6 Best Practices For Summer Email Design

Summer spells fun. We all love summer, whether it is getting a suntan, spending quality family time, or just plain barbecuing. But what online marketers know (of summer) is that it is a time to exploit email marketing with prudent summer email design.

Both offline and online, summer is when mid-season sales spike. Travel agencies, clothes retailers, and several other businesses are in the money at this time of year.

On the flip side, summer is a lazy time. People read emails infrequently. Some businesses stagnate. Yet, with summer email marketing, you can turn disadvantages into advantages.

People are more likely to loosen their purse strings in summer. By its nature, summer is a great time to strengthen business relationships. Also, there are golden sales opportunities to be found if you are prepared to look.

This article is meant to be a short guide to summer email design and summer email marketing. Follow the best practices, tips, and tricks. Also, check out real-life examples of superb summer email design.

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Perennial Summer Email Design Themes

Summer has few holidays that are far between as well. But here are some perennial summer email design themes:

● Mystery sale

● Flash sale

● Birthday discount

● Semi-annual sale

● Because it’s Friday

● Office-style sale

● Summer is coming

● Summer is ending

● Teasers

● End-of-school

● Start-of-school

● New arrivals

● Festivals

Summer Email Design Subject Line Checklist

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There are five reasons a great subject line is essential to great summer email marketing.

1. It builds reputation
2. It sets you apart
3. It sets the tone for the conversation
4. It creates the first impression
5. It decides your open-rate

To ensure your subject lines are contributing to your marketing, follow this checklist:

● Outline the summer email marketing theme at the outset

● Use catchy, memorable language

● Use language that is in the theme of the season

● Communicate the offer and benefit clearly

● Use emojis effectively

● Personalize the email

● Use your brand name

● Make the email seem exclusive

● Specify your discount

● Offer shopping incentives

● Make time-bound offers specific

● Use humor

● Make it short and sweet

● Use the preheader well

● Make use of psychological tricks – like color psychology

Here are a few great examples of subject lines for your summer email design:

● Hot Summer, Hot Offers

● The Heat Is On: 40% Off

● Unmissable Summer Offers

● Midsummer Magic Savings: 30% Discount

● Hot Promos To Celebrate Graduation

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6 Best Practices For Summer Email Design

For great email marketing campaigns, you need to be on the same page as your customer. This applies to summer email marketing as well. Level with your customer to succeed. Customers are in a holiday mood in the summer. Communicate with them with this detail in mind. Follow these summer email marketing best practices to turn summer into cash season:

1. Personalize your summer email design

Your summer email marketing should tug at the customer’s heartstrings. You can do this by personalizing the email. This has been one of the email design principles since the early days of online marketing.

In the content, use personalized tags. Speak to the recipient using their first name. Use segmentation, behavior statistics, and personal data to craft a truly valuable email.

2. Exploit themes in your summer email design

Tying sales to holidays is a great idea; think Christmas or Valentine’s Day. But summer has few holidays. We then need to exploit other themes tied with summer. Tie your promos to the outdoorsy summers. Help the readers make the most of the summer with various guides on themes such as:

● Staying hydrated

● Family time

● Barbecuing with friends

● Grilling with family

● Sunburn protection

● Staying away from mosquitoes

● Road trips

● Summer holiday destinations

● Lawn and garden maintenance

Think out-of-the-box. Run a contest or giveaway with tickets to theme parks or attractions. Give away beach items with your brand name. Focus on college graduates and those who will be back to school soon. Help them make the most of their free time. Focus on sales for their next college season.

Explore the summer wedding theme. Center your promotions around dresses, gifts, flowers, music, shows, and outdoor activities.

3. Be ready for on-the-go shopping

Summer is the holiday season. Your customers aren’t likely to be behind a desk. They won’t distract themselves with huge monitors. Expect them, however, to be engaged with mobile phones and tablets. You need to communicate with small screens in mind. Your newsletter should be friendly to users with smaller screen sizes.

Here’s a summer email design checklist for on the go shopping:

● Use a responsive structure with one column

● Use bigger fonts

● The most important information should be at the top

● Use big CTAs

● Easily navigable graphics

4. Each email should focus on one offer

People don’t want to exercise their minds during the vacation season. Make it easy for them; give one offer per email. Another essential part of summer email design is using just one CTA per email.

5. Build relationships with subscribers

Use new and novel ideas to build relationships with subscribers. Use blogs and online venues to advise and discuss. Initiate reward programs. There are multiple things you can do to build subscriber relationships. Summer email marketing should focus on building relationships rather than hard selling. Make the customer feel unique and cared for.

6. Summer email design: General checklist and recommendations

Follow these recommendations for an effective summer email marketing campaign:

● Do split testing to define and focus on strategies

● Focus on accessibility and summer email design structure

● Check for mistakes

● Verify the email before hitting send

● Send at the best time

● Be on top of technicalities

● Monitor statistics

● Make emails interactive and responsive

● Segment

● Clean lists regularly

Summer Email Design Elements

So you want to create a great summer email design? Want to indulge in great summer marketing? How do you do it? The answer is simple: Get the most out of your content, colors, typography, visuals, and animated GIFs.

1. Content

Like the subject line, the emailer content should also define summer moods. Summer is a time to be casual, so make it all friendly and fun. Keep up with the relaxed summer vibe.

