Best Promotional email Examples and Practices
After the slowdown, caused by pandemic lockdowns, the restart of the economy last year created huge competition among market players in almost all sectors. Marketing teams must do their best to get their promotional emails opened. Although it takes a lot of effort to make it happen, there is more to do.
Here is our guide to help you monetize those clicks.
The importance of using promotional emails
There are many advantages of using promotional emails as you may already know. But did you know that 50% of people buy from marketing emails at least once per month?
Cost-effectiveness
Email marketing is responsible for promoting a brand and increasing sales on a very affordable budget. While traditional marketing campaigns such as direct marketing or print marketing can be costly, email marketing campaigns are often more cost-effective. They reach the right audience faster and more efficiently.
Furthermore, email campaigns don’t take long to produce. If needed, you can produce an email in one day, which is much more cost-effective than the time it takes to produce a direct or print campaign.
Improving sales
We can’t mention enough how email marketing has the power of boosting companies’ sales more than anything else. Over 59% of respondents said that marketing emails influence their purchase decisions. This number is significantly growing since the pandemic definitely changed the shopping behavior of people.
Email marketing campaigns can highlight a product or service, encourage customers to buy after they abandon their cart, or offer your customers special offers.
Improves communication with consumers
Promotional emails play a vital role in improving and maintaining customer relationships. It allows you to reach a large audience and easily communicate with your customers. Plus, these emails will keep your audience informed, regardless of the season, whether it’s off-season or busy. Let them know about new products and make them buy what they want at a lower price. This can help you attract new customers and retain loyal customers who have been buying from your brand.
Improving the relationship with your consumers can also help establish a strong brand image. Make them feel like the brand is genuinely interested in their well-being and wants to give them the best possible service. Building strong relationships is essential if you want to retain more customers — whether you run a subscription-based business or a one-off purchase model.
Types of promotional emails
Promotion emails can take many forms, however, the main goal is always promoting a product or service. In this article, we review some of the different types of promotional emails and gathered many examples that can help make the final decision about the right type of email for your needs.
Limited-time offers
Limited-time offer emails create a sense of urgency. We have all heard about scarcity once in our life, it is one of the biggest influences on purchase decisions. When a product or a discount is only available for a certain amount of time, people show greater interest in the offer and they are more motivated to act fast and buy it.
Countdowns go down, second by second, this is one of the best psychological triggers. When you are planning to run a flash sale keep in mind that your customers are from different time zones. However, you want to give them more time to purchase weekend-long sales don’t always provide the same results as one-day sales.
NYX cosmetics used bright colors, which match their audience to get their attention. Highlighting the discount code and putting it in the main section to poop out more. Adding a “2 DAYS ONLY!” is another way to imply urgency, and prove that the offer has a strict time limitation.
Sales promotion emails
In a sales email, all you really need is the number of your discount and the product you want to highlight. Using bright colors and images feel like they’re popping right out of the screen just like in this example from Bobbi Brown. Don’t forget to add a small paragraph explaining the offer and lead the subscribers to your website to make a purchase.
Product launch emails
There are different types of product launch emails and each has a distinct purpose. For instance, product release emails, pre-order emails, and future sales emails. However they are different, but all of them have a similar goal to educate the readers about the upcoming product or service you are offering.
Take it a step further and use these emails to increase product adoption. Here is a great customer onboarding guide to help increase conversions and retention.
Giveaways
Giveaways work like magic, increase your sales, and generate leads from people who are interested in your business. It gives the possibility of asking them to follow you on different sites, makes them complete a survey, and plenty more. In a situation like this, both sides have a positive outcome, you collect leads and your customers get the chance to win something valuable.
Holiday promotions
There is a holiday around the corner all the time, you need to take advantage of it. Email is responsible for 20% of online holiday site visits. Seasonal promotional emails usually goes together with a limited discount only for the holiday. To keep up with other businesses including free shipping is a must, especially from Black Friday to Christmas. During these months more than 90-95% of the emails come with free shipping.
To stand out more focus on “smaller” holidays just as Mother’s day, Halloween, and more…
Special offer emails
The New York Times chose a unique way of advertising. Instead of an immediate offer, they send their articles to raise interest. When the customer decides to click on their link and read further, that is the time when the offer comes up.
Email design trends for 2022
Dynamic email elements are trendy – whether AMP or not
AMP for email started as a huge trend a few years ago. Beyond sexy image carousels and interactive elements, like event responses or document comments, there aren’t any good use cases yet.
Developing AMP-ready email designs is still a bit headache and email client support is not full yet. You need to decide if the fancy AMP for email features is worth the extra time or not.
There is a “secret” switch in Chamaileon APP that enables customers to create AMP-ready email designs, you can give it try.
I suggest trying it out once as an A/B test: create a product-selling promotional email with an image carousel with AMP and a control version without it.
Example image carousel in an AMP email.
GIFs are a trend
Advertising is about catching the attention. The motion in your email provided by GIF is eye-grabbing and the amount of information hidden in a well-created GIF tells a lot about the product and your company. Increased attention makes your audience curious and enhances them to read further and land on your website.
Bershka chose to place multiple items from their collection into this one gif. The purpose was to increase the attention of people with different styles.
In this email, ILIA gave a quick tutorial about the use of the product. Showing out, how easy to use it without any tools. They also inserted the picture at the end to make sure you find the right product on the website.
Personalization matters
Using the data you have about your subscribers helps to make your customers feel special. Offering them exclusive discounts creates a sense of gratitude and their importance to your company. Using their names, and their pet’s names can make a significant change in the whole email. The customer will feel more special, also makes them feel the email was created especially for them. Personalization increases open rates and thus increases your revenue.
60% of retail, e-commerce, and other companies are personalizing emails, this number highly increased as it was around 35% back in 2019.
In these two examples, you can see, how simple to create personalized emails.
Here FashionNova reached out with not just one special discount, but two. Mainly focusing on the first, they gave a greater 25% off to make you feel special in the hope of making you buy “your birthday fit” from their store. On the big day, they also sent out a smaller discount with the purpose of letting you know they care.
Promotional email subject lines that work in 2022
- LAST CHANCE: 40% OFF
- Free gifts from us to you
- Don’t miss out on our special offer!
- Don’t let FREE SHIPPING past you!
- We heard you [ name ]
- Check it out, it is INSANE
- Oops, let’s try that again…..
- Hello you, it’s NEW
- Only 5 Hrs LEFT!!
- DON’T forget your [ ] benefits
- THIS JUST IN: You would look amazing in it
- Hey [ name ], you forgot this – here’s your 15% off!
- Get in [ name ], we’re going out
- This is where it all starts!
- Trust us, you have never seen something like this before
Subject line AI generator
The subject line has a huge impact on open rates. It helps you to make a positive impression about your brand and the content of your email. This is why you must make an effort to find the best one that suits your brand and that bloody email. The process consumes a lot of time so here is the time to turn to help o AI. These tools can generate subject lines according to your keywords, using all the psychological tactics that exist and basing it on the pre-training they have received through supervised learning.
Summary
Despite its age and different challenges in the last decades, email stands still and is going to stay at the forefront of marketing later on. The use of promotional emails is an absolute go to for most businesses especially in the economic environment we live in today.