Whether you’re looking for some inspiration or just wanting to check out what the competition is doing, we’ve put together this list of Shopify jewelry stores to inspire your own. 

And it’s not just these Shopify jewlery stores are impressive for their store layout or offerings, but the stories behind how the founders started selling jewelry online is also equally inspiring.

Many store owners started where you likely are now: with a passion to have their own store to sell jewelry and looking to take their side hustle to the next step. 

So let’s check out, in no particular order, their Shopify jewelry stores and the stories behind them.

Vivian Frank – A hobby that became a full-fledged Shopify jewelry store

Vivan Frank was founded by Simona, who previously worked as a production manager for feature films in the film industry.

All that changed however after the birth of her first son, Frank, when she decided to stay at home to raise her son. 

Originally Simona’s ventures in jewelry making started as a hobby where she would design and make pieces for herself. When her friends started admiring her work, she started creating jewelry pieces for them as well.

It wasn’t long before she started selling her jewelry to customers and launched her highly successful online jewelry store. 

Today, Vivien Frank’s jewelry is sold globally and has been garnering atention from magazines such as Annabelle, Vogue UK, and Glamour.

Check out Vivian Frank’s Shopify store here.

Pura Vida Bracelets – A dedicated Shopify jewelry store for bracelets

Pura Vida (Spanish for ‘pure life’) Bracelets is a California-based jewelry business that sells hand-crafted bracelets and jewelry through their online store. They also have offline stores in the form of boutique stores that sell directly to customers.

The inspiration for the online store came when the co-founders Griffin Thall and Paul Goodman met two artisans during a trip to Costa Rica to celebrate their graduation. 

They were so impressed with how the bracelets captured the beauty of Costa Rica that they teamed up with the artisans and started selling them back home. 

Today Pura Vida is a popular Shopify jewelry store that helps over 800 artisans in Costa Rica earn money from their work by selling millions of bracelets every year and is the 40th largest Shopify store in the world. And it’s no longer just bracelets, but also rings, necklaces, and charms among many other accessories. 

Check out Pura Vida Bracelets’ Shopify jewelry store here.

Vincero Watches – An online store primarily for high-quality watches

The story of Vincero Watches started when the three co-founders moved to China to start designing and manufacturing their own products back in 2010. 

What they noticed was an overabundance of watches being mass-produced with as many corners cut as possible to keep costs low. So they set out to create their own watches with their own supply chain to ensure superior quality at every step of the production process.

The end result is the community they’ve built up around their brand who value quality and refuse to wear jewelry made with shortcuts taken. 

And it’s not just watches they sell through their Shopify jewelry store either. The Vincero brand has expanded its jewelry line to include bracelets, sunglasses, and wallets.

Check out Vincero Watches’ Shopify store here.

Vitaly – A Shopify jewelry story for genderless jewelry

Founded in Toronto in 2011, Vitaly prides itself on being an ‘experimental design movement’ producing genderless pieces of jewelry that “build upon the framework of global cultural directions”. 

Most of their jewelry is made from stainless steel because it does not rust or tarnish and, more importantly for their brand, is highly recyclable.

Although the materials they use may be limited, their jewelry range is extensive. Vitalty offers a diverse selection, including rings, pendants, chains, and bracelets.

Check out Vitaly’s Shopify store here.

Molten Store – A unique online store for sustainable and upcycled jewelry

Based in Brisbane, Australia, Molten Store is a jewelry store with a focus on sustainability and upcycling jewelry. 

In addition to producing high-quality jewelry from reclaimed materials, Molten Store also has a “swap your jewelry” program that lets customers trade in their unwanted jewelry for store credit. 

It’s not just about sustainability, though. Molten Store’s core mission is to ‘connect customers with their dream jewelry,’ and they describe themselves as ‘vintage jewelry history buffs.

Perhaps the best way to describe their Shopify store is as the “antique store for millennials.”

Check out Molten Store’s Shopify store here.

Missoma – A top-visited Shopify jewelry store for creative jewelry

Missoma is one of the most visited Shopify jewelry stores in the world. Naturally, they are quite a bit larger than most of the other Shopify stores on this list. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t strayed from their mission or are any less inspiring. 

Founded by Marisa Hordern, Missoma’s mission is to inspire confidence, spark creativity, and fuel collaboration. 

Because of their size, they also have an extensive collection of different types of jewelry and have fantastic product reviews.

Check out Missoma’s Shopify store here.

YCL Jewels – One among the top successful shopify jewelry stores for limited edition jewelry

YCL Jewels was founded by Fabienne, a self-taught artisan jewelry maker and designer who started her business after quitting her job as a nurse.

Although YCL has grown since Fabienne started it in 2013, all of its pieces are still handmade, and most are still designed in-house.

YCL also emphasizes limited edition jewelry, ensuring that once a collection is sold, it is never produced again.

Check out YCL Jewels’ Shopify store here.

King Ice – One of the top Shopify jewelry stores for hip-hop accessories

King Ice is a bit different from other Shopify jewelry stores on this list in that instead of producing feminine pieces of jewelry, they offer high-quality hip-hop jewelry inspired by urban culture. 

Founded in Los Angeles in 2007, King Ice’s specialization in streetwear culture and aim to bridge the gap between artist, culture, and people has led them to become an internationally recognized brand. 

They have also collaborated with plenty of big-name brands including Warner Bros. Viacom, 20th Century Fox, Death Row Records, and Snoop Dogg to supply jewelry in films and music videos. 

Check out King Ice’s Shopify store here.

By Charlotte – A dedicated Shopify jewelry store for spiritual jewelry

By Charlotte was founded in 2012 by Charlotte Blakeney, inspired by her love for ‘semi-precious gemstones, crystals, symbols, and their deeper meanings.

Today, By Charlotte still aims to instill every piece of jewelry they make with “deeper meanings of spirituality and enlightenment” to “inspire and empower the wearer”. 

In addition to their online Shopify store, they also sell jewelry in their flagship boutique store. 

Check out By Charlotte’s Shopify store here.

Gwen Delicious – An online store that sells jewelry for everyone

Gwen Delicious’ story started when its founder, Bonnie Doyle, used to watch her father design and create jewelry in his own workshop. 

Bonnie didn’t immediately follow in her father’s footsteps, however. Originally she had a day job and it wasn’t until she became a stay-at-home mother after health complications with her second child that she started Gwen Delicious. 

What started off as a creative outlet to deal with life’s challenges is now a full-time business and Bonnie’s husband has even quit his job to help the business grow as well. 

In terms of the jewelry, the store sells s a wide range of fine jewelry including necklaces, wedding rings, earrings, and cufflinks. 

Check out Gwen Delicious’ Shopify jewelry store here.

It’s a wrap on some of the most successful Shopify jewelry stores

So there you have it, our top picks for the best Shopify jewelry stores in 2021. 

Hopefully, you’re now excited to start selling jewelry online, or if you’ve already begun, to make improvements to your Shopify store to make it as inspiring as the examples we’ve discussed.

When you get your store up and running, be sure to check out our email marketing for jewelry stores guide to ensure your store is as successful as it can be.

If you know of any other great jewelry stores on Shopify, feel free to mention them in the comments below! 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about Shopify jewelry stores

The post The 10 Most Inspiring Shopify Jewelry Stores in 2024 appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

Whether you’re looking for some inspiration or just wanting to check out what the competition is doing, we’ve put together this list of Shopify hardware stores to inspire your own. 

And it’s not just the online stores that are impressive, but also the stories behind how the founders started selling online.

Many of them also started where you likely are now: either with a passion for good quality hardware and looking to start a side hustle or take an already existing bricks-and-mortar hardware online for the first time. 

So let’s check out, in no particular order, their Shopify hardware stores and the stories behind them.

The top hardware stores on Shopify

Life and Home

Life and Home is a small, family-owned and operated startup based in Brooklyn. 

Their mission is to offer a range of efficient and reliable products for your home and garden through an easy and seamless online shopping experience. 

The result is one of the best examples of a hardware-style Shopify store we’ve come across. 

It’s got everything people looking to take on a DIY project or some home improvements could want. 

Visiting their online store, you’ll also notice a smooth experience finding products thanks to their well-organized mega menu in their top navigation bar. 

Because hardware stores typically offer a much more extensive range of products than other types of stores, letting your customers browse easily and quickly locate what they’re looking for is a vital part of your Shopify store design. 

Visit Life and Home’s Shopify store here.

Schoolhouse

Schoolhouse was founded in the Pacific Northwest by Brian Faherty in 2003. 

Today, Schoolhouse operates out of a 109-year-old brick factory in Portland, Oregon where they continue their mission of building on the rich heritage of classic American designs to “reimagine the familiar.” 

This has generated plenty of high-quality, handcrafted pieces that communicate sophistication and elegance. 

Unlike other Shopify hardware stores, Schoolhouse is definitely at the upper end of the market which is reflected by their online store. 

Visit Schoolhouse’s Shopify store here.

Semihandmade

Heading from the top of the hardware market back toward the middle is Semihandmade. 

Semihandmade has its origins in a simple question founder John McDonald asked: Could we make doors for Ikea cabinets?

From that question back in 2009, Semihandmade launched in 2011 with a system of handmade add-ons to complement Ikea furniture so that customers could further customize their homes. 

Today Semihandmade is not just one of the best hardware style Shopify stores you’ll come across, but has also been named one of America’s 500 fastest-growing private companies. 

Knowing that they cannot compete with Ikea’s prices or the scale of larger retailers like 

Amazon, Semihandmade focuses their efforts on product quality, uniqueness and customer service. 

Visit Semihandmade’s Shopify store here. 

Nest Studio

Nest Studio is another hardware/furniture retailer similar to Schoolhouse in that they focus on creating high-quality, designer products. 

Founder Jessica Davis launched the business in 2012 after she struggled to find suitable knobs and pulls for her interior design projects which inspired her to tailor-make her own pieces.

The pieces Nest Studio now produces draws on Davis’ extensive experiences from her Chinese and European heritage to growing up in Australia to now living in the United States. 

The resulting Shopify store is well worth checking out. 

Visit Nest Studio’s Shopify store here. 

Casson

Casson is another Shopify hardware store with an interesting back story. 

It started off when founders Megan Cassidy and Jane Son met on their first day of Architecture school back in 1996 at the University of Toronto. 

Their passion for bringing beautiful hardware into the modern environment led them to start Casson in 2017. 

With over 30 years of combined experience in the industry, their hardware store is definitely worth checking out. 

Visit Casson’s Shopify store here.

Over to you

So there are our top picks for the best Shopify hardware stores. 

Hopefully, you’re now fired up and eager to start selling your own hardware and furniture online, or if you’ve already started selling online through Shopify, to make improvements to your store. 

When you get your store up and running, be sure to check out our email marketing for hardware stores guide to ensure your store is as successful as it can be.

If you know of any other great hardware style Shopify stores, feel free to mention them in the comments below! 

The post The Top 5 Shopify Hardware Stores to Inspire Your Own appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

And it’s not just collecting email addresses that they’re great at either. Popups are also useful when it comes to advertising offers, coupon codes, and reducing cart abandonment. 

But if you’ve ever run a popup on your store, you’ll know that the challenge isn’t setting them up, but getting customers to engage with them. 

So, to help you with designing popups that convert, we’ve put together this collection of 10 great examples from some of the top jewelry brands to inspire your own.