2. Colors

Summer is about bright and bold colors. Make your summer email design about bright, bold coloring. Use orange, yellow, sea-blue, and sea-green. Indulge in shots of bright color or a color riot. Apply dazzling gradients with touches of neon. Splashes of color can complement your text well. Make the summer email design reflect the summer heat.

3. Typography

Make the typography casual, laid-back, and fun. Use playful, fancy typefaces. But don’t take it too far. Typography should always focus on readability. Don’t make it too ornamental or too relaxed. Readability and consistency in typefaces are of paramount importance.

4. Visuals

The imagery and patterns within the summer email design should be in keeping with the season. Pictures of popsicles, seashores, watermelons, palm leaves, flamingos, and pineapples are common in the summer. Patterns that align with summer themes like safaris and savannas are also workable.

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5. Animated GIFs

Animated GIFs are useful for engagement and driving attention. They also cheer up the audience and infuse dynamism. Summer is the time for the great outdoors, parties, and festivals. Therefore, animated GIFs help uplift the mood and keep in tune with the season.

5 Things To Watch Out For in Summer Email Design

1. Write concisely

It is important to keep it short and simple. You need to communicate the value proposition in as few words as possible. Add a tagline and CTA and make it one integrated unified whole. Let the customer know quickly what you are proposing.

2. Make the USP stand out

Let the customer know what your USP is. Are you offering a great price? Is your product of better quality than others? Does your product have features that are not available in the market? Highlight the USP in a prominent font or bold, possibly with unique colors.

3. Pertinent product uses

Highlight the product uses concerning the summer. Is your product a soothing chocolate smoothie? Is it a bright t-shirt that will stand out on a sunny beach? Is your product just a suave new pair of shades? Whatever your product, display it in the context of the sunny summer. This is a great way of summer email marketing.

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4. Showcase the summer mood

Cash in on the summer mood. Keeping your product email in sync with the summer mood is superb to create a great summer email design.

5. Begin your email with relevant and eye-catching information

Whatever your email communicates, begin it with an arresting component. It should compel the reader to read further. Also, it should instantly communicate what the email is about. How does your product help the customer this summer? This should be how you begin your summer email design.

5 Summer Email Design Newsletter Examples

These five summer email design examples look at relevant successful summer email marketing examples. Let’s begin.

Summer Email Design #1: 8fit

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This email is inspired by that all-pervasive summer fruit, the watermelon. The bright yellow background reminds one of the summer sunshine. It makes the newsletter warm and bright, like the summer. The bicycle on watermelon wheels is catchy. It conveys a subtle message.

This is a superb example of best practices being put into play by a summer email design. They have stuck to one offer in this email. It is also a very skillful use of typography. They also create a sense of urgency in the call-to-action.

Summer email design #2: Urban Outfitters

Urban Outfitters focuses on the hugely popular theme: summer steals. Pretty models present their summer offering beautifully. The email looks stylish, friendly, and cheerful. The coloring is soft and muted. This keeps the visuals and content in focus while remaining in the summer mood.

The font makes the newsletter feel inviting, playful and welcoming. The discounts are merged with the rest of the pitch to make them feel non-salesy.

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Summer email design #3: ASOS

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ASOS embraces the coming of summer with its tagline SUMMER IS COMING. They use emojis to picture a dream summer. This makes the reader open the email immediately. ASOS wants readers to get rid of negative preconceptions of the summer. Summer is just a mindset, and you can easily enter it with their clothes and accessories. They feature some great summer accessories and good reasons for checking them out. This is a great summer email marketing campaign that moves with water flow while selling its wares.

Summer email design #4: Prose

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It may be that your product isn’t connected with the summer, like Prose. Then, the solution is simple: invent a connection. The subject line is intriguing: “Summer means two things.” With curiosity aroused, when readers open the email to find what summer means, the answer is – dry shampoo and leave-in conditioner.

Prose follows the simple summer theme, with words such as “take it easier,” “absolute breeze,” and “simplify.” It then connects the use of Prose’s products with this relaxed summer theme. They conclude the email with an expert opinion as social proof.

Summer email design #5: Nike

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Nike does a great job of summer email marketing. This email arrives right around summer. The email goes straight to the point with minimal copy and a simple design. The emails prioritize the men’s section based on the joining demographic. You also have options for family shopping. The sand-like background reminds you of the beach.

Everyone loves the summers. But the season can leave newbie marketers in a fix. Often people aren’t in the mood to check inboxes and respond to pitches. If you don’t capitalize on the season’s mood, you may be left with deteriorating statistics and low engagement.

Don’t lose hope. Turn the tables. Unbox your creativity. Follow the tips and tricks mentioned in the write-up. Take inspiration from successful examples. You may find a new area of success where there was only frustration before.

Summer email design can be fun and rewarding if you apply these six best design practices to your summer email marketing.

Key Takeaways

● Summer email design needs to be done with the season in mind. The colors, fonts, visuals, and other design elements need to be in sync with the season’s mood.

● Summer email design keeps all the traditional design elements of email while incorporating the mood of the summer-like beaches.

● Summer email marketing has an advantage – people are willing to spend. It also has some disadvantages – people check emails less often. You need to play to your marketing strengths in sync with the season.

● Like all email marketing, summer email design follows the KISS principle – Keep It Simple, Stupid.

● When creating a summer email design, focus on one CTA per email.

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