How to Expand Sales with a Burns Night Newsletter

Burns Night means offers a lot of great opportunities. You can eat haggis, drink loads of whisky, and dance. If you are a marketer, you know that there are great sales opportunities to be realized. Whether you sell Scottish delicacies, host a traditional Burns Night supper or organize any Burns-related celebration, this article will come explain you how to grow your sales with a Burns Night newsletter.

According to Scotland Food and Drink, traditional Scots products are up by 24% as shoppers opt for Scottish themed favourites for Burns Night. What is even more interesting is that the UK exported £4.85 million of haggis over in 2010-2014. The savoury pudding saw a 51% sales rise between 211-2013.

Why to create a Burns Night newsletter

Email marketing comes will handy before the Burns Night kicks in.

Great value for money

A Google ad will probably cost you up to a few pounds per click, which is a lot compared to pennies you need for email marketing. Newsletters dispatch is very affordable.

Huge reach

If you’re focusing your campaign efforts on social media only, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity that email marketing offers.
Not everyone is active on social media or has a social media account at all. However, there are hardly any people with no email accounts. To put things into perspective, there are 3.42 billion Internet users currently. 1.79 billion has a Facebook account, which pales in significance compared to 4.35 email accounts. What a better way to invite people to celebrate the Scottish poet than sending an email to your contact base?

Hard to beat ROI

Email marketing generates a 3800% ROI.
It’s the best channel as far as ROI is concerned, probably because a good newsletter provider offer more personalization options than other marketing channels. Thanks to personalization options, you can create one newsletter draft… that would convert into two emails. Imagine that you’d like to create a different email to your female and male subscribers. The text remains the same for the two groups, however you define inside the draft that the image block will exhibit Scottish delicacies for women, while a newsletter designed for males will display whisky and kilt images in the same place.

How to create a Burns Night newsletter

1. Create campaign goals

When launching Burns Night email marketing campaign, these are the questions you need to have answers to.

• Who is your audience?
• What actions do you want your subscribers to take?
• What’s in it for your subscribers?
• How will you measure campaign success?
• How can you utilize current trends to your advantage?

2. Be responsive

According to a 2016 Litmus Email Analytics study, only 19% of all email is opened on desktop, while 55% on mobile. That means that you need to be where your customers are and make sure your newsletter is perfectly readable. Responsive design ensures that your email campaign displays perfectly on every single mobile device.

Please note that responsive design isn’t synonymous with a mobile-friendly design. The latter won’t display your newsletter perfectly, as mobile-friendly emails won’t adjust fonts or layouts. That means that a reading experience won’t be great. You don’t want your reader to send your newsletter to the bin just because you didn’t optimize it for mobile devices.

3. Add a compelling subject line

You probably won’t be the only sending an email campaign to your contacts base. The problems is that people get too many campaign offers (not mentioning other emails), which might render your newsletter invisible. However, that won’t happen if you go for an unusual subject line.

With the rise of emoji in social media, you can safely place an emoji or two in the subject line. After all, a Burns Night newsletter should call for celebration. Just make sure that the emoji you pick matches is relevant and matches your newsletter theme.

Check out this blog post to find emoji-related inspiration. 10 most popular emojis on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in 2016.

4. Create a successful call to action

You will send out newsletters because you’d like your subscriber to take a certain action (e.g. make a purchase or register somewhere). Therefore, you want to make sure that you insert a very specific call to action (CTA) that will incentivize your subscriber to click on it.

When crafting a call to action, you should use an active language, for example “Buy Scottish products here” or “Get 30% on Haggis today”. It’s best to include a certain timeframe in the CTA so that your potential customer feels pressured to click right now.

5. Run a multivariate A/B test

Multivariate A/B testing is a great feature that can help you skyrocket your email open rates. Thanks to it, you can test up to three subject lines (plus the newsletter content and the from name). Once you send an A/B email to a percentage of your customers, the newsletter software will analyze campaigns performance. Then, it will automatically send the best variant (with the best open rate, that is) to the rest of your email list. You can learn more about multivariate A/B testing here.

6. Send out abandoned email carts

Some subscribers might want to make a purchase right away. They might start adding products to their basket… and then close the laptop, without making a purchase. You should reach out to those customers with a gentle reminder. They probably had to deal with something important straight away and then wanted to complete the purchase, but they simply forgot about it. Send out abandoned cart emails to remind them about abandoned items. Here you can learn more about automated newsletters.

7. Add recommended products

People love if you help them save time. Therefore, you should make sure to insert a compelling product picture as well as accurate description. While you might think that your product is only one click away, it’s better to increase your chances by having your products neatly described. However, it’s a time-consuming task. Therefore, you should go for 1 click product transfer to transfer all product information in one click, without the need to reformat anything.

We wish you a successful email marketing campaign with Burns Night newsletters!