Examples of effective Jewelry popups 

1) Missoma’s general popup

Missoma’s popup certainly lives up to the site’s reputation as one of the top online jewelry stores. 

While it may not have any particular stand-out feature or design, it’s a good example of a general jewelry popup that does the job of collecting email addresses well. 

The background image adds a nice touch to the overall design and the heading and body copy is original enough not to be boring. 

The 10% offer one’s first order is also enticing and will help improve the overall conversion rate of the popup.

That said, this offer could be more visible and attention-grabbing. 

With the popup’s current design, customers will only learn about the offer if they bother to read the body text. And as people tend to dismiss popups quickly, you’ll want to make sure whatever incentive you use is immediately obvious. 

2) Example of a simple, typical design

Sometimes the most effective popups are not the ones with elaborate designs but basic ones that get the fundamentals right. 

While the opt-in incentive in this example isn’t as enticing, at least it’s more obvious and not hidden. There’s also a short description of what people can expect by signing up as well as a link to their privacy policy. 

This goes to show you can quickly and easily create an effective popup without having to agonize over its design too much. 

3) YCL Jewels

Another example of a simple and well-designed popup, this example from YCL Jewels also asks for customers’ names. 

Collecting this information will let them personalize their email campaigns later on which will help boost their effectiveness. 

While adding more question fields to your popup can harm its effectiveness, you can get away with just asking for someone’s email address and name. If you want to be really safe, you can also make the name field optional.

4) Highlighting the opt-in incentive

Some of the popups of the list so far, while well-designed, haven’t the best job of highlighting their opt-in incentive. 

Not this example from Baublebar however. This one quite literally highlights the offer with a highlighter effect and bolded text. 

This makes it the first thing people’s attention is naturally drawn to which helps massively with improving the conversion rate. 

While the rest of the popup design may not be particularly inspiring, this is a good example of one that gets hierarchy right. 

5) Kate Spade Saturday

Talk about an attention-grabbing popup design. 

This example from Kate Spade Saturday probably has the most stand-out design on the list thanks to its bold color choice. 

The copy “OH, HEY!” also does a good job of attracting attention. All of this makes it impossible to miss this popup.

The opt-in incentive is then also bolded in the body talk to help it stand out and entice people to sign up to their email list.

6) Popup offering relevant content

What this popup lacks in the design department, it more than makes up for in its relevancy. 

Being triggered on engagement right product pages only, the offer of a free guide on choosing the right ring is likely to resonate with a fair percentage of people who see it. 

It also goes to show that you don’t need to just offer a monetary incentive like 10% or $20 off to grow your email list. 

Often a well-placed and relevant guide like this will perform just as well, if not better, and save you plenty of margin.  

7) Exit intent popup

Unlike the other examples on this list, this exit-intent popup doesn’t aim to collect email addresses. 

Instead its goal is simply to reduce browse abandonment by being triggered when someone goes to close the page or visit another site. 

By redirecting people to their bestsellers, customers who would’ve otherwise have left their site are hopefully shown something that will interest them, giving the jewelry store another chance to make a sale. 

8) Gamified spin-to-win popup

Gamified popups have grown massively in popularity over the past few years.

The interactive element and prospect of winning a prize makes them more enticing which is why they can achieve a conversion rate up to twice that of regular popups.

The other thing to notice about this design is that instead of just being a window in the middle of the screen, it takes up the entire left half of the screen. 

While this ensures that shoppers must interact with it (even if just to dismiss it), you should be conscious of the impact it has on your customer experience if you decide to go with something similar. 

 9) Non-intrusive side popup

If your main concern is not interrupting your customers’ shopping experience, then you might want to consider a non-intrusive side popup such as the one Vivien Frank has on their store. 

Going for a smaller design and having it display only in a corner as opposed to right in the middle of the screen helps ensure you don’t annoy people browsing your site. 

The tradeoff, however, is the smaller and less intrusive you make your design, the fewer people may end up subscribing to your email list. 

10) Popup asking for customers’ birthdays

By Charlotte also has a side popup that’s a bit more attention-grabbing with its contrasting color and image at the top. 

This helps it strike a good balance between being noticeable and not needlessly interrupting the shopper’s experience. 

The other thing this popup does that others on this list don’t is ask for customers’ birthdays. 

This is so that they can send their customers birthday email campaigns later on. 

So that this question doesn’t negatively affect their conversion rate, they’ve made it optional and also explained why they’re asking for it. Two things you should do too if you also want to ask for customers’ birthdays. 

The rest of your jewelry store

Hopefully now you have plenty of inspiration for your jewelry popups. But why stop there?

We also have a collection of great jewelry stores on Shopify in case you are looking for inspiration for the rest of your online store’s design.

Once you start collecting email addresses with your new popup, we also have a comprehensive guide to email marketing for jewelry stores so you can make the most of your email list. 

And once you start email marketing, you can find jewelry email design inspiration here.

For more tips for your popup, check out our guide on popup design best practices. 

The post 10 Great Examples of Jewelry Store Popups that Convert appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

Not only is email marketing the most effective digital marketing channel, beating out social media and other paid channels, but email lets you communicate directly with your customers. 

That said, for your fashion or clothing store’s email marketing to be effective, you need people to open your emails. 

And the biggest factor influencing your open rate for a particular email campaign is its subject line. So much so that a third of your email list decides whether to open your email or not based entirely on its subject line. 

That’s why we’ve put together this list of 100 subject lines the top fashion brands have used in the past. 

So whether you struggle with writing catchy email subject lines or are just looking for some inspiration, these examples are sure to help you boost your open rate.

The best fashion subject lines

General newsletter examples

These are good, general subject line examples that you could easily adapt for your upcoming fashion or clothing newsletter.

• Wearable memories start with details – Tommy Hilfiger
• What’s up, shorties? – Hollister Co.
• Top Styles of the Week – Forever 21
• We Know What Your Closet Needs – boohoo
• Support sustainability with the new Emporio Armani capsule collection – Emporio Armani
• Going Coastal – Travis Mathew
• MEET CELESTE. OUR WHITE SHIRT CAMPAIGN AMBASSADOR – Witchery
• stylish maternity and postpartum basics – Spearmint Ventures
• Find Your Fave – Vans
• 100s of 5-star reviews can’t be wrong… – Express
• This Shirt? – Ben Sherman
• We’ve Got IV Reasons to be Excited About Tomorrow – Reebok
• Make a choice that makes a difference to our oceans – Adidas
• Relax in Style – Citizens of Humanity
• Hurry! Open for your exclusive treat! – Sheln
• Knits to Love – Bardot
• Join us on safari – Boden
• Let’s Keep This Shorts – Bestseller
• Your favorite shirt has a new secret… – Chico’s
• Work pants packed with lightweight tech.​ – Timberland
• For hanging poolside – United By Blue
• Your First Pair Risk Free – Knix Wear
• We Know Sports Bras – Title Nine
• Pack light and bright – Trunk Club
• Weekend trend: utilitarian edge – Trunk Club
• COLOUR THE WORLD – P.E. Nation

Subject lines with emojis

Adding an emoji to your subject line is a great way to make it stand out in people’s inboxes and get your emails opened. Just like the examples below have done.

• LAST CHANCE to Unlock Your Mystery Offer – Ashley Stewart
• OMG! ? These are the prettiest sandals! ?? From $12.99 – Rainbow Shops
• Want To Win a $500 CK Voucher? ? – Culture Kings
• FINAL DAYS Your Mystery Discount ends soon! – City Beach
• EXTRA 25% OFF*. YES to all of this ? – General Pants
• Say goodbye to 20% Off $65 ? – Forever 21
• ? Fresh Finds – Tillys
• calling all hopeless romantics ? – Red Dress Boutique
• ? Your Weekly Personalized Styles – Zumiez
• A sunny chance for romance – Free People
• ? Make a SPLASH in these! – carter’s
• We Got Your Back ? – Charlotte Russe
• What Offer Will You Get – boohoo
• The footwear edit is here ? – The Iconic
• ? FLORAL DRESSES | Starting At $8 ? – Tobi
• Add these OBEY graphics to ? ASAP – PacSun
• Your *overall* new favorite look ? – Free People

For more emoji tips, check out our guide on using emojis in subject lines here.

Subject lines for fashion sales

When sending an email about your current or upcoming sale, you’ll want to give it a subject line that gets customers to pay attention and even create a sense of urgency.

• Yes! Free gifts with purchase – Nordstrom
• FINAL HOURS for Midnight Madness: Up to 80% off! – Men’s Wearhouse
• SALE: 25% OFF – Rent the Runway
• CLEARANCE SPECIALS: Up to 80% OFF. – Jos. A. Bank Clothiers
• ENDS TOMORROW: Can’t-miss deals from $9.90 – Uniqlo
• Up to 70% off —> Picks for brighter days ahead – Gap
• OUTLET SALE – SAVE UP TO 85% OFF – Zumiez
• That Swimsuit You Wanted Is On Sale! – Bare Necessities
• Mystery Deal Flash Sale! – Talbots
• Save $100 now. Buy more, save more. – Brooks Brothers

Mentioning free shipping

If your fashion sale includes free shipping when you’d usually charge for shipping, then you’ll want to mention it in your subject line as well.

• ATTN: Free Shipping – boohoo
• Free shipping farmhouse finds – Jane
• Those cute dresses you’ve been eyeing? They’re 50% off (and ship free!) – LOFT
• A match made in heaven (+ it ships FREE) – Lou & Grey

For more inspiration and ideas check out our collection of free shipping subject lines here.

Examples for new additions

Launching a new clothing collection for a new season or event is a great opportunity to send a newsletter to your email subscribers. 

• 160 New Styles Added Online – HUGO BOSS
• Bestseller in a new color – Pendleton
• you’ve never seen CHIC like this – Revolve
• Brighten up your look with Pastel Pack – Adidas
• Fabric of the Season: Linen – Banana Republic
• Perfect Outfits For Any Zoom Meeting! – dressbarn
• Chic style for wherever you go – Nike
• And the color of the season is. . . – Todd Snyder
• Peaceful in Pink Ginger – Knix Wear
• Discover Our New Dream Angels Collection – Victoria’s Secret
• The New In You Need To See – boohoo
• Purple, anyone? – Stadium Goods

Subject lines for changing seasons

The beginning of a new season is obviously an important time in the fashion industry as people change the style of clothes they wear. This also makes it another great opportunity to email your customers.  

