Why not take the lead this year for Valentine’s Day 2020 and paint the town red with our highest converting holiday email marketing strategies? This email marketing strategy catapulted our revenue that we generated through email for our clients last December during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2019 sales.
The season of all things heart-shaped and chocolates is just around the corner and coming in fast! So, it’s time you geared up and took charge of this $20.7 billion holiday.
If you’re planning to give this one a skip to wait for the bigger fish this year, you might think twice after reading this article.
It’s January! Are customers ready for another big sale?
The answer is, yes! Let’s face it, one month of downtime seems just about right. Valentine’s Day is the first big holiday since the biggest eCommerce holiday last December.
Your customers are probably starting to miss you right now, and they’ll want more.
Also, Valentine’s Day is huge. Between 2017 and 2018 alone, Valentine’s Day retail sales rose by $1.4 billion in the US. Americans aren’t the only ones who are love-struck. The UK spells good news for eCommerce as online transactions during Valentine’s Day grew a whopping 169% from 2017 in 2018.
While these numbers alone are enough to send our hearts aflutter, clearly the popularity of Valentine’s Day is riding high. Valentine’s day is the best time for you to retarget your customers. Apply what worked for you during the BFCM 2019— and do it better. It’s definitely time to do some email marketing magic for Valentine’s Day 2020!
Here’s the upside. You’re coming out of the period of an eCommerce shopping extravaganza. So, you’ll have the following at your fingertips: your best performing results, highest performing lists, optimized customer segments, and best practices.
It’s imperative that you plan and strategize ahead for your Valentine’s Day campaigns. For all it’s worth, “V-day” is a challenging holiday for the eCommerce industry to break through the noise. So let’s begin.
Recreate Our $831k Week with 3 Takeaways for Valentine’s Day
During the back-to-back eCommerce holidays in December, it was important to establish a reliable and sustainable modus operandi.
A strategy that we could rely on to replicate for future major eCommerce holidays and that allows flexibility to evolve with each brand.
This strategy, in turn, would help us achieve our client’s goals (and ours) and secure themselves a spot in their customer’s hearts and minds amidst the blitzkrieg.
The 6-step email marketing sequence is the backbone of all our holiday email strategies, flows, and campaigns that we implemented across the board for our clients. Here are 3 key takeaways you can try immediately so you can recreate our $831,000 success from the BFCM 2019 week.
Key Takeaway 1: Build Hype
For Valentine’s Day, you can start re-engaging your customer lists and best performing segments from BFCM as early as the 3rd week of January—meaning, now. So it only makes sense to begin creating the anticipation for the upcoming sales with teaser email campaigns or Hype Builders.
Why it’s important
Hype builders don’t necessarily have to be a hard-selling email. While this may seem counter-intuitive, your teaser campaign is an effective way for you to create anticipation, offer opportunities for customers to join your VIP list and further segment your customer list.
So you’d want to optimize for opens rather than conversions. Essentially, teaser emails can aid to keep your open rates high and unsubscriptions low for the duration of Valentine’s Day sales period.
Teaser emails can build intrigue and make your audience feel as though they are privy to a privileged community— when done right. The main objective is to make it attractive for them to “opt-in” now.
Ultimately, you’d want to make it clear to your customers that opting in early even before the start of the sales will open more doors to bigger and better discounts.
What we like about this campaign
We think the graphics for this entire campaign takes the cake for Valentine’s Day, plus the single-column layout is perfect for mobile-view.
Mobile optimization is definite to consider when you want to increase the conversion rate of your emails through design.
From our experience, the countdown timer is akin to having a very useful shepherd to herd your visitors towards your subscribe button. It also gives them a sense of urgency. Your customers will surely be on the lookout for the prices of their favorite items.
Key Takeaway 2: Main Launch
The main launch is where the heart is. Here’s the main event you’ve been building up to.
What you should do
By this time, your list of customers is still fresh from the BFCM 2019 so use it. Here’s where you pull out all stops to execute your best performing practices from the AB tests to target your biggest and most profitable segments, the cream of the crop.
Your main launch should target your largest segment of active subscribers. These are segments of your customer list who engaged with your emails or purchased from you recently.
Key Takeaway 3: Social Reminder
Word-of-mouth is still the most effective way of marketing. We’ll call it social proofing. Here, you integrate the inspirational aspect of shopping with your eCommerce brand to influence your customer’s buying behavior. If you’ve received plenty of happy testimonials, showcase them by delivering their positive words straight into your customer’s inboxes!
How to coin this campaign
Keep it exciting! Be creative in displaying your customer testimonials be it text-based or videos. If you’ve got a number of notable influencers who are using your brand, get them to actively tag you whenever they’re using or wearing your products.
Keep it lively, keep it fun, and build a community.
Let’s put it this way. If your customers had any doubts about purchasing during your main launch, this campaign will surely sweep them off their feet! According to a survey, 63% of customers are more likely to purchase from a site if a product has had reviews!
Here’s where the better comes in
Here’s an idea. Have you ever thought about building a marketing strategy so cohesive that your customers seemingly glide through their buying journey? A solid customer’s buying journey is exactly what keeps existing customers coming back for more!
When executed and timed correctly, email marketing and SMS marketing offer the perfect relationship to fine-tune and solidify your customer journey experience.
Recently, our CEO, Josh spoke to Mike Stoychev of SMSBump on creating the perfect Valentine’s Day strategy for 2020 with SMS and Email Marketing combined.
The CEOs hashed out the exact touchpoints where eCommerce businesses can use the advantages of both email marketing and SMS marketing with our 6-step holiday strategy.
Watch the full conversation here on our Facebook.
How’s your email marketing campaign looking for Valentine’s Day?
If you could choose any marketing channel based on return on investment alone, which would you choose? With $42 for every dollar invested, email marketing has the highest ROI of any marketing channel for eCommerce.
That being said, the role of email marketing for any eCommerce business’s success can’t be denied.
By applying the best practices we’ve distilled from many bloody seasons of eCommerce holidays, we managed to help our client increase their email revenue by 350%!
Try out the 3 campaign takeaways listed in this article and even try incorporating SMS marketing into your strategy this Valentine’s Day! The best part about these strategies is that it doesn’t just apply to Valentine’s Day. You can actually test it out on any upcoming eCommerce holiday.
We’re always here to lend a helping hand. If you’ve got a question or want to share a success story of how these golden nuggets worked for you and your eCommerce brand, give us 30-minutes to strike up a conversation with one of our email experts today. Conversations with us are always free.
