Valentine's Competition Entrants #10

The competition is heating up. On the 10th day of Love, we've got to 2 more competitors to add to the crop.

Vote for them now!

1) Arts Connexi

2) BCWWA

Friday Corner: The Trials of the Social Media Manager

Original cartoon found here

Valentine's Newsletter Subject lines that win hearts and open wallets

It’s the final Friday before the 14th and last minute Valentine’s Day email promotions are in high gear.

Will the results of your Valentine’s special offer leave you broken-hearted, or will your subscribers be pulling out their credit cards and showing you the love?

The busiest Valentine’s promotion timeframe is normally from the 10th to the 14th of February. Inboxes everywhere are getting crammed, which means that most of the offers in circulation are more than likely being ignored.

This is where the all-important subject line can make or break getting a recipient to open your email marketing message.

A Valentine’s promo newsletter is a good chance to capture subscribers’ attention, entice them to click through to your store to view your products. But, there is a fine line between being creative and influential, and getting it wrong.

We’ve selected a few of our favorite Valentine’s Day email subject lines that we’ve seen in past campaigns, to give you some insight and inspiration.

Here are our top 10 most successful Valentine’s Subject Lines:

#1     Order now to avoid heartbreak this Valentine's
#2     Save on our Best Selling Valentines Day Gifts
#3     Next Day Shipping - For those of you staying in for Valentine's Day
#4     Shipping + Valentine's Specials
#5     Need Valentine's inspiration? You’ll love these last-minute offers
#6     Get gifts as extraordinary as your Valentine
#7     Valentine Sweetness for Your Someone Special
#8     Get Valentine’s Gifts They’ll Adore, at Prices You’ll Love
#9     You’ll Fall in Love with These Valentine’s Ideas
#10   Valentine’s Day gifts shipped for FREE

Valentine’s Day is also a favourite time for spammers to get into full swing. To help real-deal email marketers make sure their campaigns don’t look like junk messages, researchers at Symantec have compiled a list of the top 10 most spammy Valentine’s Day subject lines in use today.

Holding the top 3 spam subject line spots are the "male enhancement" crowd who have really taken to this holiday. Right behind them is the "fake gift card" gang and lastly, the "replica watch" fraternity.

These are the top 10 Valentine’s subject lines to avoid:

#1     Increase your length, the best Valentine's gift
#2     Show off your length for Valentine's
#3     Get it before Valentine's day and watch her smile
#4     You have been invited to partake in a shopping spree with [Removed] This Month for Valentine's!
#5     Happy Early Valentine's Day, You have been selected to go on a $1000 Shopping spree to [Removed]
#6     The Best Valentine's Day Present Ever...
#7     Your Valentine's Day is about to get a lot better
#8     Enjoy your Valentine's Day with a Grand Cash from us =)
#9     [Removed] invites you to take a $1000 shopping spree for Valentine's Day
#10   Great watches for your Valentine

Researchers have also seen an increase in other Valentine’s Day-related spam with the words “Feb 14”, “February 14” and “Cupid” in their subject lines, which are a safe bet not to use.

To drive home those last-minute sales you need to write your subject lines from the heart and provide subscribers with product and service offers that they'll really want, but you should always test those subject lines before you hit send and study what other marketers have successfully used in the past.

Valentine's Competition Entrants #9

On the 9th day of Love, we've got to 2 more competitors looking to walk away with the grand prize.

Admiring their newsletter making savvy? Vote for them now!

1) Solid Edge Technology

2) Abhyasa Yoga Center

3 Best Practices for Increasing Subscriber Engagement

There's lots of hype surrounding email engagement, yet everyone has a different opinion on what that really means. In practice, we can only influence people while they're engaged with us, but engagement doesn’t happen automatically or overnight. It takes time and work, and is a slightly different process for every kind of business.

Engaged subscribers usually represent a small percentage of a list, but they do have the most value to a brand. This makes cultivating engagement a worthwhile pursuit.

Here are three tips for increasing subscriber engagement in bulk email marketing campaigns:

1) Roll out the welcome wagon:  Engage subscribers from the start. Welcome new subscribers with a helpful, eye-catching email to connect them with your brand from the first click. It can be hard to get newcomers to engage with you and respond in the way long-term subscribers do, so it’s necessary to reach out to them specifically. That’s where automation through triggered emails and personalisation comes in.

Set the right precedent for a long-term relationship with every new subscriber by developing a welcoming system. Be supportive of newcomers by offering them additional customer support or maybe even extra incentives. Consider having a newsletter series specifically aimed at teaching them the ins and outs of your company. If they lose interest, you lose money, so don’t give them the opportunity to by engaging them from the start.

2) Track and understand user actions: To increase customer engagement, you first need to understand what interests them and why. In email marketing, this means understanding the actions your subscribers take on and from your newsletter.

Begin by defining an engagement score. Combine key metrics such as opens, clickthroughs, comments on your newsletter, friend referrals, time spent on your site, visitation frequency and end-goal actions such as downloads and product or service purchases. Also consider measuring interaction with your support and marketing materials, including downloadable product sheets, promotion participation and access to help centers.

