6 Tips for running an engaging seasonal email banner campaign

Seasonal holidays create the perfect opportunity to get creative with spontaneous and engaging marketing campaigns. It’s something our clients ask about a lot and we have the ideal solution – email marketing banners.

Email signature banners are impactful, interactive, easy to implement and ultimately turn every business email into a marketing channel.

In this short blog post we’ll take you through 6 tips for using email banner marketing to run a simple, successful seasonal promotion. As an example, we’ll use our own recent ‘Golden Egg’ Easter banner promotion.

Let’s get started…

Tip 1: Set a SMART objective

However simple your promotion, you need to be SMART (a favourite marketing acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Bound). It’s important to keep your email banner focused on achieving one goal, whether that’s lead generation, newsletter sign-ups or even direct sales.

Like our clients, we have multiple email banner campaigns running at any one time, assigned to specific senders and targeted at specific audiences. We kicked off our Easter seasonal campaign with an email signature banner to customers reminding them that, if they needed Rocketseed to design Easter banners for them, then they should brief us in a timely manner in order to meet the Easter deadline.

But we also wanted to engage our clients in a more innovative way. An email banner hunt, if you like. That’s when we decided to run a ‘Golden Egg’ promo. The goal? To give something back in an entertaining way (strengthening their relationship with Rocketseed), as well as showing them another way to use an email marketing banner.

The promotion was SMART – specific in its goal (to give away a free email banner design), certainly measurable (see Tip 6 below), achievable, realistic and timebound (the promotion ran from the beginning of April until Easter, with the free banner having to be claimed by 30 April).

Tip 2: Keep it simple

Avoid running any promotion that takes up too much time with complicated processes and endless terms and conditions. The secret is to keep it simple. This is especially true of email banner campaigns.

The mechanic of the ‘Golden Egg’ promo was incredibly simple:

• In any one-to-one emails sent by Rocketseed, existing customers started seeing a banner encouraging them to keep their eyes open for the ‘Golden Egg’ banner that will enable them to claim a free email banner design.
• The ‘Golden Egg’ banner was then tactically set up to override all other banners on rotation for a short period of time on selective days of the week only. The ‘Golden Egg’ banner had a clear ‘Claim free banner design’ call-to-action (CTA) button for them to click.
• Each recipient click automatically generated an email to the sender of the email who then liaised with them directly regarding their requirements for the free banner design.
• Every interaction was tracked using Rocketseed’s analytics and the results reported.

Tip 3: Design eye-catching, easy-to-click email banners

Keep the email banner design simple. Space is limited (650px x 150px being the ideal email banner size) and it needs to make an immediate impact. Use eye-catching imagery, headline copy that’s concise and compelling and – most importantly – a clear, easy-to-click, call-to action button. With Rocketseed there’s also the option to add animation. See our email design guidelines on the best dimensions and file formats for email signatures and banners.

For our ‘Golden Egg’ promotion we created 2 promotional email banners – both designed to Rocketseed visual brand guidelines, with eye-catching Easter imagery and clear headline copy.

Firstly, we designed an email banner to create awareness of the promotion, with emphasis drawn to ‘free’. Unusually, it didn’t include a call-to-action (CTA) button as its purpose was simply to raise awareness of, and encourage recipients to keep their eyes open for, the ‘Golden Egg’ email signature banner.

We then created the ‘Golden egg’ banner itself. It featured a clear ‘Congratulations’ headline message and a clear clickable call to action button.

Clicking the button automatically opened a draft email to the sender with a pre-populated subject line: Easter Golden Egg: Claim free banner design, to be followed up by the account manager to discuss the client’s free banner design requirements.

Tip 4: Ensure email banners are right on target and on time

This is where Rocketseed segmentation – either by sender or recipient audience groups – and banner campaign scheduling come into play.

For our ‘Golden Egg’ promo we used Rocketseed’s segmentation rules to apply the promotional banners on emails to existing customers and only on emails sent from client-facing staff.

Our software’s scheduling rules also ensured that we could specify the banner campaign start and stop dates as well as set the priority level – in this case it was set to override any other banners.

Tip 5: Give it some support

Whilst the email banner promotion could have been run as a self-contained campaign, it pays (as with all integrated marketing communications) to give a promotion cost-effective marketing channel support where possible.

In this case, we promoted it as a supporting feature in our monthly client email newsletter (created and sent using Rocketmailer – our bulk email marketing tool).

Tip 6: Measure success

Want to see the success of your banner promotion? That’s the role of Rocketseed reporting and analytics. Our dashboard shows just how many emails were sent with the promotional banner applied, the number of unique recipients, the email open rate (always extremely high as this is everyday business email) and – for a real measure of the promotion’s engagement – banner click-through rate.

In EMEA, 83 branded emails were sent with the ‘Golden Egg’ banner and achieved a 26.7% engagement rate.

As you can see, it’s incredibly simple to set up a short-term, seasonal promotional email banner campaign whenever you feel there’s an opportunity to drive extra engagement. With SMART objectives, a simple promotion mechanic, targeted interactive banners, and clear results reporting, your email banner promotion will be a success. To see how Rocketseed can help with your next seasonal email banner marketing campaign, simply book a demo.

Morgan Henderson  |  Account Director
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