Teaser Email: Create excitement for upcoming competitions
Want to get people curious about your new competition site? Or, if you’re an older business, you’ll want to get the contacts on your mailing list excited about upcoming competitions and their prizes. Sending out a teaser email is one of the best ways to do this.
A teaser email is a marketing strategy designed to intrigue and tantalise your audience, leaving them wanting more. Think of it as being similar to a “Coming Soon” page on a website – which is also something our web agency often builds for competition clients looking to attract an audience before their new site’s launch.
A teaser email means you can get the word out about your competitions without giving away too many details. This is great for the following reasons:
- You’re still working out all the details
- You want to create excitement on social media
- Your competitors are watching closely
- You want to keep your mailing list engaged with your content.
A teaser email doesn’t have to be a lone email either. It can be part of a series of emails used to get your customers excited for what’s to come.
Structuring a teaser campaign
For teaser campaigns, we recommend sending out 5 to 8 emails over a series of weeks. More than that and you risk annoying people. This will lead to them tuning out, or even unsubscribing from your mailing list. Here’s how we recommend structuring your teaser campaign…
1. Welcome Email
Every time a person signs up to your mailing list, you begin a new relationship with them. Sending out a welcome email is a great way to say that first hello. Read more about Welcome Email Best Practices here.
2. Progress Email
You’ll want to find a balance between keeping in contact with your audience and avoiding spamming them. Letting your mailing list know about your progress in your prelaunch is a great way to keep them engaged.
3. Plug your social media
Encourage your audience to follow your business on social media. The more email subscribers you have following your social pages, the easier it is for you to promote your competitions. You’ll also be able to improve the attendance of your Live Draws. For more tips on this, check out our post on running a successful Facebook Live Draw.
4. Reminder Email
Don’t forget to send your mailing list a friendly reminder just before you launch! You might also want to include a short survey here. This will open up feedback on how things have gone so far and help to get your subscribers invested in your brand. (Having a great relationship with your customers is vital for competition businesses!)
5. Announce your launch
Your site is now live and it’s time to announce your launch. *Pops open bottle of champagne* Yay!
Tracking your teaser campaign’s performance
To get the most out of any email campaign, you’ll need to know what your goals are and whether they have been achieved. Here’s some of the ways you can check how well your teaser email campaign is doing…
Really understand your email marketing goals
From open rates to click rates, you should focus on how this campaign directly supports your business’s goals.
What are you setting out to achieve?
How will you know if you’ve achieved them?
At what point during or after the campaign should you have reached these goals?
In Fancy Business Lingo, this is your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
Pay attention to your mailing list’s subscribers
You’ll definitely want to track how many new subscribers you receive from the campaign. Especially if it’s connected with a sign-up form on your site.
If you’ve noticed that your mailing list is steadily increasing, your teaser campaign is working. If not, you might want to think about making small changes to your emails so that it better appeals to your audience.
You should also keep an eye on unsubscribers. If possible, try to find out why people are opting out of your mailing list. Some email marketing services will ask unsubscribers for a reason. If this feature is available to you, we recommend checking it out!
Another metric to look out for are bounce rates. Sometimes it’s a matter of your email being filtered out as spam. Other times an email has bounced because it’s been sent to an address which doesn’t or no longer exists (or the email has a typo!) This is known as a hard bounce.
You’ll want to remove any addresses with hard bounces before they unnecessarily clog up your mailing list!
Look out for mentions
Setting up a Google Alerts for your brand and teaser campaign is an easy and simple way to keep track of whenever your competition business is mentioned. You should also pay attention to any time your company is tagged in a social media post.
