Black Friday is in just three days, its time to reach out the consumers and make sure they know about your amazing deals.

Virgin Media one of the project brands from one of the largest corporations in the United Kingdom. All Virgin Medias customers receive their email marketing, this month they sent out one that is event triggered by Black Friday.

The email will be analysed against an academic framework made by F. Ellis-Chadwick and N.F. Doherty that has analysed factors of email marketing and how emails should be written to increase effectiveness and click rate.
Lets analyse this email in stages, first of the subject line.

Subject Line

One of the biggest issues with email marketing is getting the receiver to actually opening the email. The subject line must grab the attention of the consumer and needs to be short, catchy, incentive and relevant to the content of the email. (Ellis-Chadwick,2012) The majority of subject lines with phrases such as: Free, Open Now and Winner gets filtered out via the spam filter. (Campaign Monitor, 2018)

Virgin medias subject line “Martha, our Black Friday scorchers have arrived! 🔥” it is personalised short and relevant to the content and works well. Over 25% of marketing emails are personalised and may improve click-through rates, build a relationship between the brand and customer. (Ellis-Chadwick,2012)

Headline

Their headline “Black Friday Scorchers” links well to the subject line and the content of the email. However, it is repetitive since they use scorchers twice.

Illustration

The email is an infographic the background colour is the famous red that they use in their logos and much more. Images and illustration helps the end users to engage, make it more interesting and also grab their attention.

Length of email

Virgin medias Black Friday email is an infographic with very little text which is effective since consumers rarely read the whole email. Although short emails are good, I would personally have a little more text, such as information why they are different from other Black Friday sales and more product information.

Hyperlinks and landing page

Each product image is a hyperlink that leads to that particular product page.

When clicking on the first and second products in the infographic the landing page, with information about the product and a chose plan option.

the third products landing page looks different first is a high-quality image with information about a sim card and they are focusing on that the price is lower due to Black Friday and that it is faster than Vodafone and Three. As you go down on the page there is a payment plan for different kind of sim cards after a plan has been chosen an add to basket options is available.

They used hyperlinks well, and you could click on the product and a call to action button. However, they could aslo have used an animation or short video of each product, when you would hover over them it would be a short animation or video of the product.

References

Campaign Monitor. (2018)’ 7 Data-Backed Ways to Write Email Subject Lines That Boost Open Rates’. [Online] https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2018/05/7-data-backed-ways-to-write-email-subject-lines-that-boost-open-rates/  [Accessed 20 November 2018]

Ellis-Chadwick, N.F. Doherty. (2012) ‘Executional tactics in e-mail marketing messages’. Journal of Business Research. Vol 65, No sp, pp843–848.