Are you ready for one of biggest retail days of the year? Yes, Valentine's Day is getting closer so get ready for a love fest when it comes to promotional messages showing up in your inbox. Do you plan on spreading the love with email marketing this Valentine's Day?
Here are 10 tips you can use to influence your recipients or in this case, your Valentines.
- Use or create a Valentine's Day template. By using a nice balance of Valentine-specific copy and imagery it will get readers in the mood and thinking about the day.
- Create a special email message for people who bought from you last year around Valentine's Day and this time make it an even better offer. Great way to build and keep customer loyalty.
- Segment your list by gender. There is no better day than Valentine's Day to do this. Send female-oriented offers to the guys and male-oriented offers to the ladies. Keep in mind that this sort of segmentation may not be appropriate for all audiences or all products.
- Use customer testimonials and reviews in your email marketing campaign. Most people will buy if they know another person has had a positive buying experience with your product or service. Think of it like a movie. Most people put more stock in a friend's review than what an advertisement says. At the same time you are showing some love to the person who took the time to leave the glowing review.
- Coupon Codes are the perfect way to generate traffic to your website or service and convince potential buyers to make a purchase. Make the coupons very easy to use and make sure you mention all terms and conditions clearly.
- If your business has a blog, Facebook page or Twitter account, mention the Valentine's Day promotion there as well. The more love you spread, the more that will come back to you (hopefully). Many potential leads may just need that extra incentive to purchase your service and let's face it, there are a lot of eyeballs using Facebook and Twitter these days.
- Make sure it is super easy for people to take advantage of your offer. Nothing will make a potential customer discard your message faster than if they have to work hard to act on it. Do as much of the work for them by making contact information prominent, coupon codes that are easy to read and give clear directions on what they have to do.
- Thank loyal customers by sending them a Happy Valentine's Day email postcard to show customer. This supports customer retention and will keep them from even thinking about looking elsewhere. This is also a great time to ask customers to make sure their account information is up to date.
- Mention shipping cutoff dates in your emails. It can be a great call to action strategy to remind people they don't have much time to ship gifts to loved ones if they want to get it by February 14th.
- Have fun and be creative! The more enjoyment you and your coworkers have when creating your email marketing campaigns, the more it will resonate with the reader. There will be thousands of emails flying around the Internet between now and Valentine's Day and you want to get noticed. Unleash Cupid and all his arrows of love and appreciation.
Got a tip to share with your fellow email marketers? Want to be our Valentine? You can interact with the SimplyCast team on Twitter and Facebook.