Winter apparel subject lines

• Fall 2021 Ready-To-Wear Show: From Shanghai, With Love – Dior
• STYLE REMIX. WINTER WRAPS. – Witchery
• The Autumn/Winter 2021 menswear pre-collection – Alexander McQueen
• Our Ultimate Winter Cops – Culture Kings
• Get Ready For Winter – City Beach 
• Winter Is Coming ? – Culture Kings
• Shop Our Winter Warm-Up Collection – Original Penguin
• First look – Women’s Fall/Winter 2021 – Acne Studios
• Now’s the perfect time for that new winter look. – Paul Fredrick
• The 7 items on our winter wishlist – Whistles
• Bring Out Your Winter Wardrobe! – Myntra

Spring subject lines

• Spring comfort made easy. – Orvis
• ACT NOW: 30% OFF Spring Essentials (Plus Everything Else!) – US Polo Assn.
• Superstar gets a spring update ? – Adidas
• Soft and sultry springtime intimates – Free People
• Spring Essential: Our Softest Tees – Banana Republic
• Float into spring in swim ?‍ – ModCloth
• Tell me it’s spring without telling me it’s spring – Lululemon
• Spring’s favorite fabric – Frank & Eileen
• The season’s best duo: a dress and sandals – Nordstrom

Summer subject lines

• Yep, they’ll wear this ALLLL summer long! – carter’s
• Add a splash of color with summer new arrivals – Scotch & Soda
• New Collection | Summer is Calling – Lacoste
• Bright, beautiful Summer Blue – Frank & Eileen
• We’re just as ready for summer as you are… – Free People
• Your summer wardrobe made easy – FRAME
• Summer Awaits No, You’re Not Dreaming… – boohoo
• Are You Geared Up For Summer? – O’Neill
• make your tan lines worth it this summer – Chubbies
• Transitioning To Summer – Rebecca Taylor
• Summer: Incoming – boohoo

The rest of your fashion email campaigns

You should now hopefully have plenty of subject line inspiration for your fashion newsletters and automations. 

For more help with writing subject lines, check out our guide on writing subject lines here which includes tips on aspects like using call to actions, optimal character length, and more.

But there’s obviously more to an email campaign than just its subject line. 

If you’re looking for inspiration for the content of your emails as well, check out our collection of fashion email marketing examples here.

We also have a guide to email marketing for fashion stores that takes you through how to set up a high-converting email marketing strategy you might want to check out too.

The post 100 Fashion Newsletter Subject Lines to Inspire Your Own appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

Not only is email marketing the most effective digital marketing channel, beating out social media and other paid channels, but email lets you communicate directly with your customers. 

That said, for your jewelry store’s email marketing to be effective, you need people to open your emails. 

And the biggest factor influencing your open rate for a particular email campaign is its subject line. So much so that a third of your email list decides whether to open your email or not based entirely on its subject line. 

That’s why we’ve put together this list of 50 subject lines the top jewelry brands have used in the past. 

So whether you struggle with writing catchy email subject lines or are just looking for some inspiration, these examples are sure to help you boost your open rate.

Subject lines examples for jewelry stores

Jewelry email newsletter subject lines

These are good, general subject line examples that you could easily adapt for your upcoming jewelry newsletter.

• Head back to nature with Pandora Moments – Pandora
• The Culture of Design by Cartier – Cartier
• Always dreaming, always innovating – Cartier
• Mix & Layer Your Amulets – David Yurman
• One Ring for You, One for Me – Tiffany & Co.
• A Dedication to Your One and Only – Harry Winston
• A One-of-a-Kind Love – Harry Winston
• A Precious Moment – Harry Winston
• In Perfect Harmony – Harry Winston
• Wear your values | (Re)new Bamboo – John Hardy
• Play it cool in Silver – Monica Vinader
• I want it. I got it. – BaubleBar

Email subject lines for new jewelry launch

Launching a new jewelry collection or introducing new styles is a fantastic opportunity to email about. For this type of email campaign, go with a subject line like the examples below.

• Introducing the new Pandora Colours Collection ? – Pandora
• A new galaxy of High Jewelry – Van Cleef & Arpels
• Autumn Treat for you – new styles added ? – Sif Jakobs Jewellery
• How to style our new pieces – Monica Vinader
• The very latest pieces from M&S – Marks and Spencer
• Luck shines with the new Alhambra creations – Van Cleef & Arpels

Examples with emojis for jewelry newsletters

Adding an emoji to your subject line is a great way to make it stand out in people’s inboxes and get your emails opened.

• Ways to carry her favorite people with her ? – Pandora
• oh. my. goodness. these bags & wallets are everything… – Kate Spade
• Around the ? Bracelets for just $9.99 – Alex and Ani
• How many stars would you give PANDORA UK? – Pandora
• A Beginner’s Guide to Lab-Created ?s – James Allen Rings
• Start Trying on ?s – Virtually – James Allen Rings
• Picking A Diamond? Follow These Tips ? – James Allen Rings
• Diamond Care: Your Go-To Guide ? – James Allen Rings
• YOU’RE INVITED ?? – BaubleBar
• Miss out on fine favorites? They’re BACK ? – BaubleBar

For more emoji tips, check out our guide on using emojis in subject lines here.

Subject lines mentioning a sale

When sending an email about your current or upcoming sale, you’ll want to give it a subject line that gets customers to pay attention and even create a sense of urgency. Just like the examples below do.

• SALE ENDS TUESDAY | Up to 60% off – Monica Vinader
• it’s confirmed! redeem an extra 40% off SALE styles – Kate Spade
• $59 for this crossbody, as a thank you – Kate Spade
• love you here’s $50 off $150+, $150 off $350+ & $250 off $550+ – Kate Spade
• Final day for Buy 2 Get the 3rd Free*! – Pandora
• Gifts for birthdays, anniversaries and special dates – Swarovski
• Enter Now To Win Our New USD$20,000 Summer Jewellery Giveaway! – Blue Nile
• 20% Off Jewelry For All Your Wedding Needs – Blue Nile
• Psst… Pastels Are On Sale, Pass It On! – Kendra Scott

Seasonal subject lines for jewelry newsletters

Whether it’s Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, the start of spring, or any other event you’re emailing, you’ll want a subject line that goes well with the occasion. These are examples from top jewelry brands from past events.

• Symbols for the New Year: Faith + Hope ? – Alex and Ani
• Ring in Spring With Bold Pieces – David Yurman
• Your fall favorite, back for spring – John Hardy
• Spring Jewelry Essentials: Diamond Bracelets & More – Blue Nile
• Express your Love with Chopard – Chopard
• Sing Your Heart Out – Harry Winston
• ? Happy Galentine’s Day! ? – Kendra Scott

For more inspiration, check out our subject line collections for the following occasions:

• Valentine’s Day
• Mother’s Day
• Black Friday
• Cyber Monday
• Christmas

Personalized subject lines for jewelry stores

Personalizing your subject line with your customer’s name is a great way to make it stand out and boost your open rate. 

So much so that subject lines that include the subscriber’s name achieve a 17% higher open rate on average. 

• {name}, get an exclusive sneak peek of our new Club Charm ? – Pandora
• {name}, Bring a Tiffany Store Experience to You – Tiffany & Co.
• We hope you had a great birthday, {name}! ? – Pandora

Subject line examples for men

Most jewelry store subject lines tend to be focused on women, but here are a few that were sent with campaigns showcasing male jewelry. 

• Layers of Style: Men’s Bracelets – David Yurman
• A gift for him. Just because. – Swarovski
• Free P&P | Perfect for Father’s Day – Hiho Silver Jewellery
• We put the Midas touch on our Soho watch. – Vitaly

If you’re looking for more subject line ideas for Father’s Day, check out our collection of Father’s Day subject lines here. 

The rest of your jewelry email marketing campaigns

You should now hopefully have plenty of subject line inspiration for your jewelry email newsletters and automations. 

For more help with writing subject lines, check out our guide on writing subject lines here which includes tips on aspects like using call to actions, optimal character length, and more.

But there’s obviously more to an email campaign than just its subject line. 

If you’re looking for inspiration for the content of your emails as well, check out our collection of jewelry email marketing examples here.

We also have a comprehensive guide to email marketing for jewelry stores which takes you through how to set up a high-converting email marketing strategy you might want to check out too.

The post 50 of the Best Email Subject Lines for Jewelry Stores appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

Unlike social media, email is a direct line of communication where you can reach people at all stages of the customer journey with tailored messages. 

This ability to segment your email list and send relevant messages is a large part of why email has the highest return on investment of any digital marketing channel. Returning on average $43 for every dollar spent.

And this is just as true for jewelry stores as it is for any other business. 

But not all emails are created equally and to get the best return from your email marketing campaigns, it helps to send well-designed emails.  

So to help inspire you when creating your email campaigns, we’ve put together this list of 10 great email marketing examples from jewelry brands. 

Jewelry email marketing examples

1) Francesca’s

This email campaign from Francesca’s is a good example of a typical jewelry email. Especially in how it makes heavy use of product imagery. 

The reason most jewelry emails use plenty of images is because jewelry is something that needs to be seen. There’s no use just talking about it.

Plenty of jewelry businesses will also do what Francesca’s has done and make use of models as this helps people visualize themselves wearing the jewelry. 

2) 1928’s blue jewelry email campaign

1928 has gone with a blue theme in their email design. 

This is a great way to showcase a particular color of jewelry and add some vibrance to your email campaigns. 

In addition to color, you could also base your emails around another theme like a particular gemstone, animal, or design motif.

3) Brighton’s black and white jewelry email

Not every jewelry email has to be colorful. 

Keeping your design black and white allows silvery jewelry to stand out when a colorful design would only distract from the jewelry images. 

Done well, black and white designs can also come across as elegant and high-end.

If these are attributes you associate with your brand, then it’s worthwhile experimenting with black and white designs.

4) Spring email

The beginning of a new season, especially spring, is a perfect opportunity to dedicate an email to. 

This particular email also includes a sale offer, but this is of course optional. The only important thing is that you present jewelry pieces that go well with the upcoming season. 

5) Tiffany&Co

This is an example of a welcome email from one of the world’s largest jewelry stores: Tiffany&Co. 

The beauty of this email design is in its simplicity and relevance of its imagery.

Not only is an image of a gift box a great visual metaphor of a warm welcome, but it’s also the iconic Tiffany’s box.

The clear call-to-action button right in the center of the email also does a great job of funneling customers through to the next step.

6) Astley Clarke

Win-back emails are an essential automation to keep customers engaged with your store. And this email from Astley Clarke is a great example of a win-back email from a jewelry store.

In addition to tempting customers back to their store with a generous offer, this email also outlines 17 reasons why customers should continue to shop with them.

High-quality product images are also added for good measure.

For more win-back inspiration, check out our collection of win-back emails here.

7) Monica Vinader’s animated email

Adding an animated GIF to your email is a great way to great people’s attention and make your email stand out.

After all, chances are you found this email more attention-grabbing than any other in this collection.

When adding GIFs to your email campaigns, it’s important to remember that less is often more. 

If you include overly complicated animations it can become overwhelming and shift the focus away from your jewelry. 

8) Kate Spade

Valentine’s Day is perhaps the most important event of the year for jewelry shops. So it only makes sense to include a Valentine’s Day example of a jewelry email on this list. 

And this email from Kate Spade is a great Valentine’s Day email to include. 

It’s got a simple, elegant design, great copy, and is clearly a Valentine’s Day email. 

For more inspiration and tips, check out our guide on Valentine’s Day email marketing. 

We also have a collection of Valentine’s Day subject lines in case you get stuck coming up with one for your campaign.

9) Halloween email

Valentine’s Day isn’t the only holiday jewelers should be creating email campaigns for. 

There’s also Mother’s Day, Black Friday, and Christmas to name a few. But don’t limit yourself to just the typical holidays either. 

For instance, you can put together a Halloween collection and run a sale just like in this example. Another idea would be to put together a collection of green jewelry for St. Patrick’s Day. 

The other interesting thing about this email is the countdown timer at the bottom. 

Including this is a great way to create a sense of urgency and boost your conversion rates in your sale emails.

10) Monica Vinader

This jewelry email from Monica Vinader showcases some of their newest arrivals. 

