Enabler provide best practice advice utilising a strong subject line within your B2B and B2C email communications, from multi award-winning email agency.

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Are you ready for Christmas?

The Christmas email campaigns have been in full swing since November. Fran, one of our email campaign managers, gives us her analysis of the festive emails.

I’ve been berating the early arrival of ‘Christmas’ into our lives for a while now. Not in an Ebenezer Scrooge-esque, bah humbug way but in a ‘this is ludicrously early’ way.

It seems that Halloween is barely over before the Christmas references start creeping into marketing messages. Plus, email – my joie de vivre – has been filling my inbox with uninterestingly designed, completely impersonal content and, most importantly, subject lines that aren’t even a little bit enticing for the festive season. Here are a few of the different areas that demonstrate how people are overthinking the minor details but not engaging the necessary focus – especially when it comes to content.

So, Halloween is over, the fireworks have finished, and now as the days get darker and begin disappearing rapidly without warning, we seem to be propelling ourselves head first into winter. That being said, it would seem that this year it’s beginning to go a little too far, just about everyone and everything has become about Christmas – even the toilet bleach:

Yet, although the decks have been ready for purchase as early as July this year (thanks Selfridge’s), it’s not hard to get confused with the recent mild weather that it might still be September – but alas the shops, the background noise, the lights, and – dare I say it – our email inboxes are a daily reminder that we are getting closer to the big festive day.

Can we honestly say that the world of email is hitting the nail on the head and drawing in those festive consumers? Taking evidence from my own inbox – I think not!

Let’s take a look at two of the key areas that campaigns are still struggling with this year, and a few handy tips for fabulously festive emails that perform.

Most unenticing subject line:

‘Francesca, it’s the season for 25% off 6 bottles of wine’

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love wine. It’s a staple in my fridge so they’ve got my attention. However, ‘season’? Does this rather large high street supermarket chain realise that there are four of them? In my humble opinion, every day (let alone season) should have 25% off 6 bottles of wine.

As an email professional, I highlight this key point for increasing user engagement: your subject line should be the prime area of focus in any campaign, at any time of the year.

As a rule of thumb you shouldn’t use any sales based words such as, ‘offer’, ‘free’, ‘sale’, ‘deals’ or icons like !, ?, £, or % in your subject line, as spam filters are highly likely to pick them up and throw the mail straight into the junk folder (hence I found the above one in my spam folder).

Keep it punchy, make it unique and create intrigue. When writing subject lines, consider the recipient – will it entice them? If there’s any doubt, then you need to rewrite it. Finally, if you’re going for a theme then go all in. The email feels half-hearted when you do it half hearted, and I don’t think you can ever over eggnog the Christmas pudding (sorry – had to).

Here are a few more subject lines that have found their way into my inbox/spam box that are lacking a little bit of get up and go:

  • ‘Shh…Keep this to yourself…’
     

  • ‘Make Christmas Your Own: Personalised Christmas Story Book £2, Santa Cutlery Holder
     

  • Sets, Luxury Santa Sack, LED Candles and More’
     

  • ‘Alert! 3 For £18 Christmas Gifts [3 Hours Only]’
     

  • ‘Is your home ready for the holidays?’ (Received the beginning of November… bit early?!)

Content that’s stuck in the dark ages (and also has no tact):

I don’t even think I need to explain why this spa wins the least personalised, most unresponsive template award and – more importantly – most contradictory Christmas theme of any winter themed email I’ve ever read.  This seems to be more the sort of email you might expect when detox season kicks off in January.

This brings me to my next point: if you manage to entice a reader to click into your email then you need attractive, interesting and relevant email content that’s going to get them reading, clicking through and opening up again next time. In my opinion, there are three main areas:

Personalisation: whether this is personal details or content based on consumer analysis (see Sophie’s blog the other week for hints and tips).
Short copy: less is always more when it comes to words in emails. Short is good.

