Discount & Promotional Email Examples

Scarcity, translated into urgency in marketing, is one of the seven psychological principles of persuasion, according to psychologist/author Robert Cialdini. Combine that with the need to limit your potential margin loss on a sale, and that leads to an email that pushes customers to act now rather than later. This pushiness has limits, however, especially if your brand sells higher-ticket items. For special sales like a one-day flash sale, the extra nudges are necessary. 

Nonalcoholic beverage brand Recess lets the right tone with this flash sale email. It begins by adding emojis to its subject line, “Amazon flash sale” and uses animated GIFs in the hero image in the message body that stress both action and savings.  

Tip: It’s easy to get lost in the number of examples for this recommendation. Use MailCharts’ advanced reporting metrics to understand what makes the email successful. Also, check the email details that accompany each email in the database. This email scored 75 out of 100 because it met standards for mobile optimization, HTML and image weight, and having a reply-to email address, but it lost points on a technicality for sender reputation.

Nothing piques a customer’s interest quite like a mystery sale with a special discount just for them. Is it 50 percent off? 30 percent off? Is it a brand they always buy or one that never goes on sale? 

For Days uses a clever through-the-keyhole animation that grabs and holds attention. But that’s not all! The copy promotes a unique discount and a surprise brand featured in the sale. 

The psychology of pricing can help you choose the right copy for your sales email. The rule says, in essence, that items costing less than $100 will look like better bargains if the offer is shown as a percentage discount instead of a lower price. For items over $100, a dollar-amount discount can be more impressive. But sometimes you can use both.

IKEA lists the Deal of the Day at 40 percent off, but the item’s discount price of $149 is more eye-catching. This is another psychological maneuver called anchoring, which says people use the first piece of information they learn as a yardstick to measure value. Here, the $149 price stands out not just because the type is larger but also because it looks good when paired with the much higher original price.

Some customers are always in the market for new products. Others need a little inspiration, especially for how to use the advertised products.

Scrapbook‘s email shows a rotating collection of cards made with the products being sold throughout its long digital circular. It can be enough to persuade a scrapbooker who already has boxes full of stamps, inking pads, and add-on doodads that yes, indeed, she really does need just a few more as long as they’re on sale.

Is one email advertising a big sale ever enough? We say no because you know not every subscriber reads or even sees every email you send. But that doesn’t mean you should swamp their inboxes with an email barrage. 

Sweaty Betty (U.S.) doubled its frequency during its four-day Labor Day sale. It sent an early-morning sale promo along with its regular daily new-product email, sent early in the afternoon.

The two sets of emails also look different, with different colored backgrounds and subject line styles. But before launching this tactic, test it to be sure your subscribers will tolerate the higher frequency, even if it’s temporary.

This can be one way to increase sales without discounts or incentives. An email like this is more of a lifecycle message that should be timed to trigger when customers are likely to be running out of your product, like the contact lenses Warby Parker promotes in this email.

Warby Parker’s email has three other things going for it:

• The subject line promotes the benefit of restocking: “Restock and rest easy”

• It upsells customers on its annual purchase program, framing the savings as a way to buy another Warby Parker product.

• It also lets glasses-only customers opt out of contact lens emails, which is another data point the brand can use to learn about its buyers and a one-click way to update content preferences.

Taking barriers out of the purchase process can begin right in your email. Give customers buttons, like Nordstrom‘s brightly colored buttons, which they can use to go to the right products without using filters to sift out irrelevant choices. 

This can benefit readers viewing your email on any device, but it’s extra-helpful to mobile users so they don’t have to peer at a small screen to use your landing-page filters.

When you have a hot sale, it’s no time to be subtle in the subject line. Meal subscription service EveryPlate pulls out the stops with this inbox entry: “Delicious deal alert 🚨 $1.39/meal!”

The low price per meal helps the sale stand out from all the emails with percentage discounts and also uses the anchoring principle we mentioned above to set the customer’s expectation for value.

Your brand photography looks marvelous. But customers might be even more moved to see how people like them are using your products.

Loverboy regularly features photos of customers enjoying the brand’s canned hard beverages and its branded merch. Its husband-and-wife leadership team, Kyle and Amanda Cooke, also show up regularly in promotional emails. This is also an excellent way to invite customers to join your brand on its social channels.