From a design perspective, the large hero image does a great job of showcasing their main new item and the smaller product images beneath lets people check out the range of items available.

There are then clear call to actions that make it easy for people to purchase the pieces of jewelry right from the email campaign.

The rest of your jewelry email marketing

Hopefully, you now have plenty of inspiration for your jewelry email design to work with. 

But email marketing is so much more than just sending good-looking emails. For example, to ensure your emails get opened, you need to give your jewelry emails great subject lines.

For more tips and strategy help, check out our guide on jewelry store email marketing. 

The guide takes you through every step of setting up a winning email marketing strategy from getting started and collecting email addresses to more advanced tips and best practices. 

The post 10 Great Jewelry Email Design Examples to Get Inspired By appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

And for a long time now, hardware stores have been largely content with relying on traditional media like TV, radio, and print ads in magazines and newspapers to drum up business.

But while too many hardware marketers put off developing an email strategy, those who do have been rewarded by the benefits. 

So if you’re looking to join them and expand your hardware store marketing by adding email to the mix, this is the guide for you. 

This guide will cover every step from choosing an email app, collecting people’s email addresses, ideas for emails, and how you can save time through automation that’ll drive sales with virtually no ongoing effort from you. 

We’ll also throw in plenty of examples of actual emails along the way to help inspire you for your own campaigns

Why email?

First things first: why have those hardware retailers who have embraced email generally seen better results than those who haven’t? 

Well compared to traditional marketing as well as other forms of digital marketing like social media, email has a few advantages. 

Email provides direct access to your customers

When you have a customer’s email address, you have a reliable, consistent way of reaching them with whatever message you have. 

If you are holding a sale or have started stocking a new product, you can inform your entire customer base by simply sending a single email. 

Likewise, your email is only reaching those who are interested in what you sell. Meaning that, unlike with other kinds of advertising, you’re not wasting money on reaching people who are never going to want what you sell. 

Few other forms of marketing come even close to achieving this like email does. 

Email lets you send the right message to the right person

The precision of email marketing doesn’t stop with just being able to exclusively target your customer base either. 

You’ll also be able to target particular types of messages to particular types of customers.

As we’ll explore later on, you’ll be able, for instance, to send former regular customers who have stopped coming to your store with a special offer exclusive for them. This is also done automatically so don’t worry about having to constantly be writing emails. 

Customers prefer email over social media

Over two-thirds of Americans prefer hearing from businesses through email compared to just 17% who prefer social media. 

This preference is also reflected in how people engaged with email campaigns from retailers compared to social media posts. 

While organic engagement on Facebook can be as long as 2.27% and even below 1% for Instagram, approximately 20% of the average retailer’s email list open and engage with email campaigns.  

Steps to implement hardware store email marketing 

So with the importance and benefits of email out of the way, how does one actually go about implementing an email marketing strategy for their hardware store? 

Thankfully, the process is fairly straightforward and only involves a few main steps. 

1) Select an email service provider

If you haven’t done any email marketing before, the first step is to choose an email service provider, or ESP for short. 

You can think of an ESP just simply being a tool that lets you manage your email list and subscribers, create email newsletters, and set up and automate campaigns. 

There are plenty of ESPs out there, including SmartrMail, if you use an e-commerce platform like Shopify or WooCommerce. 

Regardless of which ESP you choose to go with, there are a few things you’ll want to look for:

• The ability to divide your email list into segments of people based on factors like which products they’ve purchased or when the last time they shopped at your store was.
• A variety of email capture options, such as popups and customizable forms, so that people can easily sign up for your email list. 
• The ability to automate emails so you don’t have to manually send every email.
• The ability to integrate with the ecommerce platform you may use if you have run an online store as well.
• Customer support, preferably with a live chat option. This is something you’ll definitely come to appreciate if you’ve never sent an email campaign before.

2) Build your email list

A potential thought you might have if you’re still not convinced of the merits of email marketing is how you’ll be able to expand your customer base if you’re just emailing the same people over and over again. 

The solution to that is simply to continually grow your email list not just with existing customers either, but also by getting potential customers to sign up to it. 

The more potential customers you have on your list, the more opportunity you have to explain and entice them to come to your store and make a purchase. 

So how do you get people to join your email list? 

The first step is to create a compelling reason for them to want to be on it. This is known as your opt-in incentive. 

Opt-in incentives

An opt-in incentive is simply what you offer people to entice them to sign up for your email list. An example of this would be a “10% off your next purchase” coupon. 

As few people wish they received more emails, most tend to be selective about signing up to email lists unless they think they’re going to get value out of doing so. 

This is why creating an opt-in incentive is the first and most important step in growing your email list. It’s a way to demonstrate to people that they’ll receive value from signing up for your list.

Creating your opt-in incentive

So what should you use as your opt-in incentive? 

While a generous coupon is sure to get people signing up, you may not want to give away so much margin on your products. You may not want to give away anything of monetary value at all. 

Keep in mind, though, that there’s immense value in being able to reach potential customers through email. Even though you might have to sacrifice some profits to get them on your list, with an even basic email strategy, it’ll be more than worth it in the long run. 

That said, there are, however, plenty of non-monetary opt-in incentives that provide people with plenty of reason to sign up to your email list. 

Some examples include: 

• Providing people with DIY guides
• Providing inspiration for common types of home improvement projects
• Promising to keep people up-to-date with the latest industry and regulatory news

Whatever it is that you decide to go with for your opt-in incentive, it should be something that provides people with enough value to get them to hand over their email addresses. 

Spreading the word about your opt-in incentive

Once you’ve come up with an incentive that works for your business, it’s important to start letting people know about it. 

After all, if no one knows about it, it’s not going to entice anyone to sign up for your email list. 

When it comes to spreading the word about your opt-in incentive, you have a few options:

• Simply tell people in-store who seem interested and receptive to hearing about it.
• Mention it in your other forms of marketing and advertisements. 
• Include a link to a form people can fill out to sign up for other pieces of communications you give people, such as receipts and invoices.

In addition to this, there are also a few things you should set up right away to grow your email list faster. 

Set up email collection forms and popups

Any website you have for your hardware store is a great way to spread the word about your opt-in incentive and build your email list. 

Even if you just have a simple website with no commerce functionality, adding a simple form for people to sign up for your email list is an obvious thing to do. 

A few options you have to utilize your website traffic include:

• Setting up popups that grab people’s attention when they first visit your site.
• Landing pages that are dedicated to explaining the value of your opt-in incentive.
• Email capture forms in the footer and/or sidebar of your website that let people sign up without being overly intrusive. 

As web addresses are not the easiest thing to type out manually, in certain adverts and on things like receipts, you might want to include a QR code instead.

Doing so means that people simply just need to scan your ad, receipt, or other material with their phone. This saves them from having to type in an address and improves their experience. 

Present people with the option to opt-in during checkout

If you run an online store, the easiest way to grow your email list is to give people the option to sign up as they check out their orders. 

The moment when a customer makes a purchase is going to be when they’re most willing to sign up for your emails. And when they’ve already given you their email address to receive the order confirmation, this is the perfect time to ask. 

Ecommerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce will let you simply add a checkbox that people just have to tick to receive email marketing campaigns from you. 

It’s important, however, not to automatically sign people up to receive your email marketing.

Preticking the opt-in box as someone is checking out or forcing someone to actively avoid being signed up for your email list may be illegal based on where the customer lives. 

If you adequately highlight your incentive and make it easy for people to sign up, people will do so anyway. You’ll likely be better off without those who don’t as well. 

A healthy email list is key

When growing your email list, it’s important to keep in mind that a strong email list is not something that appears overnight. 

Instead, a healthy list grows organically over time, gradually but consistently, with people who are genuinely interested in receiving emails from you and your hardware store. 

If you try to force your list to grow faster by adding people you think might be interested, then the effectiveness of your campaigns will suffer as subscribers start ignoring your emails.

The best practice is to start growing your list early. If you create an enticing opt-in incentive and advertise it well, then you’ll have no trouble building a valuable list.

3) Set up email automation

Once you’ve set up an email list with your ESP that people can subscribe to, it’s time to set up some email automation. 

These automation only have to be set up once, after which they’ll be sent to your subscribers automatically whenever you sign up to your email list and engage in other behaviors like making a purchase.

There’s no number of subscribers you need before you should start setting up these automations either. 

If you wait until you have a certain sized list, by the time you achieve your arbitrary goal your early subscribers may have lost interest in your store. 

One of the primary aims of your email marketing should be to engage potential customers and maintain relationships with existing ones. 

To do this, you should have automation ready to send in time for your first subscriber, starting with your welcome email.

Welcome emails

Welcome emails are simply automated emails that are sent to people immediately after joining your email list. 

This doesn’t have to be a single email, either. 

The most successful email marketing strategies utilize multiple emails in their welcome ‘series’ to help nurture new connections, especially if the new subscriber hasn’t made a purchase yet. 

Because of this, it’s a common strategy to set up two separate welcome email series: one for new customers and one for people who have signed up to your email list but haven’t yet made a purchase.

If someone hasn’t purchased before, the first welcome email usually simply welcomes and thanks the new subscriber for signing up. Like in the example below from Bunnings Warehouse.

If you promised people something in return for signing up as part of your opt-in incentive, then this email is where you should deliver on your promise.

For those who have signed up during checkout, your welcome email can also double up as your order confirmation email. However, you should also follow up a couple of days later with a general thank you for your purchase email, like in the example below from Home Depot.

Additional welcome emails

After the initial welcome emails, you should follow up with a few more emails. 

These emails will again differ slightly depending on whether someone has made a purchase or not.

If someone hasn’t made a purchase yet, the emails should nudge them toward making their first purchase. Whereas if they are already a customer, you can be more subtle in trying to make another sale. 

In both cases, however, you’ll want to build your brand image by dedicating emails to the following potential themes:

• Introducing your brand values and design philosophy
• Talk about where your hardware comes from (whether you craft any of it yourself; or it is made from locally sourced materials etc.)
• The history of your hardware store (you can even introduce yourself as the owner to add a personal touch)
• Details and photos of your physical store if you have one (where it’s located, opening hours, etc.; this is particularly relevant if someone has made a purchase online)

For both segments of customers, you’ll also want to space these emails out over increasing intervals. A good way to do this is to:

• Send the second welcome email 24-48 hours after someone joins,
• Send the third 3-5 days after the second,
• Send a fourth one to two weeks after the third.

You can learn how to automate welcome emails in SmartrMail here.

Abandoned cart emails

If your hardware store has an ecommerce component to it, then abandoned cart emails are an absolute necessity. 

For every three online shoppers who add a product to their shopping cart, only one will actually make a purchase. The other two instead ‘abandon’ their carts. 

Online shopping cart abandonment is a major problem for every type of online retailer, including hardware stores. Globally, trillions of dollars worth of products are left in abandoned carts every year.

The good news is that approximately a third of abandoned carts can be recovered with an automated email like the one below from Lowe’s Home Improvement.

These emails are also very easy to set up and enable, especially if you use an ecommerce platform like Shopify or WooCommerce, which will let you enable these automatic emails in literally just a few clicks.

However, if you want more control over how these emails appear and function (such as the timing between when a customer abandons their cart and when they receive a reminder), you will need to use an email service provider that offers this functionality.

You can learn how to set up and customize abandoned cart emails in SmartrMail here.