Beautiful visuals: images should relate to the copy and be high-quality and eye-catching.
Email marketing is still one of the most successful ways to reach your audience, with evidence showing it’s the number one way to reach millennials.

To be successful you need to make sure your campaigns are carefully considered and relevant. There are so many different and wonderful things you can do with content now, yet I regularly receive emails that are stuck in the dark ages.

​​A festive email campaign that really caught my eye this year came from Watergate Bay Hotel, a spa hotel in Cornwall. Their festive email campaign had a simple concept, on-point branding, and excellent integration. They used wintery graphics and a snowshaker concept to create a daily competition with cleverly chosen prizes from local or partnership brands that fit with their brand.

The competition runs through the whole of December with a different prize each day and three chances to win. If you’re not successful after ‘shaking’ the snowglobe three times, you receive a discount code to use in their online shop. This is a nice touch that will encourage users to purchase Christmas gifts from their online store.

Sign up is required to enter the competition, a great method for data capture and for driving users back with follow-up emails (particularly as the prizes change every day, maintaining interest). Watergate Bay also reinforce their brand and persona through the choice of graphics and the companies they have partnered with to offer prizes.

The entire effect gives you a sense of what the hotel is about, it’s festive without being cheesy and also places the hotel in their potential customer’s minds at the right time to be considered for their 2016 holiday.

Watergate Bay hotel have nailed the three areas we highlighted earlier: personalisation, short copy and beautiful visuals – plus they continued their theme throughout every element, from the original email to the landing page.

So, when it comes to creating email campaigns – think outside the box. Don’t just stick to the norm or the drab, do something that will get you noticed. All this takes is having the baubles to commit to the theme and be creative!

Top tips for email campaign success

1.    Commit to your design. If you’re using a theme – use it, don’t only use a tiny bit of it.

2.    Limit content headers/links. That way you shouldn’t have an email that means lots of scrolling – especially on a mobile device.

3.    Have clear calls to action.

4.    Make sure you’re using a mobile responsive template.

5.    Try not to repeat a story/product/event etc, try something new.

6.    Use behavioural data – you have access to all of the data you could ever want. Data analysis is key to creating the most engaging content for your audience.

7.    Testing – always test different things in your emails. Subject lines. Content copy. Images. CTAs. Design… you should never stop testing. There are always new things to try and with it consumer behavioural data to be analysed.

8.    Use beautiful, engaging and relevant images, or create simple and effective infographics.

9.    Be personal.

10.    Make sure you’re branded correctly, effectively and in a memorable way – no matter what you do.

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Black Friday: email marketing round-up

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Special occasions are a fantastic opportunity for keeping your customers engaged. They’re one of the most important times to ensure you have a strong online presence and, although I might be biased, what better way to do that than with email?

The latest opportunity to tap into a theme is Black Friday. Somewhat controversial since Black Friday is traditionally an American concept, tied in to Thanksgiving in the same way we have Boxing Day.

Black Friday has been embraced by UK retailers in recent years and merges with Cyber Monday to offer brands a chance to entice customers with special deals and discounts – read more about this here.

This year, it looks like every brand under the sun has taken the initiative and come up with their own way to engage customers on what is now one of the busiest online shopping days of the year. As Enabler’s in-house email expert, I’ve collated some of the top tips to take away from this year’s Black Friday email marketing.

 

Key to email marketing on this busy day, is of course how to stand out from the competition. Customer’s inboxes are flooded all weekend with deals, so how do you make yours effective?

1.    Try something different

Some companies have realised that it’s not enough to just send an email with an offer in the subject line. VoucherCodes decided to go down the route of emoticons in their emails.

‘★ Dom’s Black Friday Special ★ John Lewis | Argos | Amazon | Selfridges | Debenhams’

While this looked fantastic on my Hotmail account, sadly these pretty stars did not grab my attention in a positive way on Gmail as they were blocked. They did make a clever move by naming some big brands, in the hope of encouraging users to open the email to find out what the offers are.

