Valentine’s Day Email Marketing: How to Attract More Clients
A successful business is built through strong client relationships. You want them to know your brand, trust your products and be loyal to you. As February is the month of love, here is some advice to help you attract old and new clients through a Valentine’s Day email marketing campaign.
No matter your business, you can come up with an offer for those who celebrate love. An online shop? Come up with gift ideas. A restaurant? Prepare the most romantic night ever. A travel agency? Offer the vacation of their dreams.
Got an offer in mind yet? Good. Now you have to promote it. But as you wouldn’t propose after just one date, don’t start with the offer. Take some time first to win them over.
How to Plan Your Valentine’s Day Email Marketing Campaign
The first step is to create a plan and answer a few questions:
1) What is the goal of your email marketing campaign?
Is it brand awareness, generating leads, increasing engagement or selling? A Valentine’s Day newsletter can have one or multiple goals, but don’t try to do too much at once or you risk confusing people. If you want to achieve more than one objective, an email sequence will help you communicate clearly.
2) Who is your target audience? Can you segment your audience for better results?
You can have different messages and offers for different segments of your target audience, such as men and women who are already in a relationship or single people. Let’s say you run a spa and you offer experiences for couples, gift cards from him to her or fun, relaxing sessions for those who want to celebrate Valentine’s Day through self care. Each of these offers should be communicated differently.
3) How many emails will you send? How often and on which days?
Create a clear calendar for each email sequence that you plan on sending.
4) What resources will you need?
Who will write the emails and who will design them? If you don’t have a designer to help you, but you want your emails to look professional, the best way is to use a ready-made Valentine’s Day newsletter template, that you can quickly customize with your product information.
5) What other communication channels must you align to the email marketing campaign?
To create a complete and coherent experience for you clients, consider customizing your website for Valentine’s Day. You can do this on the entire website or just on your special offer page. For example, you can create a landing page where people who click from the newsletter land. Add to that some banners and pop-ups and you’re good to go.
Here are just a few of the Valentine’s Day newsletter templates that you can find on the NewsMAN email marketing platform .
Valentine’s Day Newsletter Sequence
The advantage of sending an email sequence instead of a single newsletter is that you get multiple chances to communicate with new or existing clients, while achieving several marketing objectives.
Here are a few email ideas to use in your Valentine’s Day campaign.
Win trust
If one of your objectives is to educate clients about your brand and to win their trust, start your campaign with useful information and advice. For example, if you own an online jewelry store, create a guide for choosing the perfect gift, with information about metals, precious stones and trends. If you’re in the tourism business, write an article about the top 10 most romantic destinations. Educate while also giving them hints for gifts.
Get their attention
Send one or more teasing newsletters to make them curious about the Valentine’s Day offer. If you’re sending more than one, time them so you don’t communicate too much, too often. Here are a few teasing ideas:
a) a list with the products on sale;
b) the option of adding the products to a favorites list, to easily order once they are on sale;
c) countdown to offer – studies show that adding a countdown timer directly in the email helps with sales;
d) engagement mechanism (such as answering a question, tagging a friend on Instagram etc.) to receive an extra discount.
Send the offer
Here’s the moment you’ve been preparing for: the Valentine’s Day offer newsletter. Make sure the email has a clear and persuasive subject line, that the design is spot on and that the offer is clear and easily accessible. Don’t forget about the call to action button. You can find a few examples of great newsletters below, in the “Design Ideas” section.
Resend the offer
Sometimes they don’t open the email. It can happen to anyone, including big brands. It doesn’t necessarily mean the subscribers were not interested. Fortunately, there is a solution. In your email marketing platform, you can automatically set to resend the email campaign to those who did not previously open and thus give them the chance to benefit from the offer.
Tip: When resending the offer, change the subject line and the content for more impact. For example: “There are only x products left” or “The offer expires in y hours”.
Email remarketing
Keep communicating through remarketing with those who’ve shown interest. They visited the website, looked around and left? Or have they added products to the cart but abandoned it? It’s clear you’ve made them curious. Oftentimes, just by setting up an automated abandoned browsing or abandoned cart email you can close an otherwise lost sale.
The week after
Your email marketing campaign does not end with the offer, just like a successful relationship is not built through ignorance. Use behaviours from the campaign (who opened, which emails and when, who clicked, who bought etc.) to segment your audience and do a follow up. Here are some ideas:
1) Ask for feedback and use the information in testimonials. Learn from negative feedback.
