Quick wins for your Valentine’s Day email marketing

This article will go through everything you need to have a successful Valentine's Day email marketing campaign. We’ll share best practices, tips and plenty of email examples to kick-start your first holiday email campaign of the year.

We’ve dug up our favorite Valentine’s Day subject lines, using examples from real businesses. They’re categorized by audience so that you can tailor your approach to your subscribers.

There are no magic words that will get people to open your emails this Valentine’s Day. The competition for your customers' eyeballs will be fierce, so follow these subject line best practices to improve your chances of being seen.

The majority of people shop online for their Valentine’s Day gifts, making email the perfect way to catch their attention! Here are 17 tips and Valentine’s Day email examples to help you get the most out of your Valentine’s Day emails this year.

Valentine’s Day gifts are often last-minute purchases, so you don’t need to start promoting your Valentine’s Day offers as early as you would with Holiday Season sales. 

A good rule of thumb is to send 3 or 4 different emails between February 1 and February 14. This gives subscribers plenty of chances to see your offer and make a purchase that arrives before Valentine’s Day. 

Software or digital product sellers could start even later as they don’t need to rely on shipping for the gift to arrive. 

Last year, fashion retailer Farfetch sent its first Valentine’s email on February 5, 9 days before the big day. This gave email recipients plenty of time to choose and buy a gift that would arrive before the 14th.

Consumers in the U.S were expected to spend an average of $192.8 on Valentine’s Day. But, the highest spending age group, those between 35 and 44, were expected to spend $335.71—almost double the average! Why not use this insight to segment your email list and tailor your messaging? 

Segmenting by age isn’t the only way to create more targeted messages. You could also send messages to people based on:

• How many purchases they have made at your store

• The previous items they have bought

• Their location

• How they interact with your campaigns

• Any other data point in their profile

Once you’ve decided on your segments, send emails that target the needs of each group. For example, you could send a first-purchase special offer to people on your list who are yet to buy. Or you could send product recommendations based on the category of product the person has bought previously.

The email campaign below, from women’s clothing store Swank, targets their partners by promoting their gift card as “the gift she really wants”. They also include a Valentine’s gift guide for more ideas.

This could easily be a segmented email that goes out to people who have previously made a gift purchase. 

In email marketing, one way to catch the reader's attention is to tell or promote stories. Everyone appreciates a good love story! You can also craft a story about friendship, gratitude, loved ones or any other uplifting message that fits your brand.

For example, if you sell jewelry, tell the story behind the symbolism of a particular precious stone that’s used or of how a piece is created. You can even share the meanings behind Valentine’s traditions or fun facts. It’s all about drawing your reader in and getting a reaction. Check out this guide to crafting email content that people care about.

We love this Valentine’s Day email design by charity: water. It expresses the organization’s gratitude for their fundraisers in the form of a love poem! Each verse tells the story of their fundraising journey; a touching way to say thank you to their supporters.

We’re also big fans of the embedded video at the end of the email, which includes a special message from the team.

Email marketing is no longer a one-way conversation. Instead, give readers an experience to remember. Have fun with your emails by making them more interactive with an embedded survey, quiz, video or social media posts. 

In the email example below, the nonprofit WWF asks its readers to vote for their favorite relationships in the animal kingdom!

Let’s be honest. If you don’t have a significant other, Valentine’s Day could be the last day that you want to celebrate. So instead of bombarding people with romantic gestures, why not encourage them to treat themselves?

E-commerce businesses can include special offers for shining singles as well as couples. This can result in more sales because National Retail Association data from 2023 shows that people don't only buy romantic gifts on Valentine's Day:

• 58% of Valentine’s Day shoppers buy something for family members

• 32% buy gifts for their pets

• 29% buy gifts for friends

• 25% buy gifts for their children’s classmates and teacher

• 17% buy gifts for coworkers

This email campaign from VSCO invites people to try their premium features with an eye-catching email GIF of retro images and poems. Their Valentine’s Day message is inclusive of everyone, inviting readers to create love letters for “your crush, your friends, or even for yourself.” 