Cross-sell recommendations

Cross-selling is the act of recommending similar or complementary products based on what a customer has purchased. The most common example is how fast-food restaurants ask customers whether they’d like fries and a drink with their burgers.

For hardware stores, a cross-sell example might be recommending varnish to people who have purchased timber decking. Or outdoor furniture to people who have purchased a barbecue. 

You might already be doing this with in-store customers.

Email marketing can let you automate the process, including for those customers whom you never see as they purchase online. 

The first step to setting up these emails is identifying suitable pairings. 

Once you’ve identified some, you then create an email outlining why the recommended product would go great with the original purchase. This email is then automated to trigger after someone makes the appropriate purchase. 

You can find step-by-step instructions on setting up this automation in SmartrMail here.

An issue you might run into is having a product catalog that’s too large to find individual product pairings.

In this case, you can set up cross-sell recommendations based on product categories instead.

Win back emails

Just like abandoned carts, win-back emails are an essential automation to address a universal problem retail experience. 

This time it’s loyal, repeat customers going cold and not coming back to your store to make another purchase. Something that your hardware store has almost certainly experienced.

Win-back emails are for exactly this type of customer. 

In an attempt to ‘win back’ customers, these automated emails are sent to customers who haven’t made a purchase after some time. 

For instance, you can set it up so that customers who haven’t made a purchase from your store in 6 months (or however long amount of time you desire) receive an email to entice them back. 

The email below from Lowe’s Home Improvement is a good example of a win-back email that attempts to entice customers back by talking about the changes they’ve made. 

You can learn how to automate win-back emails in SmartrMail here. 

Other email marketing automation you can set up for your hardware store

The four types of emails mentioned above are the most effective email automation you can set up to give you the best return on investment. 

Email automation doesn’t need to stop with these four. However, there are plenty of other types of email automation that you can set up that we don’t have the room to cover here. 

A few other common automation you might want to explore further include: 

• Personalized product recommendation emails that look at your store’s data to determine which products customers are most likely to be interested in. 
• Review request emails to customers who have recently made a purchase to see how their experience was.
• Special offers are sent when a customer reaches a milestone (such as a year on your email list) to keep them engaged. 

4) Continually send great email newsletters to keep people engaged

After you’ve set up all the best practice automation, it’s time to start planning your first few email newsletters. 

Unlike with your automation, you can wait a couple of weeks after you’ve collected your first subscriber before you send your first newsletter, as your welcome email series will keep them engaged for the time being. 

Just don’t wait too long; otherwise, you risk your subscribers losing interest and not engaging with your newsletter when you finally send it.

Unlike the other steps so far, this is also an ongoing process. 

While you shouldn’t send newsletters every day (otherwise, you’ll annoy people and have them unsubscribe), you should be consistent in emailing your customers. 

Anywhere from once a week to once a month is a good range for your newsletters.  

By regularly sending newsletters, you keep your existing and potential customers engaged with your brand. Therefore when they need some supplies for their latest DIY project, your hardware store will be top of mind. 

In terms of what you should include in your newsletters, here are a few ideas.

Home improvement inspiration/instructions

The list of DIY projects to do around the house is seemingly never-ending. 

In addition to this providing a constant stream to customers to your store, it also provides you with plenty of newsletter content. 

A great idea for whenever you’re stuck on content is to dedicate a newsletter to a particular home improvement project. Just like Lowe’s has done in their newsletter on patios. 

You can time particular projects for particular times of the year too. 

The above example of patios might not make so much sense at the onset of winter when home heating would make for more appropriate content. 

By the time you run out of ideas for projects to base newsletters on, enough time will have likely passed to go back and reuse content from previous campaigns as well. 

Sales

Just like with any marketing channel, when you hold a sale, you’ll want to utilize your email list to spread the word about it. And this means sending a dedicated newsletter to it, as Home Hardware has done in their email below.

Design inspiration

Similar to resources for DIY projects, you can also provide customers with design inspiration for particular rooms of their homes. 

Just like Signature Hardware has done in their newsletter below.

Unlike with DIY projects, this content is more focused on the overall design of a room and how you have the items to achieve that design.

This can work particularly well if your hardware store is at the higher end of the market or you have more design-conscious customers.

Introduce new products

If you’ve recently stocked a new product that you think your customers would be interested in knowing about, you might want to add it and other new products in a newsletter. 

This can either be because the product is well known and has only just hit the market, in which case you can send a “Now Available In Store …” style email. Or if you have a high-end hardware store that stocks bespoke items, you can style a newsletter like the one below from VG&P.

Conclusion

Now that you know how to set up your email strategy for your hardware store, it’s time to go ahead and do the work. 

As you can now appreciate, the process is very straightforward.

All it comes down to is four main steps: set up an account with an email service provider, start building an email list, set up automation, and keep subscribers engaged with regular newsletters. 

For something that’s so simple yet more effective than any other form of marketing, there’s no reason to put off email any longer.  

The post How to Set Up Email Marketing for your Hardware Store appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

While it might sound like girls get the better friend with diamonds, trust me, what email marketing lacks in glamor it makes up for in results. 

When your jewelry email marketing plan is executed well, it’ll be more valuable than any diamond you have on offer too. 

And while many jewelers and jewelry retailers put off developing an email marketing strategy out of fear of it being too hard, it’s a fairly straightforward process. 

There’s no reason why any jewelry shop, no matter how small, can’t find success with email marketing. 

That’s why we’ve created this guide: To take you through, step-by-step, how you can implement email marketing for your jewelry business. 

We’ll cover every step from choosing an email app, building your email list, ideas for emails, and how you can save time through automation that’ll drive sales with virtually no ongoing work from you. 

We’ll also include plenty of email examples and show you how you can make your own emails sparkle like your own pieces of jewelry. 

Why email?

As you’re reading this guide, it’s safe to assume that you either want to set up email marketing for your jewelry store, or you’re looking to improve your current strategy to stay on top of things. 

Either way, you might have some lingering thoughts about whether email is worthwhile. 

After all, there are plenty of newer social media channels like Instagram and Pinterest that let you show off high-quality images of your products through a highly visual medium. 

Email, however, has a few not-so-obvious aces up its sleeve. 

You own your email list

Just like how your following on Instagram or Facebook is the foundation of your social media marketing, your email list is the foundation of your email marketing. 

But there’s a big difference between your followings on social media and your email list: You own your email list. 

Social media platforms, on the other hand, control how you can interact and communicate with your audience. And if you’ve done any social media marketing, you know these platforms exert this control over advertisers. 

On Facebook, for example, the average percentage of organic post engagement for a page is as low as 2.27%, and on Instagram, it’s lower than 1%. 

If you want more of your audience to see your posts, you have to pay up to sponsor posts or run paid ads. 

Nobody, however, owns email. Email is an open protocol, meaning that when you send your email newsletter, it’s sent to your entire email list.

Unlike social media engagement, nearly 20% of the average retailer’s email list opens and engages with email campaigns. 

Email is a direct line of communication

Any successful business in any field is built by identifying a target audience of potential customers, engaging them to convert them into buyers, and then maintaining that relationship to build loyalty. 

Email provides the perfect means to achieve this as it provides you with a direct line of communication with your audience. 

As we’ll explore later on, you can also tailor your email messages to people at every stage of the customer journey. This is something you can’t do with traditional advertising campaigns like in print or TV and is much harder to achieve with other digital marketing channels. 

This unrivaled ability to target your messaging to particular audiences is a large part of why email has the highest return on investment of any marketing channel.

In fact, a Direct Marketing Association study found every dollar invested into email generated an average of $43.62 in returns. 

Customers prefer email

Over two-thirds of Americans have stated they prefer hearing from businesses through email. 

Compare this to just 17% who stated they prefer social media. 

People also enjoy receiving email marketing from jewelry stores, with people opting into receiving emails from jewelry at a higher rate than any other industry. 

Developing your jewelry email marketing plan

Now that you know why email marketing is an essential part of any successful jewelry marketing plan, we can get into the steps to setting up your email marketing strategy. 

1) Choose an email service provider

If you’re new to email marketing and haven’t set anything up yet, your first step is to choose an email service provider, or ESP for short. 

An ESP is essentially just a marketing app that lets you store your contacts, design and create emails, and send out campaigns.

There are plenty of options out there, too, including SmartrMail if you use an ecommerce platform like Shopify or WooCommerce.

Regardless of which ESP you choose to go with, there are a few things you’ll want to look for:

• The ability to segment your list. That is, divide your email list into segments of people based on factors like whether they’ve purchased an engagement ring or whether they shop at your store in the lead-up to Valentine’s Day, which will let you send targeted messaging later down the track.
• A variety of email capture options, such as popups and customizable forms, so that you can grow your email list. 
• The ability to automate emails (which we’ll cover later) so you don’t have to send every email manually.
• The ability to integrate with the ecommerce platform you use for any online part of your store.
• Customer support, preferably with a live chat option. This is something you’ll definitely come to appreciate if you’ve never sent an email campaign before.

2) Build your email list

Once you’ve chosen an ESP and got your set up and acquainted with the app, it’s time to start collecting email addresses.

When adding people to your email list, it’s important only to add people who have actively agreed to receive marketing emails from you. 

Sending marketing campaigns to people who didn’t opt-in to your email list can constitute a violation of their privacy and breaches regulations like CAN-SPAM. It can also land your emails into people’s spam folders instead of their inboxes.

So how do you get people to join your email list?

It’s all about your opt-in incentive. 

What is an opt-in incentive?

An opt-in incentive is simply what you offer people to encourage them to sign up to your email list. For example, if you offer people a 5% off coupon if they sign up to your email list, that would be your opt-in incentive. 

As you can probably relate to, people already receive plenty of emails, so they tend to be selective about signing up to email lists unless they think they’re going to get value out of doing so. 

This is why providing an opt-in incentive is important. It’s a way to demonstrate to people that they’ll receive value from signing up to your list.

Creating an enticing opt-in incentive

So what should your opt-in incentive be? 

While a coupon for a certain percentage discount will get people signing up, there are plenty of other non-monetary options as well if you don’t want to discount your jewelry. 

Many jewelers will simply promise to keep people up-to-date with their latest news and while this type of opt-in incentive doesn’t cost them anything, it’s not particularly enticing either.

Remember that the goal of your incentive is to convince potential customers that there’s value to being on your list. 

With that in mind, here are a few opt-in incentive ideas you might want to consider:

• Provide style inspiration in the form of a lookbook that subscribers can download.
• Provide gift guides in the lead-up to events like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Christmas.
• Access to sneak peeks on upcoming designs and first dibs on new releases.

Once you’ve created an opt-in incentive that makes sense for your store, you then start letting people know about it. The more people who know about your email list and your incentive, the more people who will sign up. 

Tell customers in your store 

The most obvious way to let people know about your email list and opt-in incentive is simply to tell them about it. 

You can do this by telling people as they browse your store or after they make a purchase. 

To avoid coming across the wrong way, you’ll want to avoid mentioning your email list as soon as they walk through your door. Instead, you should wait until you’ve had a chance to determine whether they’d be receptive to hearing about your email list and if you think they’d be interested. 

Don’t feel like you have to tell everyone about your list either; not everyone is going to want to sign up, and that’s okay. You only want people who are genuinely interested in your list anyway. 

Include a way to sign up for your other marketing campaigns

If you run other marketing campaigns for your jewelry store, like ads in magazines or in newspapers, you might want to consider mentioning your email list in it. 

