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The perfect seasonal email marketing campaign starts with the perfect subject line. Read on to learn how to create one that will boost your open rate.
Téa Liarokapi
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When we're talking about seasonal marketing, the main point is holiday sales and adapting to consumer needs. Being quick and agile with sales was the main lesson learned during COVID-19. Quarantines boosted online spending and made the shift to digital sales quicker than expected:
As you can see here, the majority of consumers shifted their spending to online purchases, and it hasn't stopped since. This makes the shift to online sales and coming up with content ideas that can drive more traffic imperative, seeing as users won't waste time and effort on something that won't catch their eye straight up.
This is especially true for holiday marketing campaigns in general and email marketing campaigns in particular. Your sales revenue can be the best one yet if your marketing efforts include the right tools and tactics.
Holiday email marketing can get you there. The reason is quite simple: consumers will spend during the holiday season. Christmas, Valentine's, Easter, and all seasonal emails in between can leverage the impulsive nature of the users and boost your bottom line.
Let's see how.
Email marketing is one of the most fruitful ways to attract consumers and boost sales. Here's why:
The ROI of email marketing is quite high, provided you do it correctly, but there's a lot of effort to that. Email marketing creates an open dialogue between your brand and the user that's not dependent on the platform that you use. Social media is a fantastic way to attract users and get more traffic, but email marketing is what will familiarize your brand with the users and create in-depth emotional responses.
Of course, this ROI doesn't come quickly, and you need an overall seasonal digital strategy that will allow users to love your products and trust your brand. These strategies include frequent list cleaning, segmentation, personalization, and a clear understanding of your target audience and how it interacts with your brand.
A Valentine's marketing campaign, for example, will require careful planning and being ahead of time first of all. Secondly, you'll need to segment your audience through all the platforms. After that, create a landing page that will make your offer justice and attract the right crowd. Lastly, you'll need some very personalized Valentine's day subject lines that can boost your open rates and promote the right thing at the right time.
If your seasonal email marketing campaign is the equivalent of a dialogue, the perfect seasonal subject line is the knock on the door or the pleasant phone call from a friend. And some components make seasonal subject lines shine.
Creating a seasonal subject line might sound pretty easy, but the truth is that most brands leverage perfect email subject lines for their email marketing campaigns. This fact makes standing out in a full inbox quite tricky. However, there are some techniques to boost your chances.
Including your unique offer in your seasonal subject line is something that most brands should follow. Like so:
This is a pretty sweet seasonal deal. In that case, the brand decided to go with a very nice discount that allows users to purchase more Christmas decoration items at a lower price. It's not cryptic and doesn't promise something it cannot deliver.
Showcasing your unique offer right off the bat can also boost the user's trust in your brand - especially if you insist a little and send a follow-up email to those who opened the original email but have yet to take action.
The use of incentives is one of the oldest tricks in a salesperson's playbook. Use it in your subject lines to showcase your offer's value and the experiences your users can enjoy by taking full advantage.
Who hasn't thought that they need to "Get this while the offers last"? This trick, also known as FOMO, is quite effective and can boost your seasonal email marketing open rates.
The above example - with a clock emoji, no less - leverages one of the most lucrative ways to get your audience to open your email and see your offer. Of course, FOMO is something to be used wisely:
Creating urgency and utilizing a scarcity element will bring new life to your seasonal email campaign and increase the perceived value of the experiences your brand has to offer.
This might be a staple in seasonal email marketing, but sometimes marketers create emails that resemble email blasts all too much.
In 2023, personalized email marketing is not optional. It's one of the most common open-rate boosters, as personalized emails look and feel like a friend is talking to the prospect rather than just a faceless brand.
Of course, personalization goes beyond a simple "Hey, {First Name}". Here's what I mean:
The "year in review" email trend is one of the most lucrative ones, and it's a prime example of what personalization can do for your seasonal email marketing campaigns. You will need to leverage segmentation and understand how micro-segments can work for your email marketing campaigns.
Your seasonal subject line could include the person's birthday, an anniversary, or previous seasonal purchase and a promise for "more offers inside".
Personalization can go as far as using location-based weather data. It makes sense to have a Christmas offer for swimsuits for your Australian audience, as much as having an offer on snow equipment for countries of the northern hemisphere.
You couldn't create a seasonal email campaign that promises one thing in the subject line and mentions another in the body copy.
Creating a natural continuation of your offer inside the body copy is imperative. It builds trust; it shows that you're a credible business and you're not in it for a quick buck. In 2023, prospects have so many choices that clickbait is simply off the table.
Also, remember to use actionable verbs that lead users from point A to point B. But I'll get to that one straight away.
Your seasonal email subject line should propose something easy and manageable. In other words, you need something actionable to promote your seasonal email marketing campaign. Like so:
This subject line shows a verb and a question. "Can you?" urges the prospect to answer, and should the answer be "Yes", your audience will take action immediately.
When creating an email subject line, keep things simple. As I said before, you need users to understand how to get from point A to point B and, finally, to proceed with the action you want them to take. Use an analytics tool to understand what verbs can help you the most and write just what they'd like to see.
Let me preface this by stating that not all audiences celebrate the same holidays. Christmas, Diwali, Hannukah, Eid, Easter, or the Chinese New Year are all different holidays celebrated by different people - or segments of your audience, to speak like a marketer.
You need to know your holidays and the segment that celebrates them and create messages that will be as targeted as possible. Of course, you may wonder how to keep track of everything and every section.
