Valentine’s Sale Email Ideas for 2023

Jan 12, 2023
8
Valentine’s Day falls on February 14, a happy date for lovers and marketers. Even though there’s been much change for Valentine’s Day over the past few years, couples still celebrate their feelings for each other with dates and gifts, and companies double the volume of marketing emails that they send while increasing sales.
Valentine’s Day is undoubtedly a significant event in the marketing world, with almost every company finding an angle to get in on the action. When your competitors are jumping in on occasion and pushing their sales, it’s essential to figure out how to stay afloat and ensure that your brand is noticed among the increased email clutter around this time.

Valentine’s Day Email Marketing – The Facts

Some people love Valentine’s Day, while others don’t care much for it. However, one thing that any marketer can agree on is that this occasion is an ideal time to generate significant sales. Customers often look for products to buy for their loved ones, so it makes sense for companies to jump on the bandwagon and make the most of the day.

Valentine’s Day is a huge occasion in the US, with shoppers spending more than $20bn on the day in 2019. And, unlike other occasions and holidays throughout the year, there’s only around a week or two leading up to the event, with almost 50% of shoppers looking for a gift in early February. Add: including expensive gifts such as diamond engagement rings, and plane tickets. Plus, it’s not just couples that you can target. People buy Valentine’s gifts for anybody special in their lives, with over $600m spent on pets alone in 2016. While any eCommerce store can do well on Valentine’s Day, it’s a hectic time of the year for brands selling experiences and jewellery, and engagement ring insurance.

Valentine’s Sale Email – Planning a Campaign

The first step is considering what your brand will do for Valentine’s Day. Some brands sell products specifically for the occasion, while others offer sales or deals to their customers. Once you have the purpose of your campaign, this will shape the newsletter content, timing, and more. Consider factors such as the time needed to process and ship the orders. Typically, around a week before Valentine’s Day is the best time to launch your campaign unless you expect your products to take longer than this to ship. Make sure you give your customers plenty of time to choose, shop and guarantee that a gift will be delivered.

Valentine Email Newsletter – Make it Special

It’s essential to remember that Valentine’s Day is a prime time of year for many retailers, and after the holidays, it’s the first occasion of the new year to focus on when it comes to the marketing calendar. That’s why during this time, your customers are likely to be experiencing more cluttered inboxes than usual with Valentine’s Day messages and advertisements. Making sure your message stands out from the crowd is essential for ensuring that Valentine’s Day is a success for your brand. You can do several things to make the message more special for your customers, such as adding a funny or romantic video with the email to encourage positive emotions around your messaging and prompt the customer to click on your CTA button.

Valentine’s Day Email Marketing Subject Lines

Giving plenty of thought to the subject line you use for your Valentine’s Day marketing email is crucial. This is because, at this time of year, you can imagine that your customers will have hundreds of emails all saying something fairly non-original such as ‘Happy Valentine’s Day’. After a while, this type of subject line will certainly not stand out and grab their attention. Instead, now is a good time of year to go against the grain and do something different – perhaps even unusual. Don’t be afraid to be creative with your subject lines, and go for something unlikely to be used by all the other companies that are currently sending marketing emails. This will help you stand out in the inbox and improve your email’s open rate.

Valentine’s Day Email Copy Ideas – Share the Love

While your main aim might be to encourage customers to buy Valentine’s gifts from your brand, it’s essential that you don’t overlook the fantastic opportunity that this occasion poses when it comes to sharing the love with your customers. Of all the occasions throughout the year, Valentine’s Day is a great moment to go all out with your copy and let your customers know that you love them! Keep copy short, sweet, and catchy, and focus on sending a message that makes your customers feel appreciated and valued on the most loving day of the year.

Valentine’s Day Email Copy – Provide Value and Information

Along with sharing the love with your messaging and using copy that leaves your customers feeling valued by your brand, Valentine’s Day can be a great time to provide informative, useful, and valuable content to your customers. Many people are stuck for ideas on Valentine’s Day and would appreciate receiving an email with a well-thought-out gift-buying guide to help them choose the right present for their loved ones. You don’t have to focus on the products that you sell, either – a Valentine’s Day guide that provides value to your reader with tips on planning a date, wrapping a gift, improving relationship communication, or even spicing up intimacy can work well, as long as it is relevant to your brand in some way. Receiving content from your brand that’s informative, valuable, and helps them learn something new can be one of the best ways to encourage your readers to click on your CTAs.

What to Email on Valentine’s Day? Using Stories to Sell Products

If the product you promote for Valentine’s Day isn’t exactly romantic, don’t worry. Any product can be sold as Valentine’s gift with a good story behind it. When it comes to copy, create a contextual story around your product that focuses on love, friendship, care, and positive relationships to make it relevant to the occasion.

