Valentine’s Day newsletter in 3 easy steps

Valentine’s Day has become one of the biggest sales holidays of the year. More than half of customers in online stores plan to celebrate and they start looking long before February 14th.

Getting your Valentine’s newsletter just right can pay off big time and we’ve put together a short road map to success.

Check out our Three Steps for a Great Valentine’s Day Newsletter!

Step 1 - Prepare well ahead of time

Valentine’s Day is a fixed date on the calendar, not a whole season like summer. Nobody will care about your promotion on February 15th. Don’t leave everything until the last minute and give yourself time to put together a great design.

Set a goal

So you know that Valentines is a great occasion for sending a campaign but you still need to decide exactly what your goal is. Sales is usually the objective but not always. It could be a “romantic” twist on some other form of communication, product news or some other announcement. Now is the time to start thinking about what you want to accomplish.

Create a plan

Then put together a plan of action that includes time frames and how you want to organise the steps involved to help ensure you get what you need in time to send your campaign by a deadline.

Follow the steps

Make your work more efficient by setting up a calendar for the different parts of your plan. After all, your Valentine’s promotion can consist of multiple messages and targets, right?

To start out, you can announce the campaign with a simple banner somewhere. As time goes on and we get closer to hearts and pink and red everywhere, intensify the frequency of your messages and announcements.

Give them time to choose just the right present

If you want to get the results you’re aiming for, you need to give recipients time to look over your offer and select what’s right for them. This means giving them enough time to make their decision, order it and receive it. Don’t let competitors be the first to get their message to customers that might ignore you if you wait too long.

Remember that Valentine’s Day gifts are for that special someone and the gifts need to be special too. Let your subscribers know that you’ve put together the best you have to offer!

Help for those who wait

It’s simply a fact that a good portion of us wait until the last, last, last minute to take care of holiday shopping. Have something ready for this group too in the form of something like a gift certificate that can be redeemed later. You can also include prominent reminders in your message about the last possible day to order and still have guaranteed delivery before Valentine’s. To persuade anyone sitting on the fence, offer free delivery or easy returns.

Remember who your audience is

Bear in mind that men and women buy differently online. Depending on who your audience is, this can influence how you put your campaign together. Women look for promotions, so put an emphasis on discounts and low prices while designing a visually appealing newsletter. Men, on the other hand, tend to prefer more product information in newsletters aimed at them.

Step 2 - Attractive template and great text

Now it’s time to focus on the graphic presentation of your message. It’s Valentine’s Day so let’s see some hearts, cupids and roses along with plenty of red and pink. You can also think about going in a different direction with something new and unique.

When creating your design, keep a few rules in mind:

• Don’t make it too crowded, leave enough white space
• Use a maximum of three colors and greys and whites as a background
• A clear CTA of the right size
• No more than three simple, readable fonts
• High-quality graphics
• Simple and intuitive overall design

Remember to include separate texts in your template for men and women.

Create great text that plays on the emotions related to Valentine’s. You need to convince recipients that your offer is just the thing they’re looking for. Use the language of benefits and focus attention on how happy it will make the customer’s other romantic half.

Also remember that you need a good message subject to grab attention in subscriber inboxes. It needs to reveal what’s “inside” the mail and spark an interest in what the recipient can gain just by opening an email.

Step 3 - The right people at the right time

When everything in the first two steps is done, it’s time for the final stage and sending your campaign. But there are a couple of final things to check off the list before you hit “send”!

Check before you send

The first thing to do is to once again go over all the elements of your newsletter and look for mistakes. Make sure links are working properly and direct where they should. Ask someone to look over everything and check that the text is correct.

Use segments and don’t send the same message to everyone

Your database should already be divided into segments based on various subscriber characteristics and actions. Make sure you send the right version of your message to the right segment and send, for example, different content to men and women. For Valentines, you’ll mostly send products for men to the women on your list and vice versa. If you have additional information about your subscribers, use it! It could be just the thing you need to “wake up” inactive subscribers with a discount or increase the number of recipients who click on a link.

Show them that the message is just for them

Always, always, always personalise your messages. Address your subscribers as people, use their names and craft a message that shows that you’re not sending the same generic message to your entire database. Valentine’s Day is about celebrating with one person so don’t come across like you’re talking to thousands.

Test on small groups before you send

If you want to know which message subject will get a better response from your subscribers, run A/B tests, which can be set up in the first stage of campaign creation.

To be sure that you send your message at the best possible time, run another test to optimise the hour when you send the campaign. This is also easily set up in the first stage of campaign creation.

When the test results are in and everything has been double checked, it’s time to get your message out.

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