Best Summer Email Marketing Campaigns for E-commerce Businesses
Memorial Day 2024 2025 is now in our rearview mirrors, which means the summer season is soon kicking off.
Summertime presents a unique opportunity for e-commerce businesses like yours. You can draw upon the heart and soul of this popular season to play to the sensibilities of your audience. Achieve this through a winning email campaign.
A summertime email campaign reminds the audience that you’re there for them. It also plays on their pain points to generate interest through the excitement of the warmest time of year.
An effective campaign uses written copy, imagery, and video. You must plan everything from your color scheme to your video email signature. But where should you start? Summer is such a broad concept. How will you know what themes you should choose?
This article offers several practical ideas for a summertime marketing campaign. The tips below can position you to make a serious splash in the e-commerce world between now and the first day of school.
Pull From Experience
Have you run a summertime email campaign before? If so, there’s a lot you can learn by examining your data.
That’s even true if your previous campaign failed.
Examine your approach, reach, and the results you generated. What kind of content were you using? How effective was it when you embedded video content into your email campaign? Did people click through to your website? Did you see a spike in purchases?
If your last summertime email campaign didn’t work, you have a clear idea of what you shouldn’t do this time.
Learn from your past mistakes and adapt based on everything you’ve learned about your target audience over the last 12 months. Audit the content from that previous campaign. Was there anything particularly effective? Could you update or repurpose that content for the present? Incorporating professional event photography can also add a visually engaging element to your emails, potentially increasing click-through rates and engagement.
Closely monitor the results throughout this year’s campaign. Don’t wait until the end of the season to decide whether this was a passing or failing grade. If you’re tracking progress, you can make quick data-driven decisions to change things up and save the campaign.
Pick Summer Colors
The emails you design for a summertime promotion should immediately set the mood. That starts with the color scheme and imagery you use to set the scene.
Typically, summertime emails use different shades of blue and yellow to create thoughts of clear skies and sunshine. The blue can even bring thoughts of pools or the ocean. When paired with tan and green, you could even create thoughts of a tropical island paradise.
I don’t know about you, but that imagery helps me let my guard down in the summer. Of course, with both Memorial Day and Independence Day in the summer, you can’t go wrong with red, white, and blue.
Just steer clear of harsh colors that people associate with other seasons. For example, red and orange with some yellow can evoke thoughts of fall and Thanksgiving. White mixed with red and green can make people think of the festive season. These aren’t the ideas you should be trying to evoke.
Within the video content embedded in your emails, lean into summer imagery and colors. You’ll paint the proper picture that plays right into all the summertime fun.
Theme Common Campaigns to the Season
Your summer email marketing campaign doesn’t have to create some brand-new offer or exciting promotion. You can inject summer fun into your regular content with a few tweaks.
One particularly effective strategy for increasing revenue at any time of year is through abandoned cart campaigns. This issue is particularly relevant given that the e-commerce market revenue is expected to reach $1.34tn in 2025 (Statista).
Craft engaging and personalized abandoned cart emails with a summer touch. E-commerce businesses can recover lost sales throughout the season and drive revenue growth through this tactic.
Include a summery theme and imagery in your outreach template for automated abandoned cart messaging. Encourage your shoppers to get off their lounge chairs or beach hammocks to complete a purchase that’ll enrich their lives. Record a video showing someone doing that to add that personal touch.
Alongside a summer email marketing campaign, incorporate a special summer campaign into your social media strategy. Refine your theme of your social media channels to get more email subscribers. Simultaneously, use your summer email marketing to push people toward your social media presence.
It’s important to include your social media in email campaigns so users can easily click through to those pages and start following you. You should have an email marketing automation platform to support these campaigns. A tool to schedule Instagram posts and generate content on other social platforms can also be useful.
Keep your summer theme consistent through your email and social media to create a seamless experience for new customers.
Lean Into Holidays
The summer season is home to several holidays. You can run special promotions centered around them. It’s common to see e-commerce summer sales pop up around major events like this.
Some consumers might even put off a purchase until they see the next big holiday promotion.
Memorial Day
You can start gearing up for May. Memorial Day weekend is the official start of the summer season. It can be a great time to run a large-scale promotion that captures your audience’s attention.
For your emails and videos, you can lean into the more somber military elements of the day. To honor those who lost their lives during wartime, you can offer special promotions for veterans.
Alternatively, you could embrace the summer kickoff season with a campaign promoting a summery atmosphere at the beach.
Father’s Day
Father’s Day is also the perfect time for your e-commerce business to run campaigns, as you can place some items on sale.
