Karolina Petraškienė
Content Marketing Manager
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Fortunately or unfortunately, summer is quickly coming to an end: meaning you’ll need to catch up on your back-to-school email subject lines.
Unlike previous years, this B2S season outlook remains clouded. There is much uncertainty about school reopenings, which impacts the usual school supplies and apparel demand.
However, the National Retail Federation has optimistic predictions for upcoming discount events. According to them, the total season spend will increase by 26.2% to a record $33.9 billion, up from $26.2 billion in 2019.
For retailers, it means that they shouldn’t miss their opportunity to launch back-to-school marketing campaigns and get the piece of that multi-billion-dollar sales cake.
So let’s look at 67 of the best ever-green back-to-school email subject lines that you may need.
In our yearly Omnisend email marketing research, we analyzed more than 10,000 of our bigger brands’ 2017-2018 back-to-school email campaigns.
We wanted to find out what the highest-converting email subject lines were, related to the back-to-school topic.
When looking at the data, we see that ‘back to school’ as a term performed almost as well as the other regular subject line phrases, which include:
You can see this in the following graph:
Since we’re looking specifically at subject lines, we’re focusing mainly on open rates. After all, that’s the main
Secondly, we’re also looking at the click rates for each of the top 5 subject lines.
So let’s take a look at the 5 highest-converting back-to-school email subject lines:
#1 Back-to-school subject line: “BACK TO SCHOOL! Come join the FUN! ?”
#2 Back-to-school subject line: “OH DEER POP UP SUPER SALE! Back to school Shopping!”
#3 Back-to-school subject line: “$5 Back to School Deal ✏️”
#4 Back-to-school subject line: “Back to School never looked so good! Specials all week!”
#5 Back-to-school subject line: “30% OFF BACK TO SCHOOL SALE ?”
As you can see from the five above, there are a lot of emojis here. That’s probably because the target is about the younger generation (aiming for younger parents), or for the students themselves.
Or, it could be that it’s a pretty light, optimistic occasion in itself, so the emojis fit the mood.
You can also see that three of the email subject lines contain all caps, either completely or partially.
That fits in with the light mood, and it’s always good to experiment with differently subject line styles to see which really pay off.
Apart from buying the school appliances, “Back to School” shopping is about looking cool. For kids and teenagers, this is the most essential when acquiring stuff for the new season.
Check out the following examples, how brands differently approach their audience and promote their products.
24S.com targets young women, college students of higher income. This brand highlights the most suitable for the fall weather products on the “must-have” list.
Although the products vary in shapes and colors, the newsletter looks stunning because of the design solution that 24S.com made. The list email structure helps a lot when the products and the size of the images are different. Take a look at email yourself.
An unexpected approach has Columbia. They take a chance to promote their summer sale and introduce new arrivals for back-to-school shopping.
I also like the images: instead of listing separate products, they use images of products for boys and girls and lead them to entire categories.
This brand doesn’t sell any of must-have school appliances or cloths. However, these guys take a perfect chance to promote leggings for both – mommies and their little girls.
The photoshoot they’ve used for this sale could also serve for many occasions: the Mother’s day, upcoming fall or spring vacation, and so on. It only proves the fact that you don’t have to invest much in preparation for an endless list of different occasions. The same marketing material can be repurposed in many ways.
Lego team encourage sales by offering a school-related gift for all purchases above $50. Gifts are also something that could be quickly adopted by many ecommerce businesses.
Cath Kidson offers a wide variety of products. They sell clothes, shoes, gifts, home accessories, bags, and so on. For the following back-to-school newsletter, they chose only bags.
For me, it seems like an email marketing strategy: giving decent attention to different categories of the products and not mixing them all in one email.
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This article originally appeared in the Omnisend blog and has been published here with permission.
