But why is it such a big deal? Why should you revisit your newsletter strategies every New Year? Because every special occasion and festival comes with a tremendous amount of increase in shopping. And increased spending from your customers means that you have better chances of growing your business when you make the most of these occasions. 

Did you know that marketing emails, on average, generate $36 for every $1 spent? That impressive ROI figure is not convincing enough? Then perhaps you might have to ask why 90% of B2B marketers track email engagement rates as critical metrics to evaluate content performance. 

All this boils down to a simple concept – email is one of the most important components in marketing. It always has been and always will be! And when a new year is just around the corner, email marketing matters more than ever. Are you wondering how to make your newsletters stand out this New Year? We have some ideas for you. 

Brushing Up Your Email Marketing Strategies for the New Year 

The thing about email marketing is that audience segmentation, seasonal campaigns, and automation, all become so much simpler with it. Talking about seasonal campaigns, New Year Newsletters are on the top of the to-do lists for most marketers. 

You can use your New Year newsletters to thank your customers for their support over the past year. Or to show them how your brand has grown and evolved.

But then every brand out there sends out emails welcoming the new year. This means that there is too much noise amidst which your brand’s email has to stand out. So, let’s talk about some cool and creative New Year mailer ideas for your brand to try. Ideas that will get your subscribers to click that CTA button! 

New Year Newsletter Ideas to Get Your Brand Noticed 

A brand new year means it’s time to revisit your email marketing strategies – 

• Come up with new action points
• Set new email marketing goals based on what’s trending 
• Analyze last year’s performance reports and fill gaps in your marketing emails
• Refresh the visual content you use and explore options like GIFs and animated static designs.  

To do all that you need a strong New Year newsletter idea, to begin with. Below are some ideas that feel relevant every single year. 

1. New promotions for the new year 

Welcoming the year with new promotions for your email subscribers would be the most straightforward way to reward them for not hitting that unsubscribe button to date.  

And the best part is that promotions are still valid a few weeks into January, because, let’s face it – there is always that one friend we forget to add to our holiday gift list! So, even if you are a little late in planning your New Year Newsletter, this idea works. Furthermore, with most brands having ended their holiday sales, you have better chances of making a sale happen. 

Your New Year promotions can include store-wide discounts or discount codes for customers to use while shopping. Combo offers to promote upselling and free-shipping options are other ideas that work. 

KIMP Tip: Promotional emails have a lot of information to convey. Using images, and animated graphics to draw attention to the calls to action and using eye-pleasing visuals will improve the effectiveness of your promotional emails. 

Want to design emails that get your brand noticed? Get in touch with the KIMP team today. 

2. Use your newsletter to showcase specific products or services 

The crux of email marketing is to shorten the sales funnel and get your subscribers to become buyers. The best way to make that happen would be to place direct links to product pages from where customers can directly place their orders. 

What really matters is how you strategically choose the right products to showcase in your New Year mailers. How can you do that? 

• Start by shortlisting the products you wish to promote
• Build a story around these products and showcase them as relevant options for the holiday season 
• Curate an email that shows customers how your products would make the New Year celebrations more fun for them. 

For example, mobile carriers looking to create a New Year newsletter can design an email that talks about the beauty of staying connected with loved ones during the holidays. With this, the brand can also showcase their best cost-effective mobile plans and how they make long-distance calls convenient during the holidays. 

The best part about spinning a relevant story around your products is that it reiterates the relevance of your products to your existing customers. You can use this concept to showcase the best features of your hero product or introduce new products for the new year as well. 

The below email from Flock introduces a new lineup of apps for the New Year.

3. Gather feedback through emails 

Emails are the most convenient channels to gather feedback from customers. End-of-the-year emails can focus on questions like what customers liked the most about your brand the past year or what kind of changes they would like to see in the coming year. 

These year-end feedback mailers have two main perks – 

• You show customers that their opinions matter
• You gain valuable insights to fine-tune your content strategy for better customer engagement based on what customers expect from your brand. 

Polls and questionnaires and other interactive elements in emails boost engagement. And they are so much more attractive when you strengthen the aesthetics of your emails with images and other graphics. 

KIMP Tip: To make the most of a feedback email, you should have a consistent-looking landing page that supports the email. Ensure that your landing page also has a festive New Year vibe to align with the theme. 

Want to create cohesive newsletters and landing pages for your New Year campaigns? Choose KIMP’s Graphic design services. 

4. Year In Review 

Showing how your brand did the past year would be a great way to strengthen your brand’s image among your existing customers and therefore improve customer engagement rates. 

Your brand’s quarterly performance and other business-specific details might be more relevant in emails targeting your employees. But for year-in-review emails for customers, here are a few things you could showcase-

• New products your brand introduced 
• Number of new customers your brand gained 
• Any awards your business won 
• Growth milestones like global expansions 
• Products or services customers around the world loved the most 

Put visuals to the best use in these campaigns so that history and statistics do not seem too boring after all. Or as you see in the above example, you can simply add a link to a detailed year-in-review document or landing page. 

KIMP Tip: To make the best of both visuals and text content, adding infographics in your year-in-review emails will be a great idea. The KIMP design team can help you design crisp and catchy infographics that will have your audience fall in love with your brand all over again. 

5. Take your customers down the memory lane 

Year-in-review mails do not always have to be about your brand. You can also customize it so that every customer gets a snapshot of their transactions with your brand over the past year. Spotify Wrapped is the perfect example of this concept of showcasing customer interactions from the past year.

