Easter is one of the biggest and most egg-citing retail holidays, and an ideal occasion to get customers engaged with your brand.
Yet with more and more businesses vying for customers’ attention, making your holiday email marketing campaigns and Easter sale stand out can be as challenging as making your Easter eggs last the whole long weekend. Marketers should avoid repetitive communications and should provide customers with a convenient experience that caters to their needs, interests and eggs-pectations.
If you’re stuck for inspiration on how to go about celebrating Easter with your customers, read on for 15 of our favorite Easter email marketing campaigns.
Tip: Click on the images for the full email creatives
1. Turn shopping into a fun experience
Sunuva made Easter shopping fun by introducing a virtual Easter egg hunt for their customers. Customers could search for hidden Easter eggs on product pages to win 20% off their latest collection. This is a great way to get involved in the holiday spirit if your products aren’t specifically related to the occasion, but you still want your content to fit with the Easter theme.
Source: Sunuva email
2. Make your customers laugh
Whether they make you groan or laugh, puns are a great way to grab your customers’ attention. If your brand is one that is playful and relaxed, why not include one?
Rifle Papers Co. made use of this fantast-egg tactic in the example below.
Source: Rifle Paper Co. email
3. Increase urgency with countdown timers
Thorntons used a Fresh Relevance Countdown Timer in their Easter email to highlight a limited-duration offer. Temporarily offering a luxury product at a lower price is a great way to boost loyalty with bargain hunters who might normally be turned off by the higher price tag.
Source: Thorntons email
4. Give shoppers a dose of inspiration with product recommendations
Product recommendations are a smart tactic for any email campaign and are proven to generate results. In fact, one retailer saw a 24% sales uplift with product recommendations in their email newsletters.
Add product recommendations to your Easter campaigns to showcase a wider range of your Easter fare, give shoppers an extra dose of inspiration and help them find the perfect Easter treats.
Molton Brown highlights their bestsellers, showing items that are most popular with other shoppers. Without the ability to try on, touch and see products in the flesh, customers are more likely to be swayed by other shoppers’ opinions, making this a persuasive type of product recommendation.
Source: Molton Brown email
Similarly, The Fish Society shares their trending products to help shoppers create the perfect Easter menu. This could serve as useful guidance for someone tasked with cooking over the Easter weekend, as they are more likely to have faith in products that are trending with other shoppers.
Source: The Fish Society email
Crate&Barrel includes personalized product recommendations with the heading ‘recommended for you’, signalling to the shopper that this is a selection of products specifically curated for them.
Retailers can use past purchase and browse data to send shoppers recommendations that are most likely to peak their interest.
Source: Crate&Barrel email
Since many consumers take advantage of the long Easter weekend to go on vacation, travel businesses can benefit from promoting staycations and short breaks. Cottages.com highlights their recommended Easter packages to get customers started with their search.
Source: Cottages.com email
Travel businesses can also take the opportunity to highlight cultural trips connected with Easter and use email marketing to educate their customers about destinations of particular significance around this time of year. Olympus Holidays showcases Corfu and shares fun facts and traditions around Greek Easter festivities.
Source: Olympic Holidays email
5. Allow shoppers to find your closest brick-and-mortar store
For companies that span online and offline, it can be helpful to give customers the choice between carting items on your website or having an in-store experience. By allowing customers to choose their favorite method, you allow for more chances of sales.
In the example below, Hobbycraft included a clear and visually appealing button called ‘Find Store’. This button leads customers to their website, which makes use of geotargeting techniques to find the clicker’s closest location. The customer can then choose to allow the website to see their approximate location, or fill in their address manually.
Source: Hobbycraft email
6. Delight shoppers with a coupon
Dynamic coupons can be very effective marketing tactics, as long as they follow a few simple guidelines. They should be sent with profit margins in mind. Some customers may think the brand is less valuable when they receive a coupon in their inbox, so sending them to high spenders may not work. You can use behavioral and purchase data to see which customers may benefit.
In addition, coupons in emails should always link back to the site seamlessly. If a coupon is already expired by the time the email is opened, the email should make that clear.
In the example below, lights4fun makes use of a 10% coupon code. The coupon code is in the header of the email, as well as bolded in the middle, making it almost impossible to miss and grabbing the attention of the customers, so that they can get ready for Easter with their discounted products.
Source: Lights4fun email
7. Help shoppers have their best Easter yet with useful tips
Going in for the hard sell has its time and place. But for holidays such as Easter where your customers might have extra free time to fill and families to entertain, try sharing useful content to help them have their happiest Easter yet. This softer approach will help you build your brand reputation and foster customer loyalty in the process. Use your email newsletters to share tips for the perfect Easter roast or tutorials for DIY egg decorating – anything that helps your customers have fun and get the most out of your products.
Paperchase fills their Easter campaign newsletter with DIY Easter projects to delight and entertain their subscribers.
Source: Paperchase email
8. Reassure shoppers with social proof
Social proof is an effective way to ease any purchase anxiety and boost conversions. Tactics such as star ratings, customer reviews and user-generated content serve to build shoppers’ trust with your brand, while popularity and scarcity messaging increase urgency and reduce click to purchase rate.
Getting Personal gives their Easter email campaign extra converting power with user-generated content, showcasing their chocolatey products with happy customers. (We also enjoy the puns.)
Source: Getting Personal email
To keep content fresh and the manual effort to a minimum, retailers can incorporate real-time social feeds to automatically pull the latest posts into their marketing emails.
9. Allow for more direct channels
SMS messages have a 98% read rate, yet it is an under-utilized channel. In the Easter email marketing campaign example below, Crate&Barrel asks customers if they would like to receive text messages from them. This opens up the possibility of converting more customers with tailored SMS messages.
Souce: Crate&Barrel email
10. Keep shoppers informed of bank holiday closures
Many stores close or operate on reduced hours over the Easter bank holiday, so make sure your shoppers know what to expect. Pet Drugs Online dedicates a whole email to this, advising customers to get their orders in early to avoid potential delays around the holiday period. Customers will appreciate the thoughtful service and are more likely to speed up their purchases.
Source: Pet Drugs Online email
If these emails have got you inspired to try something new for your Easter email marketing, a tool such as Fresh Relevance’s automatic optimization is an effective and easy way to test new content, providing quick results and automatically displaying the best performer towards goals you set. Find out more about automatic optimization and how it could help your business.
Download your copy of Five Easy Ways to Make Your Emails Perform Better for more ways to delight your customers this Easter.
Disclaimer:
This blog post is for informational purposes only. Fresh Relevance is not claiming to provide its services to the companies and brand owners referred to in the blog post.
