year-end recaps aren’t a new idea, so why is the Spotify Wrapped campaign the first one that comes to mind? The answer lies in its incredibly shareable nature.

In 2022, the first three days alone saw over 425 million tweets, which just show how it has become an indelible part of the pop culture landscape.

A customer’s data gives them a reflection of who they are and what they care about—and they want to express that unique identity to other people. The listener personality feature that Spotify Wrapped added in 2022 is a perfect example of this. The personas seem almost like zodiac signs (and who doesn’t love a horoscope?):

Inspiring people to share your content turns them into de facto brand ambassadors. 92% of consumers trust earned media far more than ads, and the user-generated content your campaign creates is a goldmine for building that trust.

Not everyone wants to trumpet their info to the world, but they may be eager to share with friends, family, and colleagues. Include options for sharing via text and messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, SnapChat, and Facebook Messenger.

B2B companies might want to encourage sharing among colleagues via Slack, Microsoft Teams, and your own community pages.

Allow customers to share exactly what they want from their round-up. Spotify Wrapped, for example, displays specific stats in the form of cards that you can share individually. When designing your own Wrapped-style experience, think about the discrete bits of data people might want to share based on their values.

For instance, customers might want to show off how much paper they’ve saved by using an eBook subscription service, or operations professionals may want to tell their company’s employees how much time they’ve reclaimed with a meeting scheduling app.

No customer is an island—so show them how they connect! Including context about how their stats compare to others’ instills a sense of community and belonging. From bragging rights when they outperform the average to camaraderie with people who share their tastes, contextual data makes content extra share-worthy. This example from Grammarly artfully blends individual customer data with information about their entire user base:

When you know where you’re headed, it’s easier to track your progress. Gauging the return of your Spotify-inspired Wrapped campaign requires first identifying your goals. What do you hope to achieve or learn? Maybe the key to your business is increasing retention rates or reducing churn. Perhaps you’re hoping to get customers to upgrade to your premium option. Or you might want people to log in or use a particular feature more frequently. Measure how your Spotify Wrapped-style campaign impacts the specific metrics that support your business goals.

For the best results, this shouldn’t be a one-and-done scenario. The Spotify Wrapped campaign has become an annual tradition that people look forward to every December. Your campaign might make the most sense as a year-end event, or you could go with a more frequent cadence.

Meeting insights platform Grain, for example, sends a weekly round-up because frequent insights into usage habits give their customers an ongoing sense of the service’s value:

Whatever cadence you choose, consistency is key. It not only builds customer engagement through predictability but also gives you ongoing data you can use to compare performance over time and iterate based on how customers react. You might even want to include surveys as part of interactive elements to hear directly from customers about what they do (and don’t) like about your campaigns.

Want an up-close look at how a Wrapped-style campaign can work for a B2B SaaS company? Find out how eCommerce helpdesk app Gorgias put the strategy into action—and earned over $20,000 in ARR.

This on-demand workshop takes you through all the details.

• Campaign walk-through: a step-by-step analysis of Gorgias’ 2022 end-of-year recap emails and results
• Data deep-dive: examples of engagement data points you can track and leverage to create personalized reward and recap messages
• Shareability best practices: tips for empowering your customers to advocate for your brand on their social networks

Spotify’s Wrapped campaign is more than just a collection of listening stats. It’s become a phenomenon because it takes personalization to the highest level, giving customers compelling insights that drive conversation and connection.

Spotify does it by simply mining the customer data they already have, and you can do it too. By translating your data into personalized storytelling that matters to your customers, you build a better, more enduring relationship with them.

Ready to give it a go? With powerful segmentation, seamless multi-channel messaging, and sophisticated workflows, Customer.io Journeys can help you implement a SaaS Wrapped campaign that gets results. Use our 14-day free trial to build out your campaign and start connecting with your customers on a whole new level. Get started today.