Customer-centric New Year newsletters can use infographics like conventional year-in-review emails but every figure indicated here would be relevant to the customer. These would be emails talking about details like –

• Number of orders placed by the customers
• Most liked product category 
• Total money saved by ordering from your app or website. 

Details like these are easy to capture when you have the best analytics tools in place. Customers usually might not have paid attention to such fine points. So when you present them in your New Year newsletter, it would make quite an impact on your audience. 

Moreover, customers are more loyal when they know that brands notice them. And by highlighting the amount of money or time they saved by using your products or services you ensure that they continue to transact with you. The below email from Loom exemplifies this idea perfectly.

As can be seen from this example, such customer-center recap emails remind customers of the value your brand created and therefore motivate them to use your products or services more in the coming year as well.

6. Outlook for the new year 

Year-in-review: done and dusted. You can still expand your holiday newsletters in the form of new year outlook emails. What if you could show your email subscribers what’s brewing? 

An exclusive peek into new plans for your brand or new products you plan to introduce might all work really well for any brand. Emails like these can nurture long-term commitments because you give customers something to look forward to. 

Ideas like these are easy to use in email newsletters for the New Year’s campaigns so that your subscribers will know what’s in store for them in the coming year. 

7. Contests and games for the festive season

You can seamlessly add games, giveaways, contests, and more to get click-through rates of your New Year newsletters to shoot up. 

Contests help you gather user-generated content. They also allow customers to share your brand on their social media pages. For this, you can use design templates that they can use for something like playing a game of online bingo or a simple “this or that” template for the new year celebrations. 

Need to create templates for your New Year campaign on social media? A KIMP Graphics subscription can help. 

8. Showcase your CSR activities with pride 

Nearly 77% of customers prefer buying from brands that are socially responsible. If there are CSR (corporate social responsibilities) activities from the past that are worth mentioning, showcase them in your New Year newsletters. 

Or, you could also talk about the new year resolutions for your brand towards social responsibility. It could be possible measures for a good cause or even a sustainability approach picked up by your brand. 

Our custom delivery vehicles are electric ⚡ and cruising neighborhoods in 16 U.S. cities, with more coming in 2022 as part of our #ClimatePledge to reach net-zero carbon by 2040. pic.twitter.com/3nXCZYaoFe

— Amazon (@amazon) December 29, 2021

On its Twitter page, Amazon showed how it began the new year with a new step towards better sustainability by introducing electric vehicles for delivery in some regions.  

Similarly, you can use your emails to let customers know about any new steps you have planned as a way of making the world a better place. It would be a positive note to begin the year and earn your customer’s trust.  

9. Build around a relatable theme 

New Year Resolutions is a theme that almost every user would relate to. Innovate around your products and services to make resolutions for the new year more fun and “doable”.

For example, fitness centers and gyms can showcase the need for adding physical exercises to the resolutions and add a discounted gym membership link in the email. 

A store delivering groceries can talk about new year resolutions with a special mention about adding healthy meals and then talk about the healthy food choices they deliver. 

As you can see, this concept can be used in so many ways by brands big and small. Make your emails more conversational. You can do this by recommending some new habits for your customers to try. Or a new skill to acquire in the coming year. The below newsletter from Skillshare is the perfect example.

Motivating customers to make resolutions for the new year will make the email more meaningful. And to make this even better, show how your brand would back them up in this journey. 

KIMP Tip: Adding a free downloadable checklist for resolutions or creating an infographic with links to different products that help your customers keep up their resolutions will all work. 

Want to explore such creative ideas for your New Year newsletters? Talk to the KIMP team today. 

10. Make New Year gifting less daunting 

Shopping for Christmas and New Year can be quite overwhelming for most people. You can use your New Year newsletters to simplify this process for them. There are several ways to do it-

• Include holiday gift guides. Your email can have a snapshot of the ideas and you can add a detailed blog to support the content. Need some inspiration here? We have a whole blog post on crafting the best holiday guides for better conversions.

• Recommend gift cards – these are lifesavers for last-minute gifting. So, you can design an email around the promotion of customized gift cards for the New Year. Gift cards are great because they expand the reach of your brand to new customers through your existing customers. 

A Few Quick Tips to Make Your New Year Newsletter Design a Success 

Now you have a bunch of ideas to experiment with. But when you really do incorporate them, you should be very careful about the design of these emails. The overall design should all be aligned both with the objective of the campaign and your brand image. Here are a few more things to keep in mind- 

• Your customer should be the hero of your marketing efforts, especially with newsletters. 

• Even if you cannot make up your mind, you can use simple New Year wishes but add a splash of your creativity. For example, your New Year mailer can include a link to a customizable New Year ecard. And when customers share this card with their friends, they are indirectly promoting your brand as well.

• Play with words to convey a catchy message with a crisp copy. 

The ideas are plenty but it is all about how you optimize these ideas. And how you get these ideas to resonate with your brand. 

“Customers don’t sign up for email – they sign up for your brand.”

-Bob Frady

So, make sure that you dig deep into the reserves of email marketing and paint the best picture of your brand. And what better time to do this than the holiday season or the dawn of a new year. 

Making Your New Year Newsletters Stand Out With KIMP’s Graphic Design Services 

If you look at all the popular brands and their New Year newsletters, you might notice one thing they all have in common. And that is – eye-grabbing graphics. Some have GIFs and some make the content pop with animated text. Whatever you have in mind to make your New Year newsletters more alluring to your customers, connect with KIMP today. With a dedicated design team, have the best designs created for your brand.

Sign up for your free 7-day trial today.