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4 Steps to Create Valentine's Day Emails Your Readers Will Love
Saint Valentine’s Day is a day with a rich history behind it. It’s also one of the most popular holidays among people of all ages. By the number of greetings cards sent each year, it’s second only to Christmas. There’s no way your business can ignore Valentine’s Day, especially if you’re in retail, restaurant, floral industry, or something of the kind. However, Valentine’s Day emails can sometimes be too much for users to handle.
When your subscribers' inboxes are overflowing with celebratory emails sent by every other company they have ever engaged with, Spam and Unsubscribe buttons are clicked rather often. Here are some St. Valentine’s Day marketing ideas, tips and tricks to help you make customers fall in love with your emails... and your business. Use these, and you won’t fall victim to the holiday turmoil.
To-Do List for Your Valentine’s Day Marketing Strategy
- Segment your email list.
- Schedule emails.
- Create special Valentine’s Day email design and content.
- Add a catchy Valentine's Day email subject line.
Your Valentine’s Day promotions can run as long as you want them to, don’t restrict yourself with February 14. That said, don’t focus on what you want to say in those emails. Think about the things your customers need. Better yet, do some research and apply the knowledge you get about your audience.
1. Segment your email list.
The way you segment your Valentine’s Day email list will depend on the data you have, and the way you use this data. Just as an example, you can segment your contact base by:
- Sex/Gender: if feasible, target your male and female customers with different Valentine’s Day emails.
- Engagement: try to wake up inactive subscribers during the festive campaign. Discounts can be a good reactivation tactic.
- Preferences: in your emails, use different calls to action to lead your customers to the categories they will be interested in. Monitor what links are clicked more often. This will help you segment customers by their preferences and drive results.
- Age: a couple of 50-year-olds will most probably celebrate this particular day differently from barely-of-age teenagers. Hence, the emails to both groups need to be different too.
In our platform, you can also send extra messages based on the results of a particular campaign that you’ve already scheduled. You don't have to wait for the campaign results and build new segments based on them. At the moment of the launch of the extra campaign, the system automatically creates a segment based on the conditions you’ve pre-selected.
This option is useful to reach contacts who ignored the initial message. It also generates deeper engagement for people who showed interest in a particular product, letting you show them the corresponding product recommendations. For instance, you can select contacts who open your email but don’t click and send them a different message. In this case, you can send the same message but with a different subject line.
If you select contacts who open the first email but don’t click, then it’s better to come up with a new campaign, another offer or edit a design. Sending the same message that failed to generate a response isn’t effective.
What’s more, extra messages are available for all channels - Email, SMS, Mob Push, Web Push and Viber. If people ignore your emails, give it a try with SMS or mobile pushes that are technically hard to go unnoticed.
All tools for email marketing automation and segmentation
Useful Tip
Not all of your subscribers celebrate V-Day due to various reasons: resistance to stereotypes, a bad experience of the relationships, a current status of a single. For them, seeing too many "love emails" may be annoying.
Before launching the holiday campaign, offer your customers to opt out of it without unsubscribing completely. Add an option of not receiving your Valentine's emails. This way, you’ll be able to remove uninterested people from your holiday mailing list but not lose them as your subscribers.
2. Schedule Your Valentine's Day Emails.
Love is in the air, as spotted by John Paul Young. Valentine’s Day campaign ideas need to be light and delicate, just like air. To remind your subscribers about the most romantic day of the year, empower your campaign with ideas on how to surprise their partners, find a perfect present. After the big day, don’t forget to ask how it all went.
Remind your customers about Valentine’s Day around the beginning of February.
Send an email to all your subscribers, remind them that Valentine’s Day is close. In your first Valentine's Day email, throw in a couple ideas for gifts and activities for February 14. Add about 3 call to action buttons, each describing a certain idea. Don’t forget to track clicks on each CTA button — this will help you plan your future emails based on each recipient’s CTA clicks in your email. Alternatively, run a survey to find out how users are planning to spend the day, this will help you understand them better.
Send emails based on the CTA clicks.
For your next emails, segment your customers based on their clicks in the first email. Add a description and a suggestion on how to give the gift. Keep in mind that Valentine’s Day is not just about lovers. Single people also like to celebrate it — with family or friends, for example. Make customer loyalty your first priority and try to make your email campaigns as personal as possible.
February 5–6, launch your campaigns all out.
The longer one puts off buying a Valentine’s Day present from an online store, the more difficult it will be to find, order, and receive a good gift on time. Give users an incentive to buy from you with discounts, coupons, and bonuses of all sorts. Such as, a free holiday wrapping when they order from your store.
February 11–12, keep encouraging.