Of course, people can’t sign up directly through a print ad. So you’ll need to include the website address of a landing page where people can sign up. 

Any good ESP will let you easily create these pages or embed a signup form on your existing website. 

As web addresses are not the most attractive forms of text, you might also want to use a URL shortener so that it doesn’t take up as much space. 

Another option is to include a QR code instead so that people simply just need to scan your ad with their phone. This saves them from having to type in an address and improves their experience. 

Take advantage of traffic to your online store  

If you also run an online store, or if your jewelry store is entirely online, you’ll want to highlight your opt-in incentive to your website visitors. 

Even if you simply just have a website with no commerce functionality, adding a simple form for people to sign up to your email list is an obvious thing to do. 

There are a few main ways to do this: 

• With popups that grab people’s attention when they visit your site
• Whole dedicated pages devoted to explaining the value of your opt-in incentive (these are known as landing pages)
• Simple email forms in the footer or sidebar of your site that aren’t intrusive and in-your-face like popups, but are still visible. Like in the example below from Tiffany & Co. 

Growing a healthy email list

A final word on growing your email list. 

The more you start advertising your opt-in incentive and email list, the faster you’ll start collecting email addresses.

However, keep in mind that a strong email list is not something that appears overnight. Instead, a healthy list is something that grows gradually, but consistently over time and contains people genuinely interested in receiving your emails.

It’s for this reason that it’s important to start growing your email list as soon as possible, but also be careful about adding people who will get value from your emails. 

If you grow your list rapidly by adding just anyone to it, people won’t engage with your emails, and the effectiveness of your campaigns will suffer as a result. 

3) Setting up email automation

Once you’ve started building your email list, it’s time to start sending emails to engage your subscribers.

There’s no number of subscribers you need before you should start sending emails. 

If you wait until you have a certain sized list, by the time you achieve your arbitrary goal your early subscribers may have lost interest in your store. 

One of the primary aims of your email marketing should be to engage potential customers and maintain relationships with existing ones. 

To do this, you should be sending emails out on a regular basis as soon as you’ve collected your first subscriber. 

And the first step to doing this is to set up some email automation that’ll send automatically when people sign up to your email list and engage in other behaviors like making a purchase. 

The good thing about these automations is that once they’re set up, they require almost no ongoing effort apart from the occasional review to make sure they’re still relevant. 

Welcome emails 

Welcome emails are simply emails that are sent to people immediately after joining your email list. 

This doesn’t have to be a single email, either. 

The most successful email marketing strategies utilize multiple emails in their welcome ‘series’ to help nurture new connections. 

Because of this, it’s a common strategy to set up two separate welcome email series: one for new customers and one for people who have signed up to your email list but haven’t yet made a purchase.

If someone hasn’t purchased before, they’ve likely signed up because of your opt-in incentive. 

This means the first welcome email they receive should thank them for signing up and delivering what you promised them. Like in the example below from Molten Store, where they provide the promised $20 credit voucher.

If someone has opted into your email marketing as they were checking out an online order, then the first welcome message should be to thank them for their purchase. Like Hudson’s Bay email below. 

You can view more examples of thank you for your purchase emails here. 

After the initial welcome emails (which should be automated to send immediately after someone joins your list in both cases), you should follow up with a few more emails. 

These emails will again differ slightly depending on whether someone has made a purchase or not.

For people who haven’t made a purchase yet, the emails should nudge them toward making their first purchase. Whereas if they are already a customer, you can be more gentle in trying to make a sale. 

In both cases however, you’ll want to build your brand image by dedicating emails to the following potential themes:

• Introducing your brand values and design philosophy
• Talk about where your jewelry comes from (whether you craft any of it yourself, where your diamonds and other gemstones are sourced, etc.)
• The history of your jewelry business (you can even introduce yourself as the owner to add a personal touch)
• Details and photos of your physical store if you have one (where it’s located, opening hours, etc.; this is particularly relevant if someone has made a purchase online)

For both segments of customers, you’ll also want to space these emails out over increasing intervals. A good way to do this is to:

• Send the second welcome email 24-48 hours after someone joins,
• Send the third 3-5 days after the second,
• Send a fourth one to two weeks after the third.

You can learn more about welcome emails here and learn how to set up them in SmartrMail here.

Abandoned cart recovery

Abandoned cart emails are only applicable if you sell your jewelry online, and if you do, they’re absolutely essential email automation. 

When it comes to people shopping through online stores, for every three customers who add a product to their shopping cart, only one will actually make a purchase. The other two are said to have ‘abandoned’ their carts. 

Online shopping cart abandonment is a major problem for every online retailer, not just jewelers. Trillions of dollars worth of products are left in abandoned carts globally every year.

The good news is that over a third of these otherwise lost sales can be recovered with an abandoned cart email like the one below from Monica Vinader. 

These emails are also very easy to set up and enable.

Ecommerce platforms like Shopify let you enable these automatic emails in literally just a few clicks.

However, if you want more control over how these emails appear and function (such as the timing between when a customer abandons their cart and when they receive a reminder), you will need to use an email service provider that offers this functionality.

You can learn more about setting up and customizing cart recovery emails in SmartrMail here.

Cross-sell recommendations

Cross-selling is when you recommend a customer a similar product to what they have just purchased. 

A jewelry example would be recommending matching earrings based on a necklace someone recently bought. 

While you might already be doing this with in-store customers, the beauty of email marketing is that this process can be fully automated for all customers, including those purchasing from your online store who you never see. 

To set up these emails, you first need to take a look at your catalog and identify suitable pairings. 

Once you have these pairings, you create an email outlining why the recommended product would go great with the original purchase. You then automate this email to trigger after someone makes the appropriate purchase. 

You can find detailed instructions on setting up these automation in SmartrMail here.

If you have a large product collection where setting up these pairings would be impractical, you can cross-sell based on product category instead.

For example, instead of recommending a particular set of earrings for a particular necklace, if someone purchases a gold necklace, you can recommend a range of gold earrings for them to choose from. 

Winback emails

It’s inevitable that some of your even most loyal repeat purchasers are going to go cold and stop purchasing jewelry from you.  

Thankfully, win back email automation help bring these customers back to your jewelry store. 

These emails attempt to ‘win back’ customers by sending a customer who hasn’t made a purchase recently an email. 

For example, you can set it up so that high-value customers (i.e., those who have spent over a certain amount) receive the email after 12 months (as this may coincide with an event like an anniversary or birthday) have passed without a purchase. 

Just like in the example below from Astley Clark, these emails typically contain a special offer or message to entice the customer back. 

These emails will help you retain customers as well as generate sales, all without any ongoing effort from you. 

You can view more examples of win back emails here. You can also learn how to set up winback emails in SmartrMail here.

Other marketing automation you can set up for your jewelry store

The email automations mentioned so far are relevant for every jewelry store and will help bring in the most additional revenue.

There are, however, plenty of other types of email automation that you can set up that we don’t have room to cover here. Especially if you run an online store which will give you a lot more data to work with. 

Some other automation you might want to consider include:

• Birthday emails that give people a reward for their birthday. (You can learn how to automate birthday emails in SmartrMail here).
• Personalized product recommendation emails that look at your store’s data to determine which products customers are most likely to be interested in. 
• Milestone emails where you automate a special email to send every year (or however often) since someone has joined your email list.

4) Come up with email marketing ideas for your jewelry store 

After you’ve started to grow your email list and set up all of the best practice automation, you’ve done most of the work in establishing an email marketing strategy. 

The last step, however, is an ongoing task: to send regular, engaging email newsletters. 

By sending regular newsletters, you’ll keep your existing and potential customers engaged with your brand. When they decide to buy some jewelry, your jewelry business will be top of mind. 

While it’s hard to tell you exactly how often you should send your subscribers a newsletter, anywhere from once a week to once a month is usually fine. 

Any more frequently, you risk annoying people and having them unsubscribe, and any less frequently, the connections you build with your customers will start to fade. 

If you’re wondering what you should include in your email newsletters, here are some ideas for content. 

Introduce new items

An email newsletter is a great way to spread the word about any new jewelry ranges or offerings you have. 

Just like in the example below from Monica Vinader.

You can even segment high-value customers out and send them a ‘sneak peek’ first to show that you value their business before announcing the items to everyone on your email list. 

Sale events

Sending a newsletter to your subscribers about your sale is the single easiest and yet most effective thing you can do to ensure your sale is a success. 

You can even hold sales exclusive for your subscribers as Molten Store has done. 

Providing people with a password to unlock the savings makes the sale feel even more exclusive. The midday to midnight time constraint also generates a sense of urgency which helps to compel people to make a purchase.

Themed email collections

There are multiple themes you can jewelry collections on: modern, traditional, jewelry with a particular gemstone, animal, or design motif, etc. 

For instance, you can dedicate a newsletter to a particular color, as 1928 Jewelry has done.

Seasonal newsletters

The beginning of a new season, like spring or summer, or even the beginning of a new month of the zodiac, is a perfect opportunity to create a collection of jewelry for a newsletter. 

You can even combine this with a new season sale, just like in the email below.

Holidays

Valentine’s Day may be the quintessential holiday for jewelers but there are plenty  of other holidays you can create an email newsletter for, including: 

• Valentine’s Day
• Mother’s Day
• Christmas
• Chinese New Year
• St. Patrick’s Day (good opportunity to showcase a collection of green jewelry)

Some jewelers even take advantage of Halloween in their email marketing.

While you’ll almost certainly want to send a series of email newsletters out in the lead up to Valentine’s Day, it’s up to you which other holidays you opt to use in your newsletters. 

Jewelry email marketing examples

Now that you have a firm understanding of email marketing for jewelry retailers, it’s time to get inspired by examples of emails from other jewelry companies. 

You can use any inspiration you find here to give your own campaigns that extra sparkle. 

Stella & Dot

Aligning your jewelry sale with a charitable cause is a great way to increase the number of conversions. Especially when you’re offering limited edition jewelry that matches the cause like Stella & Dot.

Francesca’s

Jewelry is something that needs to be seen, that’s why it’s important to include high-quality imagery in your campaigns like Francesca’s has done.

Include images of models wearing your jewelry will also help people visualize themselves wearing it. 

Tiffany & Co.

The use of a gift box in Tiffany & Co.’s welcome email is a nice visual metaphor of receiving something of value in one’s inbox. 

The teal color also helps to reinforce Tiffany & Co.’s branding.

Valentine’s Day email 

If you’re looking for some Valentine’s Day email inspiration, this email from Kate Spade is a good example of one.

It’s clean, simple, and elegant. The one thing that could be improved is making the link at the bottom that’s inviting people to ‘Shop Valentine’s Day Gift’ more obvious by having it look like a button.

Conclusion

Email marketing for your jewelry store is fairly straightforward and simple when you know what to do. 

All it comes down to is collecting email addresses, setting up automation, and sending engaging newsletters. And of those three, the first two are largely the only things you need to involve yourself with when setting up your email marketing strategy. 

While your newsletters are an ongoing task, once you find what content works best for your store, you’ll find the process will become a lot more natural. 

And as you can now hopefully appreciate, email marketing delivers the greatest return of any marketing channel, is the best at both acquiring and retaining customers and is largely automated once you have it up and running. 

All of this makes email something you cannot let your jewelry business go without. 