Valentine’s Day Email Marketing Ideas – Discounts and Sales

Valentine’s Day is all about giving, so it’s a great occasion to offer discounts and sales to motivate your customers to choose your store over a competitor’s. Limited-time discounts are one of the best methods that you can use to encourage customers who are ready to shop to ultimately click your CTA and choose your store to buy their Valentine’s Gift.

You can offer lots of discounts and sales for Valentine’s Day to get more traction from your email marketing campaign and increase sales. A Valentine’s Day promotional code is an excellent option to offer. This usually involves sending a marketing email containing a code that customers can copy and paste into the checkout when shopping, entitling them to a certain amount of money or a certain percentage off their purchase.

A Valentine’s flash sale is another option if you want to use promotions and discounts to encourage customers to shop with you over a competitor. Limited-time flash sales, where you can offer a discount on a range of products or all products in your store, offer a sense of urgency that can encourage readers to click your CTA and become paying customers. You can include features such as countdowns in emails to further instil a sense of urgency and take advantage of the fear of missing out (FOMO).

Valentine’s Day Promo Email – Standing Out With Color

When you think about colours associated with Valentine’s Day, red and pink are probably the first ones to come to mind. However, the chances that every other company out there will think the same thing around this occasion is very high. Your customers will likely be getting many emails with a lot of red or pink, so something different may be worth trying. After all, no rule says you must use red or pink to signify love. There are many other ways you can do it, and any colour can work well when accompanied by the right images, subject lines, headlines, and copy. On the other hand, using reds and pinks can work well if these aren’t your usual brand colours. You can stand out differently by using traditional Valentine’s Day colours and deviating from what you’d typically use in your visual branding.

Valentine’s Day Marketing Email – Include Everybody

Inclusivity has never been more critical than it is right now. When planning your marketing campaign for Valentine’s Day, it’s crucial to ensure that everybody feels included. This is where segmenting your email list becomes one of the most important things you can do for a successful Valentine’s Day campaign. After all, you don’t want to send marketing emails primarily centred around straight couples to people in same-sex relationships or send emails focused on being loved in a relationship to somebody who’s been single for years. The good news is that Valentine’s Day is for everybody; no matter your customers’ situations, you can tailor the message to suit them. For example, singles might appreciate messages about friendship or loving themselves on Valentine’s Day, and you can change the imagery and language for customers who are part of the LGBTQIA+ community. Getting to know your customers and learning as much about them as possible is crucial. When you know what kind of content your customers want to see this Valentine’s Day, you can provide it and improve the brand-customer relationship.

Valentine’s Day Event Promotion Email – What to Promote?

Any company can take advantage of Valentine’s Day as long as they offer something customers want at this time of year. Research shows that cards, jewellery, and experiences are some of the most popular products purchased for Valentine’s Day. That being said, everybody is different, and many of your products might make the ideal gift for some customers, even if you don’t sell these specific items. Some ideas for promoting your products include:

Gift Cards

Promoting gift cards can be an ideal option as there’s always going to be a customer who isn’t sure what to buy for their significant other. And more and more people enjoy gift cards for occasions as it gives them a chance to purchase something they want for themselves. By promoting gift cards as Valentine’s Day gifts, you also have the opportunity to market your brand to another customer when the recipient visits your site to redeem their gift card.

Valentine’s Cards

Even if your business doesn’t sell greeting cards throughout the year, it can be worth adding them to your store for occasions, depending on what you sell. Valentine’s Day cards can be a fantastic add-on item. For example, you might ask your customers if they’d like to add a card for a couple of dollars when making a Valentine’s Day purchase at your store.

Include Everybody

If the items you sell in your store are gendered or come in different sizes, then promote something for everybody. It’s important to remember that customers don’t just buy Valentine’s gifts for other adults – many people purchase Valentine’s gifts for their kids and other relatives, so don’t miss out on the opportunity to promote products to them.

Free Shipping

No matter what products you promote for Valentine’s Day, offering free shipping is a must. Promote free shipping and consider offering unique options such as free next-day shipping for those last-minute shoppers to get an advantage over your competition.

 

With the holidays over, Valentine’s Day is the next big event on every marketing calendar (a template marketing planner showing key dates such as this may come in handy). When it comes to email marketing, standing out from the crowd in a sea of pink, red and love hearts set to hit inboxes in February is the most essential factor for your success.

 

Last, but not least! Remember that the success of your email marketing campaign will also depend on whether your message reaches the mailbox. Before each larger shipment, it is good to verify your list, which may contain outdated or malicious email addresses (e.g. spamtraps). Otherwise, such a shipment may affect your deliverability and even result in loss of domain reputation and  even blocking. Bouncer allows you to verify addresses in the intuitive, most accurate and fast way.

Do not wait and verify your filthy email list now!
Try Bouncer with 100 free credits.

Line and dots