Valentine’s Day is approaching faster than Cupid’s arrow and marketers around the world are preparing to woo their customers with love-themed campaigns. So with shoppers’ inboxes already filling up with Valentine’s day newsletters and promotions, now is the time to pull out all the stops and win over your subscribers with a Valentine’s Day email campaign that stands out from the crowd.
Read on to discover 8 tips for your Valentine’s Day email marketing campaigns, with some real-life examples to inspire you.
1. Start sending emails early
The early bird catches the worm, so start sending out your Valentine’s Day marketing emails promptly in January to give shoppers enough time to plan their purchases (and to ensure competitors don’t steal your share of sales).
2. Send reminders and create urgency
Send your shoppers reminders as the big day gets closer letting them know it’s not too late to secure the perfect gift. Countdown timers are a great addition here to help you boost urgency. Use them to count down the days, hours and minutes to important deadlines, such as the last delivery date to get their gifts in time. Over 1 in 4 consumers want online retailers to highlight important order cut-off dates, making this an essential tactic to try.
Thorntons uses a countdown timer to show shoppers how long they have left until Valentine’s Day.
Source: Thorntons email
Molton Brown also boosts urgency with a banner reminding shoppers when to place their orders.
Source: Molton Brown email
3. Send an ‘it’s not too late’ email
No matter how many reminders you send, there will always be some shoppers who forget. But all is not lost. If your business sells vouchers, highlight them as a last minute present option in an ‘it’s not too late’ email and wait for the collective sigh of relief from panicked lovers across the land.
Buyagift highlights their e-voucher gifts in a ‘left it too late’ email.
Source: Buyagift email
4. Add product recommendations
Product recommendations are a great addition to your marketing emails all year round. But when it comes to Valentine’s Day emails, product recommendations could give your shoppers the spark of inspiration they need to find the perfect Valentine’s Day gift.
In this example, Personalised Gifts Shop ramps up the effectiveness of their recommendations with a conversion-boosting social proof tactic – star ratings. The stakes are high when purchasing a Valentine’s day gift, so tactics like these will build shoppers’ trust in your brand. Research shows that over 1 in 3 consumers (38%) want to see product ratings for products featured in emails, making this a vital addition to your email marketing and Valentine’s Day emails.
Source: Personalised Gifts Shop email
5. Use a dynamic hero banner
Your hero banner is the one and only chance you have to make a good first impression on your recipient in your Valentine’s Day email campaign. Since the human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text, it pays to use your banner wisely and put people in the Valentine’s Day mood. Thorntons personalizes their hero banner to make sure it’s love at first sight by displaying the recipient’s name on a chocolate-shaped heart, immediately putting their recipients in the mood for love (and chocolate) with their Valentine’s Day email. Who wouldn’t be tempted to read on when an email starts in such a deliciously personal way?
Source: Thorntons email
6. Include user generated content
In love and marketing, authenticity matters. And since user generated content (UGC) is the most authentic type of content there is, add it to your Valentine’s Day email campaign to showcase your community of loyal customers and foster trust with new shoppers.
Yappy utilizes this social proof tactic effectively by sharing customers’ pictures of their products in their Valentine’s Day email campaign. And when your customers are this cute, who wouldn’t want to show them off.
Source: Yappy email
To keep content fresh and the manual effort to a minimum, retailers can incorporate real-time social feeds to automatically pull the latest posts into their Valentine’s day emails.
7. Share helpful tips
Don’t just go in for the hard sell. Delight your customers with helpful content to help them have their loveliest Valentine’s Day yet, building your brand reputation and fostering customer loyalty in the process.
Dunelm adds an easy to follow flower arranging tutorial to their Valentine’s Day email, helping their customers create faux flower bouquets for their loved ones (with the help of Dunelm’s range of artificial flowers).
Source: Dunelm email
8. Ramp up your post-purchase emails
Post-purchase emails present a great opportunity to foster customer loyalty and line up future conversions. Normally, tactics such as product recommendations work well here to show customers items that complement the product they just purchased. However, since Valentine’s Day purchases are typically gifts they don’t necessarily reflect the preferences of the buyer. So instead, try adding a discount code to encourage shoppers to come back to make another purchase, perhaps for themselves this time.
Final thoughts
Consumers’ inboxes can get overly cramped around Valentine’s Day. Use the 8 tips we’ve outlined in this post to cut through the noise. Start sending your emails early to get ahead and don’t just stop at one email – send reminders and ‘it’s not too late’ emails right up until the 14th. Include eCommerce tactics such as product recommendations in your Valentine’s Day emails to boost conversions and help shoppers find the perfect gifts. Finally, try adding a discount code to your post-purchase emails to encourage future purchases.
Download your copy of Five Easy Ways to Make Your Emails Perform Better for more ways to woo your customers this Valentine’s Day.
Disclaimer:
This blog post is for informational purposes only. Fresh Relevance is not claiming to provide its services to the companies and brand owners referred to in the blog post.