The post The Complete Guide to Jewelry Store Email Marketing appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

We know running a restaurant is incredibly hard, demanding work requiring long hours, but the reality is that you can’t rely on word-of-mouth marketing anymore. Instead, you need to be actively promoting your restaurant to keep people visiting. 

When competing against other restaurants in a cutthroat industry, it’s the restaurants that are able to engage directly with past and future diners that set themselves up for success. 

While many restaurants have found luck with social media and other forms of paid advertising, email marketing is one channel you should not ignore. 

The good news is that email marketing utilizes much of the same skill set of restaurateurs—it’s all about knowing how to satisfy your customers’ appetite and giving them what they want. 

Thankfully unlike running a restaurant, email marketing is not at all time-intensive work.

In this guide, we’ll take you through why email marketing for restaurants is so vital and let you in on the secret ingredients that go into the best restaurant email marketing strategies. We’ll also throw in some of the best examples of emails we’ve found along the way.

Why email marketing campaigns are important for restaurants

Restaurant marketing has come a long way from the days of food critics’ reviews in newspapers and magazines. 

To keep people visiting your restaurant today, you need to keep engaging with your diners long after they’ve finished their meal. With our busy lives, simply hoping that your food alone will be good enough to remind people of your restaurant for their next special occasion just won’t cut it. 

This is especially true when your competitors are constantly trying to engage with your customers as well. Even if you’re not using email, your competitors are. According to SinglePlatform, the average restaurant spends 15% of its marketing budget on email.

Email gets people in your restaurant and keeps them coming back for more

With email marketing, you’ll be able to keep your customers informed of new menu items, offers, and news (such as if you want to announce that you’ll begin home deliveries).

This not only helps entice them back to your restaurant, but also keeps your restaurant top-of-mind. With your restaurant top-of-mind, your existing customers will also be more likely to mention your restaurant to their friends and family. This increases your brand awareness and the number of new people coming to try your food. 

You’re also not limited to just emailing your previous customers. As we’ll discuss later on, there are different types of emails you can send to potential customers that’ll actively work to get more people through the door.

Advantages of email over social media marketing

Of course, when it comes to driving engagement, many restaurants turn to social media where they can share mouthwatering images of their dishes on platforms like Instagram. 

But while social engagement is great, social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram deliberately limit your organic reach. This means in order to reach people beyond your most loyal customers, you have to pay for ads on the platforms.

The percentage of people liking your page that see your Facebook posts without you putting money behind the posts is as low as 2.27% and organic post engagement on Instagram can be less than 1%. 

With email, however, there are no additional costs to reach everyone on your email list.

The restaurant industry also achieves very high open rates compared to other industries as well with the average open rate for hospitality being 40%. With the overall average open rate across all industries being 32%, this means that people respond well to emails from restaurants.

In addition to being able to reliably reach your entire audience, email also has several other key benefits:

• Email segmentation and automation allows you to target the right message to the right type of customer without any ongoing work.
• Email has the highest return on investment (ROI) of any marketing channel
• People prefer hearing from businesses through email with 72% of Americans preferring email over just 17% who prefer social media.
• Email marketing is more effective than any other channel at both acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones. 

Coronavirus & its impact on restaurant’s email marketing

Few industries have been as affected by the COVID-19 pandemic as the restaurants has been. 

With restaurants forced to close for the foreseeable future around the world, it’s clearly not business as usual for the restaurant industry. Your restaurant marketing strategy should therefore not be business as usual either.

While the fundamentals in the guide below remain the same, it’s important to consider what you send in your emails. This is not the best time to go ahead and send that email newsletter telling people to come in and check out your new renovations.

Hold off on setting up automations that invite people to come to your restaurant if you’re closed. If you’ve already set them up, either pause them or adjust the copy. For instance, instead of encouraging people to come in and celebrate their birthday at your restaurant, encourage them to order home delivery instead. 

Now is not the time to go quiet

A lot of businesses, not just restaurants, are wondering how to go about email marketing right now. And for one reason or another, a lot are going quiet and not sending emails. 

This is not the time to stop emailing. 

While it can be a good idea to reduce the amount of promotional emails, keeping in touch with your customers during these uncertain times is vital. 

Your customers want to know what’s happening with your restaurant (are they able to come in and pick up takeaway? Are they able to get home delivery? Is there any potential date for reopening?) and many will be genuinely interested in knowing how you’re faring. 

The email below from Dunkin’ is a good example of a COVID-19 update. 

After you’ve shared any updates with your subscribers, it’s still important to continue emailing. 

A lot of restaurants that are closed are generating content for their audience that makes for great email newsletters. Some popular examples include running online cooking classes and sharing recipes. 

Whatever you’re doing while your restaurant is closed, consider sharing it in your emails.

Setting your restaurant up to bounce back strong

As already mentioned, email marketing keeps your restaurant top-of-mind. By not going quiet, you’ll have a much better chance of being one of the restaurants people choose to eat at first when restrictions are lifted. 

By sending brand building emails, like ones sharing recipes or with links to video cooking demos, your restaurant will also emerge from the lockdowns with a much strange brand image and reputation in people’s minds.

Creating an email marketing strategy for your restaurant

Choose an email service provider

If you’re starting out with email marketing for the first time, then the first decision is which email marketing service to use. This is essentially just a marketing platform that lets you store your contacts, design and create emails, and send out email campaigns.

While there are plenty of options out there, including SmartrMail if you use an ecommerce platform like Shopify or WooCommerce, there are a few things you’ll want to look for:

• The ability to segment your list. That is, divide your email list into segments of people based on factors like whether they have already dined in your restaurant or not, or whether they live in your city or not.
• A variety of email capture options such as popups and customizable forms. 
• The ability to automate emails (which we’ll cover later) so you don’t have to manually send every email.
• Customer support, preferably with a live chat option. This is something you’ll definitely come to appreciate if you’re new to email marketing.

Build your email list

The first step in any email marketing strategy is to have a list of email subscribers that you can contact. After all, there’s no point in sending impressive emails if hardly anybody will ever see them.

So how do you build a list for your email marketing?

While it might seem like collecting addresses is a slow, daunting process, the good news is there are a few small things you can do right now to start building your email list. These include:

Offering coupons

Whether it’s restaurant email marketing or any other kind of email marketing, the most tried-and-true way of getting people on your email list is by offering them something of value in return.

And one of the most valuable things you can offer people is a discount on their next meal.

This does not have to be a fixed dollar amount of percentage off. It could also be a complimentary drink or free dessert in exchange for joining your email list.

It also doesn’t have to be a menu item or something of monetary value. Access to recipes, cooking courses, etc. all work as great as well.

Whatever you offer, it’s what’s known as your “opt-in incentive” – a term you’ll hear in general email marketing. A large part of growing email lists, in any industry, comes down to how attractive the opt-in incentive is. 

Offer free Wi-Fi

A particularly popular opt-in incentive for many restaurants, particularly those in areas with lots of tourists, is free wi-fi. 

Requiring someone to sign up to your email list to access your free wi-fi is a surefire way to quickly grow your email list, which is why this is a popular option among a lot of restaurants. 

This can be easily set up with a service like Beambox. 

However, beware that acquiring email subscribers this way, as well as by offering discounts can lead to a disengaged list. Ultimately you want to be collecting email addresses of people who are going to be interested in hearing from you. 

Mention your email list on menus, bills, etc.  

Of course, it’s all well and good to offer your customers a free menu item or discount on their next meal, but you have to also inform them of this offer. 

This is where you need to advertise your offer and email list where your customers will see it. 

Potential places for doing this can include at the bottom of your menu, on bills or customer receipts, and table tents like in the example below.

The use of a QR code makes it particularly easy for people to sign up to your email list by simply scanning it with their phone and entering their details instead of having to type in an address. 

The easier you make the signup process, the more people you’ll get completing the process. 

Ask people for their email addresses after their meal

Sometimes it’s the simplest methods that are the most effective, and when it comes to growing your email list simply asking people to join can be enough. 

All you have to do is train your staff to inform customers of the benefits of receiving your email newsletters and other future emails and you’ll find many customers signing up. 

You can offer to send a digital copy of their receipt if you think that’ll help push more people into handing over their email address. 

Capture email addresses from your website

If your restaurant has its own website that receives even a small amount of traffic, it’s worth also advertising your opt-in incentive on it. 

You can then provide an email signup form that makes entering one’s details super easy. This can be done in a few ways:

• With popups that grab people’s attention when they visit your site (like in the example below)
• Landing pages that are dedicated to explaining the value of your opt-in incentive 
• Capture forms in areas like your sidebar or footer that are easy to find yet not intrusive

To learn more about growing your email list from your website traffic, check out our article on capturing email addresses of your website visitors. 

One last tip on growing your email list

By implementing the above suggestions, you’ll start to see your email list grow. 

However, keep in mind that a strong email list is not something that appears overnight. Instead, a healthy list is something that grows slowly, but consistently over time. 

It’s for this reason that it’s important to start growing your email list as soon as possible. 

The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll be able to reach more people and start seeing a greater return on your email marketing. 

Restaurant email marketing ideas

After you’ve started growing your email list, it’s time to start actually sending emails. 

Of course, the ultimate goal of these emails is to get people dining in your restaurant. But as you’re likely well aware, you can’t simply tell people to dine in your restaurant and expect them to do so. 

Instead, to get people to visit your restaurant you first need to engage with them through your emails. If you succeed in doing this, you’ll start getting people visiting your restaurant. 

Some email ideas for restaurants that can engage your list include:

Announcing new menu items

If you’re about to launch a new menu item you’ll want to let your email subscribers know. 

All this involves is sending an email newsletter highlighting the new dishes and why they taste so good/why people should come in and try them. 

To take things to the next level you might want to explain what inspired these dishes. For instance, if you’re launching a new spring menu, you could potentially talk about how you wanted to utilize local seasonal produce to support local farmers. 

The email example below from Marion Wine Bar talks about their inspiration for their new seasonal menu. 

Spread the word on upcoming events

Events are a great way to get people in your restaurant.

If you hold your own unique events like live music from local artists or even an eating competition, you can send an email newsletter to keep your customers informed. 

It doesn’t have to be for elaborately organized events you put on either. 

The lead up to key dates for restaurants like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day are great opportunities to send out an email reminding people to make a reservation. 

Recipes / reheating tips 

There’s still plenty of great content you can email during quieter times of the year. 

One such idea is to share a recipe or two. Or if your recipes are a tightly guarded secret, you could provide tips for reheating dishes that people have trouble finishing in your restaurant. 

The idea is to share content that your subscribers will engage with and get them thinking about your restaurant and your great food. 

If you don’t think your audience are the cook-at-home crowd or if reheating isn’t a concern, such as if you’re running a bar restaurant, then don’t worry about sending these tips or recipes. 

Share the inspiration behind dishes 

Any interesting story behind how a particular dish got on the menu makes for great email content. 

It doesn’t have to be edge-of-your-seat interesting either. 

You can simply talk about how the recipe dish has been passed down through generations in your family, how it blends together different culinary traditions, or how the dish is a favorite for locals. 

Depending on how many menu items you have, this could potentially fill up your email marketing calendar for a while. 

Talk about the origin of your ingredients 

Many people are interested in knowing the backstory on your ingredients for a few reasons. 

Some people simply like to know whether you’re using fresh and natural ingredients whereas others appreciate it when restaurants use local produce as much as possible. 

