What is Unidays?

UniDays is an entirely free online system with no sign-up cost, no membership card and it’s entirely for students! All you have to do is enter your email and verify your student status. Registration is quick and easy so you will be saving within a matter of minutes.

UniDays provide an incredible variety of discounts for stores like Hobbycraft, New Look and Apple. Additionally, with the free mobile app (available to download from both Android and the Apple Store) you can redeem discount codes in store using photo identification on your phone – so there is no easily-misplaced card to carry around!

How effective are Unidays emails?

There is no doubt that large companies know how to capture its customer’s attention. From appealing imagery to good calls to action, or consistent personalisation, companies have funnelled huge amounts of time and money into email marketing campaigns, and for good reason. Unidays is no different. How does it stack up?

Pros

1. Appealing/Bold Imagery with Calls to Action
   Unidays know their target audience. Because their target audience is very exclusive and specific, there is a general target market in which they can effectively pander to. One way in which they do this is their bold and appealing imagery. Whilst imagery is effective for most target groups, as imagery is by definition more appealing than text, it depends what imagery you use.
   Unidays very effectively use strong brand imagery combined with calls to action to appeal to the student target group. It actually GIVES their target audience something, whilst drawing their eyes to what they want to GIVE them. When this is combined with good colours relevant to their brand, and a strong brand logo, they create a coherent and strong image which is effective on an email.
2. Social Media Tags
   Social media tags of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram are featured right at the top of the email in plain sight. This is effective as there is nothing more that students love to do than to post stuff on their social media. They also have a good social media selection, as shown above. They could perhaps include Youtube and consider working on short ‘vine’ videos, or slightly longer but more captivating 0.30-2.00 videos. Students love to be in the know, so by making their social media packed with trendy but relevant information, then it will inevitably correlate with a higher engagement in their email marketing. Marketing is holistic and is best done from numerous channels at once. For more information on this, social media company called Buffer does a great article on this: https://blog.bufferapp.com/social-media-email-marketing.
3. Free Stuff
   Unidays’ business model is based solely on providing big brand names at a discounted price for a certain target market. Therefore, providing free stuff to captivate students and put them in the right mind-set to continue buying is crucial. When you combine this with the beautiful aesthetics of the email itself, Unidays have made it a pleasurable process for the reader. Creating positivity for the reader decreases bounce rate, which is crucial for a House-List campaign.

Cons

This is a good example email, but Unidays are far from perfect. Although it has an aesthetically pleasing look with lots of imagery and minimal text, it has a vast number of big brand images and numerous calls to action. Whilst this is essentially the point on Unidays, there is only so much information that the reader can process at one time. By opening an email containing over 10 deals and offers, its likely something that the reader will not open or fully digest unless they have lots of time and are in the right mind-set.

Furthermore, there are a total of 12 offers on the email, but the reader can click on a button at the top of the page saying “plus 11 unmissable offers”. That is if the reader actually sees it. The text is so small and does not catch the eye in the slightest. It will most certainly be brushed over. These deals clearly are not “unmissable”. Besides, even the least-busy students will have a hard time looking through 23 different companies’ deals.

Unidays are an effective company who are based solely online and therefore have an advanced social media and email strategy. Their emails are a benchmark that other companies should look to reach, because they are effective, but can still be improved. If other companies can bring their own twist, taking inspiration from Unidays, then they will inevitably have an effective House-list style email.

References

Buffer. (2013). 6 Creative Ways to Integrate Social Media and Email Marketing. Available: https://blog.bufferapp.com/social-media-email-marketing.. Last accessed 03/11/2016.

Ellis-Chadwick, F., & Doherty, N. F. (2012). Web advertising: The role of e-mail marketing. Journal of Business Research, 65(6), 843-848.

Hernandez, A., & Resnick, M. L. (2013, September). Placement of Call to Action Buttons for Higher Website Conversion and Acquisition An Eye Tracking Study. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 1042-1046). SAGE Publications.

Mohammadi, M., Malekian, K., Nosrati, M., & Karimi, R. (2013). Email Marketing as a Popular Type of Small Business Advertisement: A Short Review. Australian Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences, 7(4), 786-790