Spring: One of the best seasons for cleaning, starting fresh, and—sending email campaigns? The stress of winter holidays has blown over. People are starting to shake their winter slumber and get excited about the warmer temperatures. It’s also the perfect opportunity for marketers to freshen up their spring email campaigns with interesting and personalized content. In this post, we’ll go over some common and not-so-common spring themes and ideas to spice up your emails. We’ll also provide some of the best spring emails as examples to use for inspiration.
Spring Holiday Ideas to Freshen Up Your Email Campaigns
Although December and holidays in winter seasons get most of the attention, springtime is filled with religious holidays, state days, and niche national days. Use the days below as inspiration to develop your own personalized email campaigns for your audience.
Standard Springtime Holidays
Take advantage of these religious holidays or state days to create the best spring emails for your audience.
- First day of spring
- Fat Tuesday
- Mardi Gras
- Lent
- Daylight savings time
- St. Patrick’s Day
- April Fool’s Day
- Purim
- Earth Day
- Tax Day
- Emancipation Day
- Easter
- Passover
- Ramadan
- Cinco de Mayo
- Mother’s Day
- Memorial Day
- Flag Day
- Father’s Day
National Days, Themes, and Observances for Niche Inspiration
Taking your audience and brand into account, you could create spring email campaigns focusing on any one of the hundreds of spring national days. This shows why it’s so important to understand and segment your subscriber list. Once you learn about your subscribers enough to break them up into niche groups, you can create springtime campaigns that they may find funny or interesting.
- Read Across America Day
- Employee Appreciation Day
- National Library Workers Day
- April Showers
- May Flowers
- Spring Cleaning
- Graduation Day
- Women’s Day
- Worship of Tools Day
- Poultry Day
- National Mom and Pop Business Day
- National Beer Day
- Star Wars Day
- World Health Day
- National Stress Awareness Day
- Administrative Professionals Day
- May Day
- No Diet Day
- Teacher’s Day
- Nurse’s Day
- International Jazz Day
- Best Friends Day
- National Splurge Day
- International Yoga Day
- National Trails Day
- Hug Your Cat Day
8 of the Best Spring Emails and Why They’re Awesome
Springtime is ideal for testing out new strategies and finding unique ways to reach your subscribers. Don’t limit yourself to generic bulk emails: Personalized emails produce 26% higher open rates and 6x higher transaction rates. Get to know your subscribers and what’s important to them so you can create the best spring emails. Avoid filling all your emails with promotional content and coupons. Customers want valuable blog posts and videos to improve their lives—not just sales pitches. Of course, spring is also a great time to clean up your own email list of inactive subscribers with some reengagement opportunities.
1. Fossil: Spring Break
As soon as warmer temperatures hit, people love hitting the road and exploring new places. You don’t have to run a travel-centric brand to take advantage of the action. In this email, the watch brand, Fossil, put together a list of travel must-haves. The email is nice and simple with a few images and a button to click for more information. Marketers could design similar personalized emails using behavior tracking to select products they know their subscribers will love. You could also segment your list based on age to target college students who are more likely to plan spring break getaways. Source: Pinterest
2. J. Crew: Warm Weather
Crew knows folks in northern climates are beyond ready for that sweet warm sunshine. This crisp flyer-style email shows off the brand’s basic distressed tees and summer linens. Using personalization and segmentation data, J. Crew clearly targeted men, possibly between the ages of 24-35. Marketers could also create emails like this to target subscribers in northern climates who are prepared for a shift in the seasons or gearing up for vacations. Source: Milled
3. US Outdoor Store: Get Outside
It isn’t wise for marketers to fill all their emails with nothing but products and promotions. If you want to create loyal customers, you need to provide valuable content and this springtime campaign from US Outdoor Store does just that. This email is clearly targeted towards subscribers interested in mountain climbing because it contains tips, videos, and interesting news about that specific topic. It may even be targeted towards users in a particular location like Colorado. You could divide your list into different groups based on location to provide unique content or you could simply ask them which topics they’d like to learn about through your spring email campaigns and beyond. Notice that this email doesn’t promote any particular product but it does inform the readers about a special springtime sale. Source: Milled