Take the example of StudioSuits, a men’s clothing brand. During Father’s Day, they intelligently promoted their green suit collection to their subscribers via email marketing. They also shared a Father’s Day special coupon for an additional 6% discount for their subscribers to improve their conversion rate.
Communicate these Father’s Day promotions with an email blast and a well-edited video. Go through everything your audience would need to know about using your services to bring a smile to their dads’ faces.
Canada Day
Canada Day is July 1 — three days before Independence Day in the U.S. Email your Canadian customers with messages decked out in red, white, and maple leaves. Offer special promotions to celebrate the US’s neighbor to the north, and you could start taking in looneys and toonies (that’s Canadian money).
Fourth of July
Independence Day is another holiday in the U.S. While most people are out of office and celebrating with their family and friends, they might still be looking for sale promotions for their next purchase.
But, don’t just focus on promotions. Your email marketing campaign plays an important role too. Make sure your email design includes the colors red, white, and blue, and a firework animation. This makes your promotion stand out and connect more with your target audience.
DIY Summer
Regarding summer email marketing campaigns, e-commerce businesses have many opportunities to engage audiences and drive sales. That’s true even in non-creative industries.
Take, Penn Tool Co as an example. This company specializes in power tools, including lathes, power saws, and versatile home milling machines.
Penn Tool Co. – The Best Metalworking Tools And Industrial Supplies. Since 1968.
Penn Tool Co. created an email marketing campaign centered around “DIY summer projects.” This included porch renovations, building a treehouse for the kids, and revamping a vacation rental.
Step-by-step guides and video tutorials showcase each of these possibilities. Each focused on “how to use each tool to do X, Y, and Z.”
As a result, the company inspired and empowered its audience to take on these projects. It also improved the conversion rate on summer deals by 12% from email subscribers alone.
DIY summer is a popular concept. Many see summer vacation as a time to get some large home improvement projects underway. That could be painting the house, re-tiling the bathroom, or even something as intensive as installing a deck in your backyard.
The DIY summer motif used here is an inspired touch. These emails promote an educational message, but they’re also advertising the tools customers are learning about.
Summertime Style
As summer approaches, e-commerce brands specializing in fashion retail must prepare for the season by focusing on summer email campaigns that resonate with their target audiences.
But summertime style goes beyond fashion. It can extend toward anything that helps a person look good. That could include weight loss or diet pill e-commerce companies. It could even be companies that sell products like tanning oil or medication that stops hair loss.
One exemplary brand that understands the power of season-oriented content is Hims & Hers. It has successfully helped readers and customers make informed decisions regarding purchasing products and addressing concerns like hair loss in summer.
It does this by highlighting the benefits of solutions like finasteride for women. Implementing this strategy in email marketing can be a game-changer. When something like hair loss becomes relevant in summer, potential customers will be thankful for your emails. That’s especially true if you address the pain point of looking your best on the beach this summer.
Through emails featuring embedded video lead generation content, you can show prospective customers how to solve their problems and look great in the process.
Run a Back-To-School Promotion Toward the End of Summer
Eventually, summer comes to an end. But you can still squeeze out one more e-commerce email promotion before it’s over.
It’s the perfect time when parents start preparing and buying school supplies for their children, which is why your business may benefit from an email marketing campaign at this time. The demand is high, as families may have a lot of school expenses, so finding out about new promotions could be a “life-saver” for them.
So, if you have an online store selling student supplies – don’t wait any longer. Start planning your email campaign now.
Leverage Your Email Campaign Insights
Don’t get caught up in the sunshine and rainbows of your summertime sale.
You still have a lot of legwork to do on the backend.
By analyzing your customers’ behaviors, preferences, and feedback, you can create more relevant and engaging emails that increase conversions and loyalty.
For example, you can use augmented analytics tools to generate natural language insights from your data and discover hidden growth opportunities. Augmented analytics can help you optimize your email campaigns based on timing, frequency, segmentation, content, and call-to-action factors.
In other words, just because you’re creating a fun and engaging summertime campaign doesn’t mean you can forget about data analysis and follow-up. Returning to our first step, the insights you gain from this campaign will help you saddle up even faster for next summer.
Final Words
The summertime season can be an excellent opportunity to run quality, themed email marketing promotions powered by video content. Summer is fun, relaxing, and a time when people are constantly on the go.
But that doesn’t mean they’re going to stop shopping. Your e-commerce brand can make some serious profit over the summer months if you strategically approach a themed email marketing campaign. Just keep the eight tips listed above in mind, and you’ll create a memorable experience for your customers that’ll keep them coming back for more.
Author bio:
Nikola Pantic is a Partnerships Manager at uSERP, connecting with partners and nurturing those partnerships through mutual collaboration, and a seasonal writer helping shape various industries through the written word.