Tastecard also tried something different – their subject line was:

‘BLACK FRIDAY is here’. 

The risk with this is that your email might be flagged as shady and end up trapped in your customers’ spam filters.

 

2.    Target your emails

This should be something you’re doing anyway but it’s especially important on Black Friday. Why would a customer open an email if it doesn’t contain offers for products they’re interested in? Make sure the offers in your email are customer specific. If they’ve bought tech products before, you know they might be interested in more tech products so don’t send them gardening supplies.

 

3.    Personalise your subject line

eBay had a great personalised subject line on Black Friday.

‘Gregory, stop everything! Black Friday deals you can’t resist.’

Who wouldn’t open that?! It’s incredibly eye catching, and really convinces you to open the email. eBay had also combined tactic two and three of this list, as the content in their email was targeted based on what Gregory had left in his basket recently and previous purchases. Great job eBay!

 

4.    Cross sell

Use a time you know your customers are likely to interact with your emails to cross sell a product. Amazon did this brilliantly this year with this subject line:

‘Black Friday is here: Up to 50% off, plus £10 off for new Prime Now customers’. 

This is very clever wording as it makes you interested in the Black Friday offer as well as curious about what Prime Now is. They have left enough ambiguity about the product, while enticing customers with money off their purchase.

 

5.    Remember the loyal folk

It’s not all about trying to get first time buyers to buy. Showing a bit of love for your existing frequent-buyers can also help to boost your Black Friday sales. Debenhams nailed it this year. Their subject line was:

‘EXTRA 10% OFF for Cardholders this Black Friday’

As an existing card holder, I’d have been all over that. Giving existing customers a boost during the busy times can remind them that you care and help develop the relationship between your customer and your brand. It might even encourage them to buy more out of the busy periods.

 

6.    Get clever with your language

Everyone wants to feel like they’re receiving something tailored to them. This goes beyond sending specific content and instead focuses on how you make your customer feel from the minute your email appears in their inbox. A way to achieve this, even if you don’t have the greatest data in the world, is through the language you use. One example of a brand that did this beautifully this year was LoveLula, with the subject line:

Let’s get this Black Friday week started | See inside for your code!

As someone who received this email, my initial thoughts were ‘MY CODE!’ Sure, the code inside might be a generic code generated for anyone to use within the time frame – but that doesn’t actually matter. What does matter is your customer’s reaction to that wording. It makes it sound like a personally generated offer just for them… thus making them more likely to interact with your email and – more importantly – your discount code!

 

7.    Give it some urgency

For times where your offer is only on for a short period of time, your aim is to convert the highest amount of your click throughs to purchases. One way to do this is by instilling a sense of urgency in your customers. Reminding them how little time they have left to secure items at a cheaper price is a fantastic way of doing this. Several brands picked up on this idea on Black Friday. The first was Photobox, whose subject line was:

‘Black Friday Deals – 1 day only!’

This subject line is to the point, and instils a sense of urgency to the customer.

Second was Great Little Trading Co, who used the subject line:

‘Flash Sale TODAY: up to 30% off‏’. 

This subject line definitely promotes urgency. What’s interesting about this one is that there’s no mention of Black Friday at all. This could be a tactical move on the company’s part. Are they acknowledging that the UK doesn’t actually have a Black Friday and sticking to their guns, yet tapping in to the publicity by having a sale too? Or are they attempting to differentiate themselves from all the other brands emailing by using different wording, and purposefully omitting the name of the sale? Either way, it creates standout.

Overall, brands certainly seemed to have put some thought into their Black Friday emails. Much of the content seemed relevant, on point and useful to their customers. With the Christmas holidays just around the corner, make sure you apply the same rules to your campaigns, and keep your customers engaged with fun, relevant, targeted content. Be clever with your data and Santa will put you on his nice list!

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