5 Ways to Refresh your Emails for the Spring/Summer Season

3 minute read

Upland Admin

As a general trend, sales in retail are considerably steady, so it’s important to keep your subscribers engaged to support demand generation.

According to the 2017 Email Industry Census, 22% of business revenue across sectors is driven by email.

Whether you work in the travel industry, retail, publishing or in a non-profit organisation, email is a powerful tool that helps you build relationships, create brand engagement and increase revenue. To help you freshen up your email campaigns this spring and summer, I have selected some of my favorite examples to share with you.

1. An enticing subject line is as important as ever

The subject line and the preheader text are the first elements of your email a subscriber sees. Therefore, if you are not creative and engaging at this stage, they will probably not open your email and see the rest of the copy and design you worked so hard on.

A good example is the jewelry brand RINGLY, which tried to grab its subscribers’ attention with the hashtag #springbreak. This also encourages the reader to join the conversation on social media, although I would recommend using a dedicated hashtag to avoid subscribers getting distracted.  This campaign is also a good instance of an intriguing email preview: ‘Finally, the moment you’ve been waiting for’.

 

2. Use seasonal themes in your design

Spread the cheer in your emails with the use of color! Your subscribers are probably thinking about their holidays, the sun and outdoors plans… Take advantage of that and use it to engage with them. ShopBob has a great example in which they decorated their email with vibrant colors and exotic products to create a tropical feel.

 

3. Create a sense of urgency

Creating a sense of urgency can work well if you use this tactic sparingly. LOFT used dynamic content in the form of a countdown clock and associated the sale with the well-known Cyber Monday to create Cyber Spring. I’d love to know how this worked for them and I’d also recommend using less image-heavy emails for those subscribers with images disabled in their email client.

 

4. Incentivize your subscribers

Reward your subscribers to show them your appreciation for their loyalty. Discounts can work well for this, but we suggest not to overuse them as it may affect your brand image. Instead of a discount, you could offer:

  • Free shipping. Sometimes it’s all you need to nudge subscribers to purchase. Just make sure you present it as a subscriber-only exclusive deal to show the value.
  • Loyalty scheme. You don’t need to create a whole points system and design a card to have a loyalty scheme. Simply reward your loyal customers with exclusive offers and point out the fact that they receive better deals because they’ve shopped with you more often.
  • Advance product announcements. If you have new products don’t hesitate to communicate it with your subscribers on your emails. Topshop used this strategy to keep their subscribers engaged by informing them of Beyoncé’s new collection for this season.

 

5. Add movement with animated GIFs

As Marketing Sherpa reported in a case study, GIFs can increase the click rate by 42% and the conversion rate by 103%. Adding something movement to your inbox might sound simple, but sometimes simple works best! Just make sure it doesn’t distract from the main message; Paperless have a great example of how subtlety can work in your favor to grab attention.

 

What emails have inspired you recently?

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