In either case, a ‘farm to plate’ story that gives an overview of what ingredients and where they come from is something you can send out in an email to satisfy their curiosity. And hopefully get them craving your food again.

Promote special deals

If your restaurant is the kind that runs seasonal promotions or weekly deals, then advertise these with a weekly or monthly email. Like in the emails below from Uno Pizzeria & Grill.

Just don’t go overboard and email your subscribers every second day. 

Keeping it to a maximum of an email a week is a good rule of thumb. However, holiday periods like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the lead up to days like Valentine’s Day give you the opportunity to send more frequently. 

Introduce the restaurant owner(s)

If you’re running a small family restaurant, introducing yourselves to your customers is a great way to foster a sense of community. 

Things you can potentially touch on in this email include:

• What lead you to start a restaurant
• Why you value quality food
• Your favorite dishes

As this is what’s known as “evergreen content” because it remains relevant and can be used at any time, instead of sending this as an email newsletter, you’re likely better off using it as a welcome email. 

Welcome emails

Welcome emails are simply emails that are sent automatically to people after joining your email list. 

Often the first welcome email will be a simple message thanking the new subscriber for signing up to the email list. This is also an email you should set up. You can check out examples of thank you emails here. 

Welcome email series usually include more than one email however, and for your restaurant marketing your email introducing the owners makes for a great welcome email. This is when your subscribers will be most engaged with your emails so take the opportunity to tell your story and turn them into regulars.

You can learn more about welcome email in this guide.

Automated restaurant email marketing

Welcome emails where you introduce yourself and your restaurant are not the only types of emails you can automate. 

In fact, there are plenty of emails that you only have to set up once and have them send out automatically.

Not only do these emails save you time (as opposed to having to constantly be sending manual newsletters) but they also get better engagement too. This is because they’re sent to people when they make the most sense, as we’ll see in the examples below. 

Birthday emails

Going out to dinner at a restaurant is one of the most popular ways to celebrate someone’s birthday. 

It makes sense then to try to capture people’s attention right when their birthday is just around the corner. Just like the email from Vintage Inns does.

To send birthday emails, you’ll have to ask for people’s birthdays when they sign up to your email list. Many email marketing services will let you add a date section in your email form that lets you do this. 

When doing this, we recommend only asking for the day and month as some people will be uncomfortable with providing their exact age. Also avoid making the question compulsory as this might reduce the number of people signing up to your email list. 

Being upfront and letting people know what you’re asking so that you can send them a birthday offer also acts as a great opt-in incentive. 

Good email apps will also make it easy to automate birthday emails to send to subscribers a week or two (however long you want) before their birthday. 

You can learn how to automate birthday emails in SmartrMail here.

Valentine’s Day reminder emails

Even if you don’t know your subscribers’ birthdays, at least you know when major dates like Valentine’s Day is. 

Your restaurant doesn’t have to be fancy either to get involved in Valentine’s Day email marketing. Many couples prefer to keep Valentine’s Day dinners simple. 

All you have to do is automate an email prompting people to make a reservation or simply advertising your Valentine’s Day menu/offer at the start of February. Just like Longhorn Steakhouse did with their Valentine’s Day email:

Restaurant email marketing examples

Now that you know the fundamentals of structuring your restaurant email campaigns, it’s worthwhile to check out some examples of great restaurant emails.

General examples

Olive Garden 

This email from Olive Garden is not just clever in its use of imagery, but also in how it capitalizes on National Meatball Day. 

There’s a ‘national day of…’ for just about every dish. So look up the dates for dishes that are most relevant to your restaurant and add them to your email marketing calendar. 

Patina’s winback email

This email from Patina is what’s known as a winback email that’s sent automatically to subscribers who haven’t opened any of their emails in a while. 

You can learn how to set winback emails up in SmartrMail here. 

Backyard Burgers’ welcome email 

This welcome email from Backyard Burgers demonstrates good use of food photography. 

In your own emails you’ll want to include images of your food that gets your subscribers’ mouths watering. 

Valentine’s Day Email Marketing Examples

Table Table’s Valentine’s Day email

A simple Valentine’s Day email that highlights the restaurant’s specials for the occasion. 

The ‘book your table’ call to action at the bottom is an important inclusion as it guides people to complete the all important step of making a reservation. 

Ask Italian’s love at first bite email

The beauty of Ask Italian’s Valentine’s Day email is in its creativity with its tagline ‘love at first bite’ and using shrimp to form a love heart. 

Bottiglia’s specialty menu

A simple Valentine’s Day email from Bottiglia highlighting the restaurant’s special menu for the day as well as their live music. 

What would be nice to see is a call-to-action prompting people to make a reservation at the bottom of the email.

Conclusion

Email marketing for restaurants is pretty straightforward when you know what to do. 

All it boils down to is collecting people’s addresses, sending engaging content in the form or a few newsletters a month, and setting up automations like welcome and birthday emails. 

Of course, just like with cooking, there’ll be a degree of experimentation to find what works best for your restaurant. 

But in the end the results speak for themself. 

As you can now appreciate, email marketing delivers the greatest return of any marketing channel, is the best at both acquiring and retaining customers, and is largely automated once you have it up and running. 

All of this makes email something you cannot let your restaurant go without. 

The post Restaurant Email Marketing: Your Recipe for Success appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

Email apps generally give you a list of basic fonts to choose from, such as Times New Roman, Century Gothic, Arial, ect. If you want to use one of these basic fonts in your email design, then your choice is pretty straightforward. 

For those looking for more design flexibility, finding a suitable font can be significantly more challenging. 

Very quickly you start encountering terms like email safe font, web fonts, fallback fonts and web safe fonts. All these different types of fonts and their varying degrees of support among email clients can quickly cause a headache.

So in this post, we aim to explain all these terms and all the major considerations you should be aware of as simply as possible. 

What is an email safe font?

Let’s start with the basics: what exactly is an email safe font?

In the most basic terms, an email safe font is simply a font that’s supported (i.e., can be displayed) across all modern email inboxes. 

By using these fonts, you can be sure that your email’s font will be displayed consistently for all your subscribers. These fonts are also very legible, so unless your font size is too small, your subscribers shouldn’t have difficulty reading your emails.

List of email safe fonts

Email safe fonts include:

• Arial
• Century Gothic
• Courier New
• Garamond
• Georgia
• Helvetica
• Impact
• Lucida
• Times New Roman
• Tahoma
• Trebuchet
• Verdana

What is the difference between email safe fonts and web safe fonts?

The list of web safe fonts overlaps significantly with the list of email safe fonts. Web safe fonts are simply those that are also supported across virtually all modern devices and operating systems. 

While there are some technical differences between web and email safe fonts, for all intents and purposes when choosing a font for your email marketing, you can think of them as being the same. 

This list here is a great resource as in addition to listing web safe fonts, it also shows the percentage of users on PCs and Macs that have the fonts installed. That is, the percentage of people using these devices where the font will display correctly. 

What are web fonts?

To complicate things further, there’s another term you should be aware of: web fonts. 

Web fonts are not the same as web safe fonts or email safe fonts. Instead these are fonts that have generally been specially designed for use on the web only. 

This means they don’t generally come included in operating systems or devices. When someone comes across a website utilizing a web font, that font will be loaded directly into the browser from a server so it can be displayed. 

Having hundreds and hundreds of different web fonts available to use has been a godsend to graphic designers. If it wasn’t for web fonts, the internet would look a lot less well designed than it does now. 

Can I use web fonts in my email marketing?

Even though web fonts have opened up a variety of different design opportunities for web designers, email marketers need to proceed with caution. 

Web font support in email clients

Unfortunately not all email clients support web fonts. According to Litmus, the following email clients currently support web fonts: 

• Apple Mail
• iOS Mail (default mail app on iPhones and iPads)
• Android Mail (default mail app; not Gmail)
• Samsung Mail
• Outlook for Mac
• Outlook App (not the web version)

There are also smaller email clients out there that support web fonts (like Thunderbird) but the list above covers the major players.

The good news is that together these clients represent around 50% of the total market for email opens. The bad news is that the world’s most popular email inbox provider, Gmail, isn’t on the list. 

Gmail officially only supports two web fonts: Open Sans and Roboto. Don’t expect any other web font to render correctly in Gmail. 

Gmail web font support

Does Gmail support web fonts? No.

As Gmail doesn’t support web fonts, you might be wondering whether it’s they’re still worth using. Afterall, it’s likely a decent percentage of your email opens are occurring in Gmail. 

Fortunately, just because Gmail doesn’t like you using custom fonts, it doesn’t mean you can’t use web fonts altogether. This is thanks to fallback fonts. 

Fallback fonts

Fallback fonts are fonts that have been nominated to replace a preferred font if it is not able to be rendered on a particular device. 

For example, let’s say you wanted to use Montserrat (a web font and not an email safe font) in your email campaigns. When someone opens your email in a client that doesn’t support web fonts, a different font will be used instead of Montserrat, such as Arial. 

If you’re coding your own emails you can select your own fallback fonts to best maintain the aesthetic you want. Otherwise if no fallback font is available, then the email client will render the email in its default font. 

Every email client has its own default font. For the most popular clients, these are:

• Gmail: Arial
• Apple (default Mac and iOS apps): Helvetica
• Outlook: Calibri

Going back to the Montserrat example, if you want to set it up to have Verdana as the fallback, you can use the following code in your CSS:

<style type="text/css" >
#email-body {
 .email-titles {
font-family: "Montserrat", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
}
}
</style>

Don’t be put off by the code though. Many email marketing apps like SmartrMail will give you more fonts to choose from than just the small list of email safe fonts. 

If you choose one of the custom web fonts, you don’t need to worry about setting up fallbacks. These have already been set up for you for each of the fonts available to choose from. 

So with SmartrMail you can rest assured that if your first choice isn’t available, we’ll use the next most suitable font that resembles the original as closely as possible.

How to use web fonts in email marketing

If you want to send your own HTML emails and use web fonts, there are a few things you should keep in mind. 

Firstly you will need to find a font to use. 

A great place to get started is Google Fonts. Google Fonts has over 900 custom fonts for you to choose from and makes it relatively easy to use in your email campaigns. You can then use the Google Fonts API to have the custom served to your subscriber from the server. 

You can do this with the following snippet: 

<style type="text/css" >
@import url(https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Montserrat);
</style>

Again, that example is for if you want to use Montserrat in your email. You can find a more detailed guide to doing this along with setting up fallback fonts from Litmus here.

Additionally you should also be conscious of licensing agreements when using web fonts. Because web fonts are generally designed for use on web pages, you might find some restrictions on using them in your email marketing. 

Next steps

So far we’ve only talked about the technical aspects of choosing a font for email marketing. We haven’t even begun to touch on all the design considerations to take into account. 

Not only should your fonts render properly, but they should also reflect your branding and message you want to communicate to customers. 

Thankfully we also have a guide on picking the best font for email marketing. The detailed guide covers everything from the difference between serif and sans serif fonts, font size, font weight, and style font families. 

If after choosing a font, you’re still worried about how it will appear in subscribers’ inboxes, there are ways to check. Tools like Email on Acid and Litmus make it easy to get a preview of exactly how your email will appear across as a variety of email clients and devices. 

FAQs

The post Email Safe Fonts & Web Safe Fonts for Email Explained appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.