Emails have become a necessity in communication for business to market themselves easily and quickly. With certain emails being sent to certain customers, it makes their marketing easily tailored to their target audience. Nike is a well establish and well known brand, selling a huge range of products ranging from trainers and track suits to socks and sandals. Being such a popular brand for young people, it is no surprise that Nike have many marketing strategies. But the real question is whether Nike is distributing promotional messages in order to build and maintain a close relationship with customers (McCloskey, 2006, Chaffey, Mayer, Johnston, and Ellis-Chadwick, 2003). Using a marketing strategy that uses promotional emails can save companies massive amounts in distribution costs and gives them the ability to tailor each promotion specifically to the customer based on previous purchase (Moustakas, Ranganathan, and Duquenoy, 2006).

A marketing email should have the following elements in order to be presented correctly:

  • Heading
  • Subject Line
  • Brand Logo
  • Message content that is coherent with the subject line
  • Interactive Features
  • Frequency and timing of the email

Now, have Nike hit the nail on the head with their email marketing? In this blog i will attempt to breakdown how email marketing works and see if Nike are doing it right.

I bet, like me, in the past many other people ignore promotional emails from companies such as Nike and Adidas, they would end up in the junk folder or even the deleted folder. However recently i have been surprised with the Nike promotional emails as they have been really helpful and tailored specifically to me. As you can see from this email i received recently:

Eye Catching!

The email appears on my feeds as a result of signing up to emails from Nike when shopping on their website. As a result this makes me inclined to open the email as I am a regular customer to Nike. As you can see from this email Nike have used a personalised approach in this email. I have received this email as a result of already personalising trainers before, which means that i would be interested in doing so again, hence the reason for the email. The heading alone is enough to grab my attention, which reads “Holidays By You”. This heading is what customers will see first and therefore it  must not only stand out and be eye catching, but also be relatable to them to ensure they will take a second look. Ellis-Chadwick and Doherty (2012) suggested that the subject line is the most important aspect of an email, as if it fails to entice the user in then that user is less likely to open the email. The subject line is appealing for two reasons, firstly for the “By You” part as this suggests that the user will be personalsing something, and secondly for the “Holiday” part which suggests something for Christmas as we are close to the holiday.

 

Email Critique:

Negatives:

  • The email is very limited in term of information about the product and the promotion.
  • Once you open the email itself it seems very boring and does not make the user want to find out more

Positives:

  • The email gets its point across with ease
  • The email uses a few call to actions which link to a landing page that allows the reader to get more information
  • The email is not overwhelming with information

So, have Nike delivered the perfect email?

To put it simply, no, not at all. Although the email is simple, eye catching and easy to gasp, there is minimal information which means the user does not really know a lot about what the email is promoting. For the email to be successful, there needs to be more information about the promotion and less generic information.

 

References:

Forbes (2016) 7 email marketing tips for marketers. [Online] <http://www.forbes.com/sites/ajagrawal/2016/31/7-email-marketing-tips-for-marketers/#111d74f82d2f> [Accessed 29 November 2017]

Ellis-Chadwick, Fiona and Doherty, Niel F. (2012). Web advertising: the role of email marketing. Journal of Business Research, Vol. 65, Issue 6.