How to Create and Use Countdown Timers in Email Marketing

There are three things an email marketing specialist can watch forever: email campaigns being sent, CTR growing, time until the end of a sale counting down. How can you combine these three amazing things? By creating an email with a countdown timer inside.

A countdown timer is the best way to demonstrate that a sale lasts for a limited time, a nonverbal way to tell customers: Soon a carriage will turn into a pumpkin and the price for that new bag will become huge again. You need to hurry.

Urgency is one of the best decision-making factors, so why don’t you use it to encourage a subscriber to buy?

How and when can you use a countdown timer?

You can use countdown timers for email for any type of business, be it an online store, a delivery service or a medical webinar production company.

Most often, countdown timers are used in email campaigns in order to:

• boost quick sales;

• remind that a sale is about to expire;

• remind that a sale is about to start;

• notify that a deal is about to expire;

• remind that a trial period is about to end;

• announce the date of a lucky draw contest;

• notify that a webinar is about to start.

Сountdown timers are well-known for driving sales. To test this, we’ve conducted a number of experiments. For example, we’ve divided a customer database into two halves and sent an email with a countdown timer to the first half and an email without a timer to the second one. Both the design and the text content remained the same in each email.

The results were as follows:

• The percentage of clicks on a countdown timer — 1%.
• The percentage of people who clicked email links differed by 0.2% between the first and the second groups: 4.9 clicks originating from emails with a timer and 4.7 from emails without one.
• The number of purchases was the same.

These indicators along with some additional A/B tests that showed similar results drove us to the conclusion that embedding a countdown timer in an email doesn’t affect sales level significantly. Therefore, it would be more reasonable to view countdown timers as a way to diversify your email campaigns and to entertain subscribers with an animated content element. Discounts on their own are already a good incentive to buy.

Types of email countdown timers

There are two ways to add a countdown timer to an email:

• Create an HTML timer and add a code to the email layout.
• Insert a countdown GIF image.

Both ways complement the design of your emails and accentuate urgency. However, an HTML timer has a number of perks that GIFs don’t have.

HTML countdown timer

An HTML countdown timer is an HTML script that counts down the time to a specific date in the future, second by second.

You can create such timers with the help of special services like Sendtric or Motionmail, or generate the code yourself. However, a custom-made code might cause some display issues or be cut out completely by email clients. Therefore, we recommend using the custom-made option only when you know for sure what you’re doing. The countdown timers generated by dedicated services don’t have any issues with email clients and fulfill their task flawlessly.

Usually, a countdown timer’s embed code looks somewhat like this:

<td align="center" class="esd-block-timer" esdev-config="h3">
    <a target="_blank">
        <img class="adapt-img" alt src="https://cdt-timer-plugins.esputnik.com/api/v1/images/MTkHQrFb4YRux8XP9RBPy2laYO-m_Z4FcmCJNmOXnjo" width="277">
    </a>
</td>

At first glance, it may appear that the code consists of an image link and a display style; however, it’s not quite like that. The code does include an image link but there’s a script with the timer’s conditions inside the link. This ensures that the email clients won’t see this countdown timer as a malicious object and won’t cut it out from an email.

To generate a countdown timer, you need to specify its end date and end time while taking the time zone differences into account. Such timers cannot be created without an end date. The numbers on a timer will count down continuously starting from the moment it’s generated. It doesn’t matter when a user receives the email: the number will continue counting down nevertheless. The countdown timer will stop at zero as soon as the time expires.

HTML countdown timers can be customized: you can pick a language, a background color, the color of numbers and text, etc. This way you’ll be able to adjust the timer to the design of your email.

GIF countdown timers

One of the easiest way to add countdown timers to an email is to use looped GIF animations. All you need to do is to find such GIF in a stock image library and insert it into an email’s ’Image’ block.

Email clients don’t cut GIF countdown timers out from emails because they don’t see them as something suspicious. In fact, it’s merely an animated image, not a real countdown timer. However, note that Outlook 2007-2016 only displays the first static frame of the animation in emails.

When you use such countdown timers, you might experience some difficulties with finding GIFs of an appropriate size to ensure smooth email loading. In addition, you’ll need to find the countdown timer that will fit the time frame. It’s also important not to mess up with the dates, otherwise, your subscribers might think there’s something wrong with your offer. If you specify the sale duration in an email (ends 5 PM today, for instance), a countdown timer shouldn’t display that there are 12 hours or even a day left until the sale ends.

We recommend looking for GIF images on:

• Google — the most obvious source. To find a GIF you need, open the image search and go to Tools → Type → Animated. Don’t forget to select ’Labeled for non-commercial reuse with modification’ in the ’Usage rights’ section. Google will display all the GIFs available for use.
• GIPHY — the most popular GIF storage.
• Pinterest — a huge resource where you can find GIFs and images of any kind and style.
• Tumblr — GIF creators love Tumblr as well and often share their works there. Yes, you can find timer GIFs among them.

Users tend to re-open emails in the first couple of days after they receive them. This might cause problems if you decide to use GIF countdown timers. The timer will show the same numbers even when a promo offer expires. In this case, the HTML countdown timer is a better option: it will reset to zero when the set time expires and won’t make your subscribers confused about the offer.