Best New Year Email Campaign Ideas

The holidays are the perfect time for sending out New Year emails to attract customers, stimulate sales, and promote products. One letter is good, but a series of emails is significantly more effective. That is why we strongly advise you to plan your pre-New Year mailings in advance and learn more about opt-in email marketing to launch the first New Year email on time. 

Let’s talk about techniques that help you establish contact with the audience in the pre-New Year period and review examples of interesting New Year email campaign ideas implemented by companies.

5 New Year Email Campaign Ideas

The latest best practices show that your New Year email marketing campaign should start after Christmas. However, you can include New Year promotion in your Christmas marketing campaigns and start much earlier. With that in mind, let’s look at some New Year’s email marketing ideas. 

1. Helpful or Entertaining Content

As customers are getting smarter about ads, businesses must find ways to interest them in their products. One of the best ways to attract attention is to give them something they want, thus the rise in useful and entertaining content in advertising.

The most popular content for the holidays is a gift guide. It naturally connects visitors needing New Year presents with advertisers, who have plenty of products to sell. Research shows that emails with gift guides lead to 48% more transactions than other promo emails.

Your guide can contain your bestselling items to bring even more traction. Or you can personalize the guide by customer categories or their previous purchasing history. 80% of customers are more likely to make a purchase if given a personalized experience. So tailor your New Year email marketing to your customers, and you will see a sharp growth in sales.

2. Gifts

Do not be stingy with gifts for your customers. Attach small gifts to their order: for example, a greeting card or a company souvenir. Another excellent way to capture the New Year mood and pass it on to your customers is gift sets of your products. This will allow them to ease the pain of choosing gifts, and you will gain trust in the brand.

Another simple but working scheme is to arrange a New Year's giveaway, for example, among those who bought something from you in December. This way, you will “kill two birds with one stone” by increasing the audience's involvement and pushing it to buy.

You can make it a surprise for your customers to increase loyalty. Or you can inform them with your New Year emails to attract more attention to your storefront.

Use this template

Try the “Find a gift on the site” game. The mechanics are strongly reminiscent of the game Hidden Objects. The principle is simple: all over the site, you hide gifts—discounts, bonus promo codes, and free services, and customers must find them.

If you have a multi-page site, users will probably not find them all, so you need to give hints in your New Year's email. Make eye-catching subject lines that provide hints about the game. Then, lead them to the right place with the email text or an on-site pop-up from Claspo.

Be sure to highlight on the page what gifts are hidden on the site so that users can evaluate in advance whether the gifts are worth the time spent. There is nothing worse than the “expectation not meeting reality” feeling.

3. Design

New Year's designs unwittingly uplift the mood, evoke fond memories, and encourage customers to explore the offer. That's why preparing your New Year’s emails for a holiday is so important. Add a New Year design like Christy did:

What can be done?

• add bright banners
• start the countdown to the New Year
• add a Santa hat to your company logo

4. Hyper-Personalization

Based on recent trends and current statistics, dividing subscribers into smaller segments will continue. It allows you to hyper-personalize your New Year sale emails for the target group. A personalized letter is 26% more likely to be opened than a regular email.

It is no longer enough to simply add the subscriber's name to the beginning of the New Year’s email. The content of the letter must match the interests of the reader. Otherwise, the company risks losing up to 20% of the base.

You can achieve outstanding results by creating custom content and products for your visitors. Consider adding custom gift guides (hello, idea #1), personalized discounts, or general ideas for New Year celebrations, using your products to enhance the experience.

5. 3D Animation and Interactive Emails

Perhaps the primary design trend in New Year’s emails is 3D animation. It is already being used in emails by major trend-setting brands such as Apple and Google to demonstrate the merits of their products. There is no doubt that other companies will follow soon.

Interactive New Year’s emails in which you can scroll through options, view products, and take action without clicking on links to the site will be popular. Research shows that over 50% of users receiving interactive emails will interact with them. Moreover, these emails can increase conversions by up to 300%.

Keep up the conversation after the New Year. If everything goes right, you now have an engaged audience. Here's how to keep the fire going after the New Year:

1. Analyze results for the future. Measure the overall engagement. How many people bought from you, and what was it? What did they almost buy? If you see a lot of users clicking on the red dress, send them a newsletter when you get a new batch of red dresses.
2. Keep taking care of your customers. Plan one or two New Year email marketing campaigns to run after the New Year. Send up to 1–2 newsletters per month to maintain a good relationship with users. One mailing can be marketing, and the other can be informational.
3. Use the life cycle of your products. If you sell t-shirts, you can reactivate customers after a few months and say, “Hi! We have new T-shirts. Submit a catalog?” Or, if you're in the food delivery business, send customers a checkout link with items already in their cart. Some brands include QR code cards in their boxes to increase the chance of reordering.

