Happy Be a Millionaire Day! Leveraging ‘Special Days’ for Creative Email Campaigns

Today is also Pick Strawberries Day, and National Lucky Penny Day is coming up on May 23. If you miss any of these holidays, you have all the rest of May to celebrateNational Barbecue Month. Could any of these days give you a new and interesting hook for your next email campaign?

Christmas, Valentine's Day, Mothers Day, Halloween … each of these holidays and "special" days occupies a prime spot in many retail marketers’ email calendars. You might even have begun planning out your Black Friday strategies by now.

But what do you do for inspiration the rest of the year when you need a campaign theme or a fresh approach to snare your customer's attention? Look to "second tier" holidays or the thousands of specially declared days, weeks or months that honor people, movements, ideas or historical events, such as National Bike Month or National Escargot Day (May 24).

Second-tier holidays and special days can help you inject personality into your emails, thus making them stand out in the inbox, but they can do much more. They also can increase near- and long-term engagement and deliver significant revenue.

Have Some Pi and Buy Green
I found a couple of creative examples in my own inbox. A King Arthur Flour email focused on March 14, Pi Day (get it, 3/14), with an offer of $3.14 shipping on orders totaling $31.41 or more.

ZAGG, a mobile accessory retailer, put a new twist on St. Patrick's Day. It ditched the clichéd "Savin' o' the Green" approach, offering instead a discount on any green product in its inventory. Nary a leprechaun in sight.

I absolutely loved these two emails and wanted to learn more, so I quizzed the marketers who worked on the campaigns about what inspired their ideas, how they created and launched the campaigns, and whether they paid off in the end. (Spoiler alert: They did!)

Each marketer shares details from their campaign: