Year-in-Review Digests
Here’s your year-end round-up on…year-end round-ups.
Yeah yeah, we know, it’s February, and by now we’ve all got both feet firmly planted in the endeavors of 2017. But at RGE, we thought we’d take one last look at 2016. Like a lot of folks, we’re ready to put that kidney stone of a year behind us, but alas, the internet never forgets! Even now, we’re still getting a few last-minute 2016 product year-in-review digests! And dammit, if they’re good, we’ll still read them!
Why send one?
Well at the least, they’re a good excuse to drop in on customers for whatever reason you’ve got in mind. At best, year-in-review emails can be effective tools for forging meaningful connections with your subscribers.
We’re gonna show you a few of our favorites and talk about them. First, a few objectives that seem smart to us about sending one of these bad boys to your lists:
1. It’s an opportunity to build your brand.
Year-end emails are a chance to reiterate to your list why what you’re slinging is important. It’s a chance to show your work; your company’s equivalent of an annual performance review. While we never think it’s wise to get all braggy, it’s totally acceptable to celebrate what you’ve accomplished together with your customers. Which leads right into…
2. It’s an opportunity to make your customers heroes.
As ever, put your customer in the center of the product — give them the credit for your successes! Make them proud to have been a part of what you’ve accomplished, and inspire them to take the next journey with you.
3. It’s an opportunity to upsell.
By demonstrating your value, you’re re-engaging customers with your content and possibly getting that new subscription, next edition of the product in their hands, or donation to your charity. Maybe get your customers to form some habits with your product at the time of the year when they’re setting goals.
4. It’s an opportunity to stand out.
While true of every campaign you ever send a customer, everyone’s getting a lot of year-end emails this time of year, so they’re easy to dismiss/forget about if you’re not really demanding attention above all the noise. Take that challenge and spike it down the net (that’s a sports thing, right?)!
There’s pretty much nothing you have to do in one of these, which means there’s just about no limit to what you could do. Have a total blast making this thing and your list might just have a blast with it, too.
Enough of our guff; let’s look at some emails. Shoutout to our buddy Carl Sednaoui at MailCharts.com for helping us track down these glorious works. You’re the man, Carl!
PlateJoy
SUBJECT: “🎉 2016: A Healthy Year in Review 🎉”
PlateJoy did a lot of growing in 2016, so they mapped out their company milestones on a month-by-month timeline.
- We dig the gorgeous mobile-first layout of this timeline. Paired with clear, concise copy, it makes for a quick, informative read on the go.
- Mmmm, icons. Mercy, do we have a weak spot for sexy icons. You had us at hello.
- Brand building. By the end of this email, we’ve been reminded about the wealth of new features, integrations, and updates to the PlateJoy service this year. Great mix of both product-specific and larger-industry context in which to situate PlateJoy’s special sauce translates to some excellent brand building.
- New Year, New Food! The call to action relies on your interest in diving deeper on PlateJoy’s milestones being sufficiently piqued by the time you reach it, so they leverage that good ol’ fashioned new years’ resolution momentum to make sure you start 2017 off in PlateJoy mode.
This approach is great for an audience who already subscribes to your service; it’s doing that good work of reminding you where PlateJoy fits into your life, making a case for keeping them around when you’re making your decisions about how to allocate your cash in the new year. The only concern is that the entire email is a single image; if a user’s email client or preferences don’t display images, we’d hope there’s a text alternative.
Wix
SUBJECT: “2016 Year in Review”
Wix is a leader in DIY code-less website creation, and their bread and butter comes from getting users comfortable with engaging their tools and building websites.
A few things in this email that serve these goals well:
- A catchy, colorful hi-res hero banner takes up most of the email. (Hey, my website could look like this!)
- Short, sweet list of company stats for the year to demonstrate to users that the platform they’re entrusting their web presence with is growing and stable. Who wants to build their website on a platform without longevity?
- Clear link to the website for more 2016 revelry. We’d guess this link is as much intended to get users engaging with their own Wix websites as it is to drive traffic to a recap post; show them why Wix is awesome, and get them back working on their site already!
This short-and-sweet strategy seems particularly appropriate for web app products like Wix, but we could also see where an email highlighting some gorgeous screenshots of favorite Wix sites built in 2016 could show that “stunning, inspirational, memorable!” Wix magic rather than simply telling it. Leverage all that free content your users are generating!
On the other hand, as we’ve recently discussed, there’s no shame in keeping it simple (via bandcamp):
Classy
SUBJECT: “A Year in Review: The Top 10 Blog Posts of 2016”
Classy is a fundraising platform for non-profits, and to back it all up, they provide informative, digestible content on best practices for raising all that cash money. Their year-end email takes the form of a top-ten list of their most popular blog posts, a great opportunity to drive traffic to this resource.
Lots to love here:
- Super eye-catching hero GIF. Stand out!
- The illustration scheme is really tight and cohesive. We’re left thinking we need to read ALL of these articles as a part of a series, and we’ll somehow raise a billion doll hairs once we’ve mastered all of it!
- Responsive design FTW! The 2–1–2 column structure works well for desktop, and goes to single column on mobile.
- At the bottom, some excellent sharing encouragement! The copy suggests that Classy really knows who they’re talking to—members of good-stuff-loving teams who would be stoked to read these posts. (And maybe subscribe!)
Ranking goes a long way in lending authority to your best content; there’s a LOT of stuff out there your subscribers could be reading, so it’s comforting to them to know you’ve sifted out the really good stuff.
Spotify
SUBJECT: “Your 2016 in music: personalized stats and playlist”
Enough about us, let’s talk about you. In this age of analytic abundance, when it comes to user data, smoke ’em if you got ’em. (And you really should have ’em!).
Spotify’s end-of-year retrospective is all about what you — specifically — listened to. Smart, because people love to talk and think about themselves! Or wait, is that just us?
- Spotify sends one of these pups out at the end of each month as well, and while this adheres to that basic format, there are some extra goodies for the annual iteration, including links to a personalized playlist (listen while you read) and some “huh!”-worthy stats.
- Mobile-first design! Don’t fear the scroll, kids. And anyway, as long a scroller as this email is, the copy is short and sweet, and there’s an excellent flow to the design hierarchy that naturally draws the eye towards each next section.
- Links galore. There are plenty of places to jump out of this email and back into your favorite tracks; not always a great strategy, but they already know you like these songs, so engagement is a pretty good bet once the nostalgia train gets going.
Gotta say, we’re big fans of a personal touch in emails. Think about how much more likely you’d be to read and engage with this email over one that simply told you about how Spotify did as a company this year? It all comes back to putting your user in the center of your story. Now, tell me some more things you like about me ;)
That’s it, our round up on roundups. For more delicious year-in-review inspiration, head to the Really Good Emails gallery. If you sent something year-end-y to your subscribers this year and think we’d dig it, let us know!