4. Dunkin Donuts: National Iced Tea Day
This email from Dunkin Donuts is an excellent example of an email campaign for a niche springtime holiday: National Iced Tea Day (it’s June 10 if you were wondering). Although the email doesn’t appear personalized, it does contain an offer for a free product. All subscribers have to do is sign up for DD Perks—which is also free. In reality, new enrollees in DD Perks always receive a free beverage but why not use a time like National Iced Tea Day to promote the special? Both the email campaign and landing page are concise and simple. Plus, the email contains a high-quality image of a refreshing iced tea. Source: Pinterest
5. St. Baldrick’s Foundation: Mother’s Day
Retail and e-commerce websites aren’t the only ones who can take advantage of niche holidays to drum up business. Spring is also an ideal time for NGOs and charitable organizations to get in on the game. This well-designed email from St. Baldrick’s Foundation makes it easy for subscribers to send an e-card to their mom with a donation to help kids fighting cancer. Following best practices, the subject line is concise, actionable, and relevant: “Need a Mother’s Day gift?” The body copy is conversational and puts itself in the reader’s shoes. It’s important for NGOs to build credibility. St. Baldrick’s Foundation adds a heartwarming story from their blog written by a mom to demonstrate their value through a real-world example. Source: Really Good Emails
6. Spa Finder: Teacher’s Day
Does anyone deserve a spa day more than a teacher? Spa Finder knows that while teachers might need help with supplies, they could also use some relaxation and pampering. As one of the best spring emails, this campaign is also a good example of why it’s important to understand your subscribers. If you can figure out which subscribers are parents, you can create unique spring email campaigns to send them for spring break, summer vacation, and holidays like Teacher’s Day. This Spa Finder email gets to the point with an attention-grabbing image, special promo code, and a large button that takes the subscriber to a landing page to complete a purchase quickly. Source: Milled
7. Wolf & Badger: Earth Day
Earth Day is the day for sustainable brands to shine. This springtime email from Wolf & Badger takes it to another level by promoting an in-person event: An Earth Day sustainability panel near their London location. The campaign clearly describes the event up-front so there’s no question about whether or not a subscriber would be interested in attending. To build credibility, the email highlights panelists with their backgrounds and experience. B2Bs and B2Cs alike could take advantage of holidays like Earth Day to create events about their sustainability practices and educating attendees on how to make their business a little more earth-friendly. Source: Milled
8. Animoto: Spring Cleaning
This email from Animoto doesn’t specifically mention spring cleaning, but it does encourage inactive subscribers to re-opt-in their email list. Spring is the perfect time to do some spring cleaning of your own by sending out re-engagement campaigns to inactive subscribers. Sending out campaigns like this one will help you remove uninterested subscribers from your list. Why is that important? Well, it can optimize your delivery rates because email clients will know that you’re only sending emails to people who truly want to hear from you. If you continue sending campaigns to people who never open your emails, email clients might think you’re spamming people. Source: Really Good Emails
Wrap up
Springtime is the perfect chance to freshen up your email marketing strategy with new themes and holiday spring email campaigns.
- Break your subscriber list into groups based on location, behaviors, demographics, and interests.
- Send out re-engagement campaigns to inactive subscribers and clean up your list.
- Capitalize on the hundreds of holidays or national days during the spring months. Find special days that fit well with your products, brand, and audience segments.
- Provide value to subscribers with blog posts and informational content instead of relying on promotional material to carry the weight.
- A/B test your campaigns to create the best spring emails.
When you have a thorough understanding of your audience, you can provide them the most relevant and valuable content possible through email. Need some help collecting information about your subscribers? Find out how survey emails can help.