3) The engagement ideal and how to achieve it: To truly be considered an engaged subscriber, there's a logical order of progress that must take place. The individual must first receive your email, open it, view your message as something relevant to them, begin to interact with your brand and then repeatedly purchase from you.

The important thing to grasp is that sales and engagement are two different metrics. Anyone can easily make a single purchase from you, but if they don't come back and buy again, enough wasn’t done to engage them and turn them into a long-term customer.

Talk to your subscribers individually. In addition to using their first name or other demographic elements, consider integrating personalised upsell opportunities into your transactional emails based on how they interacted with other bulk email campaigns.

Engagement is what keeps a business alive. The vast majority of your sales will come from engaged customers. The more engaged customers you have, the more sales you'll make.

Article originally published with two more great tips about email engagement on eMarketing & Commerce.

Hot tips for Valentine’s Email Marketing

Valentine’s Day is on the approach and whether you personally view the season of hearts as the most romantic time of the year, filled with love and affection, or an annual catastrophe of tacky décor and extravagant gifts; there’s no question that it can have a positive effect on any business.

Valentine's is the perfect opportunity to re-ignite relationships with customers and remind them that they are at the forefront of your mind and that you understand their needs and desires.

February has also become one of the most competitive in email marketing, as recipients' inboxes are stuffed with look-alike offers from various retailers and spammers. This means that most of it will likely be ignored with all the red-hot overload.

Here are 3 things you could do to rise above romantic mediocrity and make sure that you get some extra love from your subscribers this Valentine’s:

1) Send ‘fe-mails’ to Venus and ‘mails’ to Mars

There are lots of people out there ready and willing to part with their cash to buy the ultimate Valentine’s gift, but even if you have the perfect product, one single offer may not be appropriate for all the members of your audience.

You want to present the right message to the right people. For example; you won’t want to send an email with masculine products to the men on your list, since that would defeat your efforts.

So to work around this issue, Valentine’s is a great time to try email list segmentation. You can do this by separating your subscriber list by gender and then sending female -oriented offers to the guys and male-oriented offers to the ladies. Having segments for new customers and those who’ve made purchases before can also play a big role in the type of messaging you have in your campaign.

You can send a special email to people who bought from you last year around Valentine’s Day with an even better offer for this year. If they had a good experience last time round, present them with an exclusive deal and they will most likely buy from you again.

Says Barbara Ulmi, GraphicMail Marketing Manager: “It’s important to take the time and effort to get the perfect emails written for each segment of your list, not just in terms of the products they contain, but also in terms of the tone. The playful, boyish approach that often puts men at ease fails with women - who may prefer something more sincere and heartfelt.”

Have you entered GraphicMail's Valentine's competition yet? Watch this video to find out how.

2) Give them romantic ideas

How many times have you wondered and worried over what you’re going to do for your Valentine’s Day?

Men are always spending more than women during Valentine’s, and often have a tough time coming up with ideas of what to buy and where to go; making them highly receptive to suggestion and easy to influence.

You can draw their attention by doing the homework for them and, for example, providing a list of the top 10 best Valentine’s Day gifts or dates. Tie this to your own offering by sending out a Valentine’s Day email newsletter filled with specials and information about which products you think will make for an unforgettable evening. These could be centered round your top selling items from last year or the ones you currently want to promote.

If all else fails suggest a gift card purchase option for customers who are stumped or can’t decide.

3) Get dressed for Love

The first order of business is, of course, getting your customers in the mood for Valentine’s Day, and this starts with your creatives.

A great Valentine’s themed email template will not only boost their enthusiasm about the celebration, but maybe even your sales. If you use a good balance of Valentine-specific copy and images, subscribers will begin to get thinking about the event and will want to look directly at what you have to offer for it.

This is a very simple, but important step. Changing appearances could even be all you need to do to in practical term to improve your sales.

If you don’t have time to come up with a new look, there are still other options. Think back to the Valentine’s emails you received 12 months ago; do you remember what any of them looked like in clear detail? Probably not, and the same should be true for your subscribers.

So if your schedule is too tight, you can even re-use stock images and certain texts from last year, as long as you are repeating the resources on your site and landing pages to keep the feel consistent.

Valentine's Competition Entrants: Day 7

On the 7th day of Love, 3 more competitors have arrived and are ready to be voted for!

1) Sefapane lodge & safaris

2) TechnoCity

3) Corporate African Experience

Valentine's Competition Entrants: Day 6

Day 6 of our Valentine's competition has brought a few more entries to our list of contenders.

Do any of these catch your eye? Vote for them now by commenting on this blog to increase their chances of winning.

1) Willow Creek SA

2) Joey and Julia

3) Saiosh

The competition closes on the 29th of February, so there are still more entrants to follow. To qualify, send us your February newsletter today! 

If you're not sure about how to enter or what you need to do to win, watch this video!