Email is the glue of digital marketing. Valentine’s Day is an ideal time to build your community and grow your audience.

Email can attract more customers when your subscribers share the newsletter with a new person. Create marketing campaigns that encourage people to “share the love”, and see how many new subscribers you get. You could even set up a newsletter referral program with incentives that encourage sharing.  

TrendyEquine sent this email marketing campaign about “sharing the love”, reflecting the relationship between them and their subscribers—and readers could easily forward it to their network.

E-commerce businesses can combine the power of abandoned cart emails with the heightened engagement of Valentine’s Day to drive more sales.

Set up a special abandoned cart email message leading up to Valentine’s Day to encourage people to finalize their purchases.

You can easily do this by connecting your store to MailerLite with one of our e-commerce integrations and then creating a workflow with the abandons cart automation trigger. Or get a head start with our prebuilt abandoned cart automation template. 

We all love a good discount. Email coupons are a great way to ramp up your Valentine’s Day sales and motivate customers to spend more (because, you know, free delivery is amazing)! 

Whether you have a ‘Buy one, get one free’ offer, or an extra gift when people spend a certain amount, Valentine’s Day coupons can build hype around your brand and increase urgency—especially when the offer is available for a limited time only. 

Ultimate Guitar does this successfully with a one-day-only 20% discount on its library of guitar tabs and courses. You can only get the offer if you sign up on the day you receive the email. 

Send a reminder email on the last day people can order from your store and have the gift arrive before Valentine’s Day. This is an effective way to generate last-minute sales from people who haven’t yet bought a gift.

Greetings card retailer Thortful sent emails on February 12 and 13 reminding people that they can still buy their card and have it arrive on time with next-day delivery. The company combined this reminder with a 30% discount to make the offer extra enticing. There really was no excuse for subscribers to not buy their card in time!

Email signatures are the brief messages at the end of your newsletters. They often include a picture, a sign-off, a signature, and contact information). Give your email signature a Valentine’s Day makeover by adding themed imagery to your profile picture and customizing the sign-off message.

In this example, Jane ties the newsletter theme into her profile picture and finishes the email with a Happy Valentine’s Day email signature.

Send an email on February 13 or 14 promoting your gift cards to last-minute shoppers. It’s a good chance to get some extra sales from people who haven’t bought a gift yet and don’t have time to buy a physical product! 

We love this email example from Winc, offering a Valentine’s Day discount code for gift cards—the perfect last-minute present

Keep the love going by sending a message in the days after Valentine’s Day. This is a good opportunity to sell to people who forgot about the big day and remind your customers that you have great offers available all year round. 

In this example, AppSumo reminds its users that while Valentine’s Day is over, the company still has lots of love to give its customers. It promotes its year-round Plus membership while using fun copy to tie the offer into the Valentine’s Day theme. 

Valentine’s Day is the perfect time to take a lighthearted approach in your email marketing. 

We’re big fans of this email marketing campaign by MeUndies, which encourages people to buy a Valentine’s Day gift card that gives the recipient a new pair of undies every month! The fonts and color scheme are clean and coherent, and the email copy is fun and clearly explains what MeUndies is all about.

Valentine’s Day is perfect for promoting products that make obvious presents (chocolate, wine, teddy bears, etc). But brands with products that don’t fit this description can still get involved in the fun. 

Semrush is a marketing software tool: probably not the Valentine’s Day gift most people are hoping for. But the company still sent out a Valentine’s Day “Marketer’s in Love” series where the team introduces the features they like the most. 

Adding an animated email GIF to your emails is a surefire way to stand out when people open your emails. 

Goat Story coffee company (named after the myth that goats discovered coffee 🐐 ) used a GIF with a flashing background to help its email stand out. This is combined with copy that is minimal and straight to the point—confirming the saying that less is more!

Valentine’s Day is a good excuse to buy a present for yourself as well as your loved ones. Highlight that your product makes a good self-care present in your email to generate sales from those who want to treat themselves. 

Tony Robbins tells his subscribers to give themselves the “ultimate gift of self-care” in his Valentine’s Day email. The copy is personal, listing benefits rather than features, and there’s a special discount as an extra sweetener!