7 New Year's Sales Email Examples

To give you some inspiration for your New Year emails, we’ve gathered 7 excellent examples of emails from renowned companies. 

1. Vimeo

93% of buyers base their decision on the visual appearance of the marketing campaign or the final product. It doesn’t matter whether you choose bright and aggressive or pastel and gentle colors. The main idea is that it should fit your brand and be pleasant to your target audience.

For example, the Vimeo video service tells users about the year: how many videos were uploaded, what events happened, and what new features were launched. The letter is long but easy to read due to its exciting illustrations and bright colors that also fit the primary mood of the website.

It also contains a lot of helpful information about the user’s community and the global website community. Add both general and personal information that your users will love.

2. Spotify

The best option may be to make the history of the results not about the company but about the user. Here’s an innovative New Year email campaign idea from the Spotify music streaming service. The letter tells how many songs the user has listened to and offers to show more detailed account statistics.

This campaign has had a massive impact on the global community, especially on social media. For example, the volume of tweets mentioning Spotify Wrapped exploded by 461% in 2021 compared to 2020. That’s a lot of users turning into free influencers for their brand.

3. Busuu

Bright GIFs attract attention well. An email from Busuu, a language learning app, shows a banner with an attractive animation and a 50% discount offer. The synthesis of an attention-grabbing animation and a discount is a winning combo.

4. WizzAir

The WizzAir airline created a GIF with a Christmas tree for their New Year’s emails, which seems to be drawn by the trail of a flying plane, and instead of decorations, the names of cities. While the company offers no material gains, it reminds users about travel opportunities and subtly gives some ideas for New Year's travels.

5. Typeform

Gamification is a great way to engage readers. We never really stop playing, and a 30% increase in the gamification email open rate is the proof.

Typeform, a service for creating forms and surveys, shows a great example of gamified emails. They played with the idea of 12 days of Christmas and came up with 12 quizzes, one for each day. Moreover, they offered prizes, which enticed customers to open emails to find them. Of course, all quizzes are accessible via their website, but the email contains a button that leads there.

With Claspo, you can construct your own quizzes and games right on your website. They can be related to your products and services or gather feedback about your store. As a result, you will gather more information about your audience to send better personalized emails in the future.

6. ASOS

Humor will help unload the heads of your subscribers. A good joke will overshadow the flow of letters with the same type of congratulations from other companies.

The online store ASOS came up with a creative idea for their New Year’s emails, which turned out hilarious. Where else on the mailing list have you seen a model with such a facial expression? And the message was also fantastic—if you didn’t receive the desired gift, please yourself, and we will give you a discount.

7. Crew Clothing Company

The last hero of this collection is a New Year sale email from the Crew Clothing Company with a dachshund as a Christmas deer. This trick always works: if you don’t know what to write or want to write without text, make a cute visual with a pet.

How Claspo Can Help Your New Year Email Campaign

You might be asking yourself, “Wait, isn’t Claspo a pop-up builder? What do you guys have to do with emails?”

Technically, you are correct. But we also bring a lot of opportunities for improving your email campaigns. For starters, you can use Claspo’s widgets to gather email addresses to grow your mailing list. More reach means more potential conversions; it’s a really simple math.

You can also gather feedback or additional information about your customers to improve your services or personalize your messages.

We also have integrations with many platforms that offer email building in one way or another, including Mailchimp and Omnisend.

Here’s how it works:

• Gather emails and other data from users with Claspo’s pop-ups.
• Enable a few integration switches in your personal cabinet.
• Synchronize received data with other platforms.
• Send personalized emails.

It’s as easy as that: no fuss, no additional work from you.

Finally, you can make pop-ups a part of your multichannel marketing strategy. Show specific pop-ups to those who come from your New Year email campaign, or send emails to those who interact with your widgets. It works both ways!

How to Efficiently Apply Your New Year Email Campaign Ideas

The earlier you start planning a New Year's email marketing campaign, the more likely it will be successful. Don't beg your customers to buy just because it's New Year's Eve—give them the benefit of using your brand.

First, divide your audience into as many segments as you need. Then, create personalized emails and offers.

Try re-engaging inactive followers and building relationships with them before the big day. Also, if you want to send out a series of New Year’s emails with different products and promotions, don't forget to tag those who converted. This way, you won't annoy them with your mailing list. You can send them a “Thank You” note instead.

Prepare some abandoned cart emails. Offer help to customers and see if they convert. If they still need to make a purchase, send them another reminder with a special offer like free shipping.

Everything needs to be tested—holiday emails can be an effective tool to increase sales, so it is essential to ensure they are correct. Check whether links work and how letters are displayed on different devices and in different email clients.

If everything went according to plan and the client made a purchase, be sure to thank them and ask them to rate the quality of service or fill out a short survey.

Finally, keep in touch with your clients after the New Year marketing campaign. Send them surveys, offer items and information, and promote your company’s values. Many users will appreciate you remembering them.