An excellent place to start - especially if you're an entrepreneur or a small business - would be your social media platforms. You could always create polls and gather data to help you understand your audience and what seasonal content they'd like to see.
You can also use an online calendar, like so:
Iconsquare's free online calendar can help boost your efforts and understand the holidays your audience loves and the content that will work for your campaigns.
Knowing your audience is yet another element you'll need to master if you want your seasonal email subject lines to be perfect. Of course, as I mentioned above, not everyone will be interested in the same things, and you need to understand your customers' segments.
To do that, you'll need to leverage your data:
Demographics like location and age and psychographics like "values family" or "dog person" can be used to give you the perfect email subject line for your seasonal campaigns. But knowing your audience goes beyond that sometimes.
Use all channels that provide interaction. You can check your social media platforms and how your users "converse" with your brand. Your support channels are another great indicator of what makes your users tick. Leave no stone unturned, and leverage surveys, polls, and quizzes to give you more clarity regarding the content they'd love to see.
Apart from the content, there are more components to the perfect seasonal email subject line.
You could personalize your emails and still not see the open rate you dreamt of or the revenue email marketing promised you. Let's see how you can make your seasonal email marketing campaign bulletproof.
Finding the best time to send an email is a little tricky, but knowing when to knock on your audience's door is essential. So, even if you used all of the elements for the perfect email subject line, you need to deliver right when it's going to shine in a full inbox.
Sending an email at the right time will help improve engagement, improve your open rates, and your sender reputation and deliverability score. This is because you have better chances at open rates and interaction if you send your seasonal campaign right when users want to see it.
Of course, there's the question of when that right time is.
Moosend's research showed that the ideal time to send your email is between 1-2 pm, although the results may vary depending on the brand and the audience.
Sometimes, your seasonal email campaign won't perform as well as you would've liked because you didn't follow a set of rules dictated by your industry's average.
For example, if you're trying to promote your seasonal email marketing campaign using bright colors and bold messages, and your niche uses the exact opposite, your seasonal email campaign might look out of place.
Make sure you follow your tone of voice and adjust it according to platform. Moreover, be sure your seasonal email marketing campaigns also follow some social media trends.
To understand your industry's benchmarks through social media platforms, you could use a tool like Iconsquare's Industry Benchmarks feature.
This tool can help you determine how your social media performance compares to your competitors and give you an understanding of your engagement rate, reach, and performance. You can also see the types of content and how each one performs and understand how to design your next campaign, to make it look like a natural continuation of your social media profiles and your website.
Social media and email marketing tools can provide clear insight into your users' behavior. Moreover, it's an excellent way to gather data and provide just the right thing at the right time regarding content and seasonal email subject lines.
Using a tool like Iconsquare and connecting your social media accounts in a way that allows you to extract and view precise analytics for your performance can lead to the perfect seasonal email marketing campaign.
After that, invest in an email marketing and marketing automation platform like Moosend or other SendInBlue alternatives that can provide detailed data and automation recipes that will make a difference.
As I mentioned above, automation recipes will help your email marketing campaigns make a real difference. Email automation can help your content and offer go from point A to point B in no time.
Automated email campaigns make a lot of sense for your users. The reasoning is simple:
Transactional emails are among the most common triggered email campaign examples, as the action - we can call it point A - leads to an email, which, in our case, is point B. This type of interaction amplifies trust and shows that a user's action has a natural brand reaction.
Combine that with tailor-made content that is specific and targeted to the user's interaction with your brand, and you'll lead them gently down the sales funnel in no time.
User-Generated Content (UGC) is something that some brands tend to take lightly, but it can provide a world of difference regarding your seasonal email marketing.
Just run a contest on social media, ask users to create content with your own branded hashtag, and then use this content to create a seasonal campaign that will show the experience already established fans have with your brand.
Create a testimonial video with users showcasing how they use your product and how it has helped them in their day-to-day lives and tasks.
There's no reason to be too thorough with your email marketing subject lines. Refrain from babbling, and give as much information as necessary.
The statistic above shows the ideal subject line length. As you can see, you need to go for 40 characters, more or less. Users normally lead busy lives, meaning that they don't have the time to read through email subject lines.
Generally speaking, an email subject line is not a nice place to babble or be too specific. You need actionable verbs, a unique value proposition, and an offer that stands out, and they won't be able to refuse. Boost your seasonal campaign's open rate by taking users from your value proposition to how they can obtain that value and gently leading them down the sales funnel.
In 2023, A/B testing is non-optional in boosting your seasonal marketing efforts - and your marketing efforts as a whole. The tips above will make a world of difference, sure, but how can you know what works best for you?
The way to find out would be to create two seasonal email subject lines and change one key component - an emoji or even the percentage of your offer would work. Send two test emails to some recipients of your email list, and track and trace your open rates.
The email subject line with the highest open rate wins in our case. A/B testing can help you understand what makes your users tick and what they like and dislike about your seasonal email subject line.
Sending a seasonal email marketing campaign can be a lot of work, but email marketing is one of the most rewarding tools in digital marketing.
Make sure to understand your audience and segment, and use industry standards and trends. Always A/B test your campaigns, invest in proper tools and automation platforms, and you'll see your email open rate skyrocket.
Téa Liarokapi is a Senior Content Writer for Moosend, an email marketing and marketing automation platform, and an obsessive writer in general. In her free time, she tries to find new ways to stuff more books in her bookcase and content ideas - and cats - to play with
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