2) Create a new nurture email sequence for those who’ve shown interest, but haven’t ordered.
3) Send a post-sale voucher.
4) Create a top with the most popular Valentine’s Day products.
5) Investigate why some have not opened your emails. Your objective is not to have a long list of names, but to keep them engaged.
Valentine or Anti-Valentine ?
Some people are not into Valentine’s Day for different reasons. Too many lovey-dovey emails might turn them off. So here’s a thought: send an initial email and ask people in your list if they are into Valentine’s Day or not. Then use segmentation to send the offer to those who want to celebrate Valentine’s and to send a different campaign to the others, maybe the next day or week. With the latter, focus on self love and care, celebrating independence, fun experiences and so on.
Depending on your offer and objectives, you can use one or several of these types of emails. But the more you want to send, the sooner you need to start.
Segment Your Audience for the Valentine’s Day Newsletter
Segmentation means dividing your email list according to criteria such as gender, location, previous behaviours or any other data you can access and use (just be careful with GDPR). Segmentation leads to personalization, that is a sure way to increase open and click through rates.
For example, a Valentine’s day problem is getting your gift on time, especially if you’ve waited until the last minute to order it. Simply adding the location in your copy might make a difference: “Overnight delivery to Seattle” or “Express 2-hour delivery to New York”.
Design Ideas for Your Valentine’s Day Email Marketing Campaign
Your Valentine’s Day newsletter must attract attention, but be simple enough to facilitate sales. Here are some rules to follow:
Make it easy to follow
Complicated emails, with a lot of information, can cause confusion. Present your offer quickly and make it easy to take action. See the Yelp example from the “Make your offer clear” section.
Use powerful images
You know the saying: “An image is worth a thousand words”. This is true because the brain processes images much easier than words. A beautiful well-chosen picture can draw your clients in. Taco Bell does this well, as illustrated in the next section.
Make your offer clear
Don’t make them work for it and read a long email to get to the good stuff. Some might not make it. Instead, follow the Pulp & Press example and make the offer clear from the get go.
Highlight products
Use beautiful photos and short, catchy descriptions. There are many flower shops trying to make a sale on Valentine’s Day, but the one you’ll see in the image below, in the following section, will clearly stand out from the crowd.
Be playful
If your brand allows it, don’t be afraid to play around. For example, Saxx used a simple yet daring design, which surely makes you pay attention.
Include price and discount information in your email
NewsMAN allows you to quickly create an eCommerce newsletter: add products, insert a link for each and the algorithm automatically fills in the title, image, price, discount etc. The drag & drop functionality makes everything easier.
Use interactive elements, such as gifs and countdown timers
Valentine’s Day Subject Lines Ideas
The subject line is the first thing people see in their inbox. A good subject line is short and to the point. Here are some ideas that you can customize for your business:
- A safe romantic dinner at home. Free delivery
- Valentine’s Day = red roses. Express delivery in Bucharest
- A day to remember and frame. 50% discount on photo sessions
- Our Valentine’s Day gift to you. Get your voucher
- What women want for Valentine’s Day
- In love with discounts! -20% on all products
- 3 steps to a lovely Valentine’s Day
- Relax together with a couples’ massage
Write down as many ideas as possible and start testing.
A/B Testing for Your Valentine’s Day Newsletter
The only way to find out what works for your audience is to test different things. The good news is that you don’t have to wait till the end of the campaign to find out the results. A/B testing and MVT (multivariate testing) allows you to send emails in which you change one or several elements (image, subject line, CTA button etc.) and find out which one performs best.
You can do this in real time. NewsMAN lets you send one or several emails to a small group of subscribers and, after a short while, to send the winning version to the entire list. You are free to choose how the winner is established, for how long the test runs or what percentage of the list gets the test emails.
Attract Clients All Year, Not Just on Valentine’s Day
We hope we gave you enough information and ideas to plan a successful Valentine’s Day campaign. If you’re looking for a responsive email editor, beautiful templates and eCommerce automations to make your life easier, give NewsMAN a try for free.
And if you want to grow your audience, optimize your website. Instead of the same old forms, why not try a wheel of fortune for email subscription. Offer prizes such as free trials, discounts and, in the Valentine spirit, a virtual hug!
Don’t forget to communicate constantly with your audience, not only when you want to sell. Create automated email flows to save time, while also being present in your clients’ inbox.