So let me start off by saying that I pretty much love everything about this email from the folks over at REI. The subject line, the visible text, the body, everything. As far as I’m concerned, this is pretty much the exact right way to do a clearance sale email.
Subject Line and Visible Text
Let’s start with what the reader first sees: “Summer Clearance-Save Up To 50%”. The subject line is clear and to the point. You know when you open the email, you’re going to get information on a clearance sale. It doesn’t use emojis, it doesn’t tease you, it just tells you what it is. It is straightforward and I love it (I wasn’t expecting personality in this email, as REI doesn’t really do that sort of thing).
The visible text then reads as follows: “Shop The North Face, Patagonia, prAna & more”. It fits well within the constraints of teaser text so you don’t get the dreaded ellipses due to the message being truncated. Further, as I’ll discuss in the body section, it does an excellent job of supporting the subject line and the focus of the email.
Email Body Content
As I’ve mentioned previously, body content for clearance sales are surprisingly tricky. REI provides a big old “clearance” image as the main focus, but then in the secondary (below the fold) area, they include three brands – North Face, Patagonia and prAna. Ok, do be fair, they also include the logos for these brands above the fold, but you get the idea.
The reason this works is clear. The company name dropped these brands in the visible teaser text, so the email promotes the three brands via logos and images of a single product from each brand. In addition, the copy in the body supports this by stating “Really big brands. Really big savings.”.
In essence, this email from REI tells you just about everything you need to know about their sale. The only issue I had with this email (and it is a very small one) is that when I clicked on the logos for the three featured brands, it took me to the clearance landing page rather than a sub-page devoted to showing the deals for the brand. When you click on the below the fold images, it does take you to special “deal” pages for each of the brands, so I can only assume that hotlinking (yes, I said “hotlinking” because I’m old and I’ve been doing this for a very, very long time) the logos to the generic clearance page was an oversight.
Overall though, this is exactly the right way to do a clearance sale email.