Remember the summers of youth? If you are like me, you looked forward to summer all year long. When it finally arrived, we relished the playful freedom, savored the sounds and flavors, and enjoyed every adventurous moment. In this summer, and others, consider sending inactive subscribers to an adventure with re-engagement emails, among other tactics to spur clicks and conversions.
Blooming in summertime
As screen-locked adults, many of us now wilt in August. We complain about the heat, our campaigns suffer because audiences are on vacation, and we can’t wait for the kids to be back in school.
“STOP!”
1. Make your message hotter
Step into your subscribers’ flip-flops and consider what would resonate with them this summer. Perhaps create a sweepstakes with a prize of tickets to a water park. Maybe summery CTAs like “Beat the heat with…”
Consider statistics for your industry. For example, if you are in the HR field, recruiting slows down in July, but Monster.com tells us that “[it] picks up at the end of August.” Plan your strategy according to the summer peaks of your industry.
2. Make it responsive and add SMS
With kids on vacation and many people traveling, subscribers may be reading your messages on the go more this summer than ever before. Test all email campaigns for responsiveness across platforms and devices. Consider adding the SMS channel to catch your subscriber’s on-the-go.
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3. Be social
If you have only been dipping your feet in the social media pool, summer is a great time to dive in! According to Hubspot, “80% of marketers indicate that their social media efforts have increased traffic.” Add social sharing buttons to your emails, try a hashtag campaign, encourage your subscribers to engage with you on Facebook, Twitter, and especially Instagram.
According to a Forrester Research study of over 3 million user interactions with more than 2,500 brand posts on seven social networks, six of the seven social networks had an engagement rate of less than 0.1%. For every 1 million Facebook fans those brands had collected, each of their posts received only about 700 likes, comments, and shares. On Twitter, the ratio was about 300 interactions per 1 million followers. The social network that stood out was Instagram, which delivered these 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook, and 120 times more engagement per follower than Twitter.
4. Segment your seasons
It is easy for us Northern-Hemispherers to forget sometimes: August isn’t all beach and swimming pools everywhere. In fact, in Sydney, Australia, for example, the average August temperature lows are around 9°C/48°F. Be mindful and don’t send them bathing suit deals.
Also, while August may be back to school time in some areas, others may only start back up in October.
List segmentation is always wise, but some email marketers forget that seasonality profile segment.
5. Try something new
As a child, summer was a great time to try a new flavor of ice cream and buy new clothes for the upcoming school year. As a young adult, it was about surfing lesson, summer concerts, and travel to faraway lands. As an email marketer, I like to try something different with my campaigns in the summer.
Why don’t you try a summer fling with a new ESP or SMTP relay, a new kind of dynamic content or personalization, or split test a new design concept for a newsletter.
Use summer time for testing and discover all the new ways you can optimize email deliverability, reduce costs and maximize ROI.
Summer email marketing tactics yield ROI throughout the year
These summer tactics have worked for me and for many of our Ongage customers. Try them for your campaigns this summer. If the results are as good as ours were, they will be the gift that keeps on giving all year long.
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