When you want to offer a discount or incentive, use a gift guide because you can structure your suggestions to give customers ideas on how to use their promotion. MailCharts subscribers will find dozens of ideas for gift guides tied to holidays, recipient personas, and other categories. This email from Aloha shows how the format can work even for brands that don’t fit the classic ecommerce business model.

Tip: MailCharts subscribers can review nearly 300 gift guides from brands like lululemon, YETI, and ABC Carpet & Home in our hand-curated Gift Guides list of email examples.

Your welcome/onboarding journey is more than a chance to say “Howdy.” If your brand uses a discount or incentive to entice site visitors to opt in to your email program, your welcome email is the perfect place to deliver it. This email or series should be designed to nudge your newcomer to browse and possibly even buy, and to start creating data points you can use to target future messaging. 

Jomashop gets right to the point with an email that restates the benefits of signing up for email, tells the customer how to use it, and suggests possible purchases or destinations to move shoppers right back to the website.

There’s a reason why many email marketers start working on their holiday messages when summer is still baking the sidewalks outside—finding ways to make their emails stand out is a full-time job by itself.

One stand-out idea: using a promotional email to invite customers to a virtual treasure hunt throughout the website, like this message from Catherine’s. One caveat: This email is not optimized for mobile, but it easily could be if the brand had highlighted only the treasure hunt. 

It’s not enough to sell your customers a product. You should use every opportunity to help your customers buy the right product. It works for everybody—your customers are happy, so they’ll come back again. Your customer service people are happy because they’ll have to deal with fewer returns. 

This email from Purple gives shoppers many avenues to get advice, from customer reviews to buyer assurance policies and links to online assistance.

How can you sell without selling? By creating excitement about new products and collections.

This email from Vincero makes a big event out of introducing new sunglasses with an animation that slowly reveals each new model. That builds anticipation for the mobile-friendly images and descriptive copy that follow. The subject line is just as low-key exciting: “New Collection Alert.”

Tip: Brands know email is a perfect vehicle for introducing new products and collections. That’s why MailCharts has a curated and searchable collection of 200+ emails full of newness. We unlock the Introducing New Collections list at least once a year so all subscribers can use it. Free subscribers, check your email homepages and your update emails regularly to learn when the list is available.

Customers sign up for email to get VIP treatment, whether that means discounts, early notices of sales, or other subscriber-only perks. So these messages should be prominent in your email schedule.

Casper reminds its subscribers about their special deals by posting a “subscribers only” badge in those campaigns. It’s a subtle but noticeable reminder that Casper is delivering on its opt-in promise.

Birthdays are the perfect moments to send your email subscribers a discount or other special offers so they can treat themselves by buying from you.

Follow Spirit Airlines’ lead: Use the recipient’s first name, time the message as close to the birthday as possible, and send a relevant incentive (one that won’t take a big bite out of your profit margin). 

That turns your message from just another email into a digital birthday card.

Along with helping your customers to buy the right products the first time, you’ll remove another barrier to checkout when you give them a memorable discount code.

The code in Case-Mate’s email, “ITFLOATS,” is genius. It’s short, it’s easy to type on a mobile screen, and it repeats the benefit of the product the brand is promoting in the email.

A coupon code like “WXAUG2023FLT” might be a data-rich locator for your ecommerce or CRM system but it’s super-customer-unfriendly if your email doesn’t automatically fill in the discount code on the checkout page.

“Shop now” or (shudder) “Click here” just don’t cut it as inspirational or action-driving calls to action. The full version of this Sugarfina message is full of CTAs that tell customers why they should click or what will happen when they do click or tap on the CTA. But we really like the first button copy: “Find Your Candy.” 

It fits perfectly with the astrological calendar that makes up the email’s animated hero image. Plus, using “your” makes the email more personal even though it doesn’t have any basic personalization tactics.

Tip: Need to polish up your call-to-action skills? Read Email CTAs: Boost Conversions with Compelling Calls to Action on the MailCharts blog for advice and email examples.

For some customers, a site-wide sale, a 20 percent discount, or an incentive like free shipping aren’t enough to push them into shopping.

Younger consumers want to patronize brands that reflect their worldviews or have values they can support. If your brand has a clear mission or vision along with the need to make money, make sure your emails reflect it. 

This email from Glow Recipe ran during Earth Day and makes the personal connection between a customer’s purchase and its environmental impact. 

This approach has one caveat: Customers who care about the mission will be watching to see whether you consistently follow the values you talk about in your emails. For Glow Recipe, the brand adds its value statements to the end of each message.