Valentine’s Day Email Marketing: Brief Guide With Examples [2026]

Valentine’s Day isn’t just big for romance; it’s also one of the biggest revenue drivers of the year. This holiday creates a great opportunity for brands to connect with their audience. But with every inbox flooded with “sweetheart deals,” an effective email strategy is the key to making the most of this seasonal surge.

To help you benefit from this popular gift-giving holiday, we’ll show you how to set up an efficient Valentine’s Day email marketing strategy without extra effort or budget. You’ll also find ideas and real examples from top brands to get inspired.

1. Choose Your Holiday Campaign Goal

Before creating a campaign for your audience, you need to set your goals. Consider what your customers need today and deliver it as effectively as possible.

The most profitable Valentine’s Day email campaigns usually offer amazing discounts and limited-time coupons. Plus, you can target last-minute shoppers with special incentives or gift card options to boost conversions.

Nevertheless, providing your customers with gift guides or sending them a VDay card will help boost engagement and loyalty. You can also send them an appreciation message to thank them for their support.

Below, we’ll see three amazing Valentine’s Day email examples and why they work to get you inspired. Let’s see them.

Promotional Email Example

Subject line: 🚨🌹 last-minute Valentine’s Day gift alert

This Valentine’s Day email marketing campaign by Kate Spade is a great example of promoting your sale using a lovely email design.

The brand uses short copy, actionable language, a chic color scheme, and different fonts to ensure the recipient clicks the CTA. Moreover, the beautiful design is perfect for Valentine’s Day, using a simple background with colorful hearts.

When it comes to the CTAs, it gives potential customers two options: adding a “Shop Now” button for those who want to grab the special offer and a “Send an e-gift card” one to help last-minute buyers.

Overall, this is a simple and effective promo email marketing campaign to boost your Valentine’s Day sales.

Valentine’s Day Gift Guide Newsletter Example

Subject line: Our newest gift guide is here.

These Valentine’s Day email marketing campaigns are perfect for engaging your audience days or weeks in advance. Not only will they inspire your customers, but they’ll also allow them to purchase their V-day gifts early.

Like Rothy’s, you can craft a beautiful email campaign to be your customer’s digital Cupid. Make sure to write valuable copy highlighting the benefit of clicking your CTA, add your gift ideas, and help your email list find the perfect Valentine’s Day gift for their significant other and loved ones.

Lastly, you can use your email footer to add links to your social media profiles. This way, you’ll boost your cross-promotion efforts across channels and better engage your audience.

V-Day Love Letter Email Example

Subject line: Happy Valentine’s Day!

Now, if you want to send a more personal Valentine’s Day newsletter to your new and loyal customers, you can send them a beautiful email to thank them for staying with you and your brand.

Like Biko, you can use the letter format to make your message more unique and personal. Through the copy, the brand addresses key points and offers subscribers compelling solutions in the form of Valentine’s Faves.

Biko also adds a reminder to their “Self-love Giveaway” to further engage them and boost participation. Lastly, the brand adds another section highlighting the benefits of purchasing from it, such as free shipping, environmentally friendly packaging, a lifetime warranty, and a contact option.

2. Create V-Day Signup Forms & Landing Pages

One of the best ways to boost your lead generation for Valentine’s Day is to create signup forms and landing pages with compelling incentives that will get your audience to join.

Valentine’s signup forms

Let’s start with newsletter signup forms and the most important elements they need to stand out:

• Valuable copy
• Eye-catching visuals
• Clear call-to-action button

Now to Valentinify your forms, all you have to do is use holiday-themed images, copy, and a lovely CTA. You can use your form builder to make beautiful popups for your new and old visitors based on your goals.

For example, you can create sales-focused newsletter signup forms, offering visitors X% off their holiday purchase or a free gift guide to help them out.

Below, you can see a simple example of a Valentine’s Day form:

Source

V-Day landing pages

These standalone web pages focus on more elements to shine compared to simple forms. Besides the ones shared above, you need a compelling headline, the Unique Value Proposition (UVP) of your Valentine’s Day offer, and social proof like testimonials to win trust faster.

Thankfully, you don’t have to design this page on your own. You can find pre-made landing templates on email marketing services like Moosend or landing page builders like Stripo, and dive into their editor to craft those pages easily. All you need is a design with the prebuilt sections you’d prefer and the simplest design skills to customize it through the builder.

Let’s imagine that you want to promote your exclusive Valentine’s menu to increase reservations in your restaurant. You can easily customize this pre-made template from Moosend by tweaking the images, colors, copy, and fonts, or even adding new sections.

Explore Moosend’s builder

3. Design Compelling Valentine’s Emails

The Valentine’s theme offers plenty of opportunities to show your creative flair in your email design. Red and pink color shades, along with images of happy couples, are a safe formula for most brands.

Nevertheless, some brands stick with their existing style by adding more minimal elements, skipping the notion of extra hearts and flower visuals. Check out how Salomon delivered an excellent V-Day email without adding any of those elements:

No matter the style you choose, make sure that your main offer or message is spotted at a glance. Email layouts following a Z- or F-pattern secure an easy navigation.