Valentine’s Day doesn’t just have to be about driving conversions; it can also be about saying thank you and building relationships with your audience.

This Valentine’s Day newsletter from charity: water shares a heartfelt thank you with the nonprofit’s supporters. It also has a GIF showing all the things they’ve been able to achieve with their help. 

Now you’re fully stocked with Valentine’s Day email ideas, here are 3 final tips to ensure your themed campaigns make an impact.

1. Follow Valentine’s Day email design best practices

Ensure your Valentine’s Day emails look as good as the examples above with these email design best practices. 

Use complimentary colors and be consistent 

Use a tool like Coolors to find a color scheme you like. Typically we’d advise using your brand colors in your emails, but you can add some romantic shades of red or pink to your Valentine’s Day promotions. 

Choose 2 or 3 complementary, easy-to-read fonts 

Assign these fonts to each type of text, such as headings or body copy, and use them consistently across your emails. Use MailerLite’s global design settings to assign styles and colors to each email element.

Add media

Images, social posts, and videos can help your messages stand out. These are also good ways to showcase your products and encourage purchases. 

Add a clear call-to-action (CTA)

Make sure your recipients know what you want them to do by adding a CTA button asking them to take next steps. Use text like “Redeem Offer,” “Shop Gift Cards” or “Shop Now.” 

Test your email on multiple devices 

Your email marketing service provider should ensure your designs are responsive. But it’s still worth testing them on multiple devices to check all elements show up as intended, especially if you’re testing a new template for your Valentine’s Day emails.  

Consider accessibility

Accessibility best practices ensure everyone can read your emails.

• Use clear fonts and contrasting colors so they're clear and easy to read for as many people as possible. Here's a useful tool to test contrast

• Add alt-text to images to provide context about the image to people who use screen readers

• Include a text-only version of your email that can be read by people who use screen readers

• If you use GIFs, ensure the image flashes fewer than 3 times per second

This guide from the Web Accessibility Initiative has more information about accessibility best practices.

2. Choose Valentine’s Day email campaign metrics

Once you’ve set up your campaign, measure whether it was successful by tracking key email marketing metrics. The ones you choose to focus on will depend on the goals of your campaign. 

Here are some common ideas:

• Campaign revenue: The total revenue your campaign generated

• Total orders: How many orders your campaign generated. Both revenue and orders are useful metrics for e-commerce stores

• Open rate: The percentage of subscribers who opened your email. It shows how effective your subject line is

• Click rate: The percentage of recipients who clicked on your campaign. It shows how engaging your campaign was

• Specific link clicks: Use this to see the impact of a specific call-to-action and whether people actually clicked on what you wanted them to click on 

MailerLite users can see all these metrics within each campaign’s analytics. To view campaign revenue and total orders you’ll need to have a connected e-commerce store. This is super easy to set up with our pre-built e-commerce integrations for top platforms including Shopify, WooCommerce, Prestashop, and BigCommerce.

3. Test your Valentine’s Day campaigns

Metrics show the impact of your newsletter so you can improve your next campaign. But it won’t help you maximize the impact of your current campaign. For that you need testing. 

MailerLite has 2 features you can use to test your emails:

• Multivariate testing: Test up to 8 different versions of your email on a small segment of your list to see which one performs best based on opens or clicks. You can change 3 elements from your subject line, email content, sender name, and sending time. The tool will then send the winning version to the rest of your subscribers

• A/B testing: Test 2 versions of an email, where only a single element (subject line, email content, sender name) is different. You can also A/B test automations, forms, and landing pages

Learn more about email testing in our guides to A/B testing and Multivariate testing. 

Whether you love it or hate it, Valentine’s Day is a golden opportunity for your email marketing campaign. It’s a great time to build brand awareness and sell the perfect Valentine’s Day gift. Say thank you to your customers or create a coupon for the season.

Will you send Valentine's emails? We'd love to see your ideas!

Editor's note: This article was last updated in January 2024. It's been refreshed with new insights and examples to make your Valentine's Day emails rock!