Top Ways to Prepare Your Email Campaigns for Summer Sales

Compared to massive peaks in revenue and performance around Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the winter holidays, the summer season in the e-commerce world tends to be a bit slower. 

Summer is the time of year when people are out and about, celebrating warmer weather, and taking trips to see friends and family. It’s about recharging, relaxing, and enjoying the outdoors. As an e-commerce professional, you have many opportunities to capture the feelings of the season through bright design, fun content, and deals that appeal to summer holidays and events. 

The best way to communicate with existing and potential customers is through email campaigns. In this article, you’ll learn about how to gear your products to the season and make them known through a variety of email campaigns. 

Create Summer Deals and Content 

Before you begin sending out your email campaigns, you need to know what you’re selling. Even if you don’t have products that are necessarily “summer-y”—such as swimwear, warm weather apparel, or beach accessories—clever strategy, design, and copy can help you carve out your niche in the season. 

To start:

Create summer-themed collections.

Offer customers a curated collection of essentials that are perfect for summer. This is a great way to bundle complementary products to push more sales while addressing customer needs.

As we mentioned, your product doesn’t have to be a “summer product.” You can pull in themes and activities of the season around your product. For example, in the email below, you’ll see how Elysium used summer activities—stargazing and gardening—to talk about health:

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Create a summer gift guide. 

A gift guide is a curated selection of products that are for a certain occasion or recipient. Usually, these guides feature a range of products from a variety of categories and price points that make it easy for shoppers to find the perfect gift for friends and family. 

Create summer lifestyle content. 

Your email campaigns can’t only push sales and product drops. If you go that route, the customer is going to pick up on the pattern and won’t walk away with a memorable experience, which is a big part of building brand loyalty. 

Offering help, fun content, or education will plant deeper memory triggers in your customers, pushing them to become loyal, repeat customers.

Need help planning lifestyle content and summer events to match your brand? At SmartBug, we do exactly that! Contact us to connect with a strategist today.

Create Summer-Themed Email Campaigns 

Now that you have your products, bundles, content, and deals planned out, how are you going to promote them to your customers? One of the surest ways to connect with your customers is by creating email marketing campaigns that are complemented by SMS strategies. (Note the word complement; SMS messages are rarely sent without email campaigns but are instead used to inform the recipient of an order confirmation, provide delivery confirmations, and promote time-sensitive deals. Leave emails to the content-heavy messaging.) 

Here are some content ideas for your summer-themed email campaigns: 

Memorial Day Sale Announcement

Memorial Day is a huge summer holiday. It’s the unofficial start to summer, and you can harness the excitement of the new season to promote your brand. 

Promote your Memorial Day sale by sending an email announcing the sale, highlighting the best deals and discounts on summer-related products.

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Summer Holiday Campaigns

The summer is full of holidays. Some of them are well-known—such as Fourth of July and Labor Day—while others are lesser known. Promoting products around well-known holidays is great, but it’s also predictable. If you can gear your message towards the lesser known holidays, you get the element of surprise and intrigue. 

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New Summer Collection Launch

An email campaign that showcases your latest summer collections highlights new products, features, and even content, such as how to use the products or where to use them.

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Summer Gift Guide

Summer gift guides are another great way to kick off the summer. Feature products for different occasions and recipient types. This way, you take the mental guesswork off the customers’ plates, which makes their shopping experience nearly effortless. Depending on the number of customer profiles you’re going after, making multiple gifts guides is a great idea.

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Summer Clearance Sale

Toward the end of summer, send an email promoting a clearance sale of end-of-season summer items such as swimwear, outdoor furniture, and more.

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Summer Lifestyle Content

Your email campaigns shouldn’t only shouldn’t only push products or deals. Customers will quickly catch on and will soon become less engaged. 

Provide summer-related lifestyle content pieces that show customers how to get the most out of your summer products, how to stay cool in the heat, how to plan a summer barbecue, the best places to travel, and anything else your customers would value.

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Make a Splash with Email Marketing from SmartBug

Need help promoting your summer products? Team up with our e-commerce team to maximize engagement and sales not just during the summer but in every quarter of the year. 

Request a consultation with one of our expert strategists, and we’ll plan it with you!