Only send emails to subscribers who have opened at least one email in the last 3 months. If feasible, remind them that the time to buy presents is quickly running out. February 13, the day before It’s probably too late to try and sell anything, let alone deliver the purchase on time. For the subscribers who open your emails but do not buy, offer ideas on how to celebrate the day with their significant other. For those who buy — ideas for how to surprise their partner on the Lovers’ Day. Such content will help you make sure your customers remember you and recommend you to their friends.
February 14, here it is.
On this day, no one expects your emails. Everybody’s celebrating. Well, there’s a chance to catch a sad single someone... or encounter a troll the likes of Sheldon Cooper who doesn’t recognize this day as a holiday. However, in these cases, you can still be creative and, say, suggest watching I Hate Valentine’s Day :) You may even decide to not bother your subscribers at all.
Alternatively, send your subscribers a love letter. This is a good day to tell your customers how much you value them. Send them a Valentine’s Day greeting card or a simple message to show your appreciation. A nice virtual equivalent of a flower bouquet and a bubble bath. Find an original greeting message without any lovey-dovey references.
You know your subscribers best so the choice is yours.
February 15–17, the afterparty.
On these days, ask your customers to tell you their love stories or how they’ve spent the day, what presents they’ve given to their partners, and whether your offers were useful to them.
You can create a survey in a Google Form and add a link to it in one of your emails. Or you can use an AMP form and let people share their ideas straight in the email. In the editor, an AMP form is a ready block that you can add to your template without code knowledge. Since it doesn’t require an upload of a new window, you have more chances to get feedback.
Further, you can use these answers to analyze your audience and maybe reconsider your email marketing strategies. Plus, they are a good source of user-generated content, and you can build a post-holiday campaign based entirely on it.
3. Create Valentine's Day Email Design.
If you want to make something special for your subscribers, you need to plan it beforehand. See what other businesses do and try to come up with even better ideas.
As for Valentine’s Day email templates, in the editor, we have over 400+ templates to choose from. They’re all block-based meaning you can edit them by adding, removing or moving separate structures and blocks without starting from scratch. You can also upload your own template to the editor and customize it for your current needs.
.jpg "Valentine's Day email templates in our editor")
In case you need more options, see our special article on where to find free HTML email templates.
400+ free HTML email templates you can edit in the drag-and-drop editor
As for design tips, follow the 2021 email marketing trends and pay attention to the following techniques.
- Include user-generated content (photos from Instagram, website reviews, messaging from chatbots) to give your product more social proof.
- Deliver value through emails. Instead of sending promos only, consider including some useful content in your Valentine’s email strategy. It can be helpful tips on how to spend the holiday on budget, how to entertain your kids, how to create a sweet e-card, etc.
- Team up artistic illustrations and minimalist animation to set the mood and give your emails a romantic touch.
.gif "Art & animation combo")
- Make a smart use of email background images to create a single concept for the entire campaign.
- Make use of gamification to prolong the reading time and drive deeper engagement.
4. Add a good Valentine’s Day email subject line.
One of the biggest challenges you can face is making your subscribers want to open your email. Email subject lines are often deal breakers when it comes to email open rates. Here are some examples for Valentine’s Day email subject lines to inspire your campaigns:
- Cupid’s Countdown Is On! Only 7 days left to Valentine’s. It’s high time to think about presents.
- Baby’s 1st Valentine’s Day;
- ❤Get Ahead on Your Valentines Day Shopping!❤
- A Valentines Day to remember
- Show yourself some love this Valentine's Day... ?
- Sending You LOVE ???✨
- 3 Days till Valentine’s. Find your presents today, it might be your last chance to get them in time.
- Love Comes In All Shapes And Sizes;
- ❤️Open Hearts Reveal Your Love!❤️
- Gifts or emotions? What will your significant other like better?
- ❤️ day gift ideas: anything red + you’ve been missed around here;
- 10 Ways to Say “I Love You”: Valentine’s Day greeting cards’ ideas;
- 514 Gift Ideas for Valentine’s Day;
- V is for Valentines + VERY secret savings ?
For more examples, read our special article 130+ Best Valentine’s Day Email Subject Lines. And if even after checking all these lines you're stuck with the right wording, consider using subject line generators for help. Yes, most variants they offer would be too usual, but gems happen as well.
Final Word
These are the 4 stages to go through if you want to get closer to your customers, subscribers, partners, near and dear. Voice your feelings! Don’t be ashamed to show your emotions on this love-filled day.
Let us go ahead and wish you a fabulous Valentine’s Day! Here's from our entire staff: We appreciate you!
Stay tuned for more blog posts!