The best news? You don’t need extra design or coding skills to design winning Valentine’s emails. You can draw inspiration from the pre-made templates found in your builder or create something from scratch. Just state the benefit above-the-fold to ensure your audience knows why they should give you their email address.

For instance, Moosend’s template library has some beautiful Valentine’s Day templates you can use as a blueprint for your email campaign.

Below, you’ll find one of our interactive templates. You can check it out and see how easy it is to customize it by clicking on the button below.

Customize it!

If you want to send your customized email to your audience, sign up for a Moosend account and see what else we have in store for you. After the free trial, paid plans start at $9/month for unlimited emails, workflows, forms, landing pages, and more.

4. Craft Unique Email Copy

What kind of messaging will best serve your campaign purpose? While the copy of most V-Day emails focuses on romantic love, you can go out of the box, especially if you want to differentiate yourself from inbox competitors.

Self-love notes, Galentine’s Day offers, and customer appreciation messages can be excellent alternatives. Find the perfect recipe, always considering your target audience and what they would expect and appreciate from you.

Look at this email from AllTrails, for example. They decided to follow a more inclusive approach by recommending excursions for everyone, whether they join with their partner or furry friend:

Subject line: Celebrate love outdoors this Valentine’s Day

No matter your angle, focus on the benefits and unique value of your offers to boost conversions. And if you choose to share unique Valentine’s wishes instead, fill your message with emotional and meaningful words to move your audience.

Further reading: Want to find more unique Valentine’s Day marketing ideas? Explore unconventional email campaign examples to get inspired.

5. Write Intriguing Valentine’s Day Subject Lines

Let’s say you crafted a beautiful Valentine’s Day email design with all the right elements. Before you deliver it to your customers, you need to add an appealing subject line to ensure your subscribers open it.

Before you create one, remember that your open rate is one of the most important email marketing metrics. A low open rate will result in low engagement and conversion rates.

To ensure that your Valentine’s Day subject lines perform, you need to follow a few handy marketing tips:

• Show the benefits of opening your email in a single line.
• Keep your subject line short, between 20-40 characters.
• Use emojis to make them stand out in the inbox.
• Add a sense of urgency with specific words, such as limited, last chance, etc.

Below, you can find some great subject line examples for before and after the big day:

• John, show your ❤️ on Valentine’s Day
• Lovable Gifts For Her & Him ❤️
• Our Valentine’s Gift To You! 🎁
• 14 days of love 🌹| Last day for day 8 gift!
• 25% off V-Day collection (last chance!)

Further reading: For more examples, check our 200+ Valentine’s Day email subject lines post.

Moreover, you can use a free subject line tester like Refine to help you see how your creations will perform and make necessary adjustments to boost your open rates. Moosend also has a built-in AI writing assistant to help you nail your copywriting.

6. Create Outstanding Calls-To-Action

Apart from writing valuable email copy and intriguing subject lines, you also need to pay attention to your CTAs.

As a rule of thumb, keep your copy short to avoid lengthy buttons. Moreover, action verbs (get it now, claim your discount, shop now) will add a sense of urgency and incentivize your recipients to click.

After you write your copy, choose the right colors for your button. Don’t let your CTA blend with the background. Choose bold colors that match the holiday, like bright red or pink, to make them stand out in your email design.

For instance, Peloton uses a red CTA button in this Valentine’s Day email marketing example that is hard to miss. Also, it matches the headline and the visual, creating a balanced and eye-pleasing result.

7. Target Your Audience With Tailored Emails

While a bulk email with best sellers or Valentine-themed recommendations often works well, you need to offer more personalized email experiences to boost your seasonal sales to the max.

You can begin by segmenting your audience. Think demographics like age and gender, or factors such as engagement level or customer journey stage. You can also use product blocks and custom tags to share tailored recommendations. This way, your emails won’t feel like ads, but like helpful suggestions your audience won’t want to skip.

Don’t forget to leverage behavioral data. By tracking previous purchases or recently browsed pages, you can deliver the exact content your contacts look for to convert them into customers during this special season.

To save time without compromising quality, you can use an AI-powered tool, like Moosend’s Audience Discovery, to find what product categories your contacts are interested in and where exactly they’re in the funnel stage to streamline your work more effectively.

Try Moosend’s Audience Discovery

8. Create Automated Email Sequences

Marketing automation is a powerful tool every eCommerce business can use to streamline its efforts. For Valentine’s Day, you can set up a sequence to drip your content to your subscribers before, during, and after Valentine’s Day. Especially if you aim to increase sales.

Start with a pre-Valentine’s email with your limited-offers at the end of January to give contacts plenty of time to purchase their gifts. You can schedule a follow-up email one week later with a more urgent tone. Focus on the value of your offers and share incentives such as free shipping and discounts to target hesitant deal-hunters.

Finally, you can target last-minute shoppers with gift cards or share DIY solutions to boost brand awareness. No opportunity should be left unseized.

Moreover, if you already have automated emails such as abandoned cart campaigns in your toolkit, consider adding a few Valentine’s elements to your trigger emails, or mention your seasonal incentives to give them an extra push.

Overall, the right email automation software will equip you with pre-made email templates and automation workflows to streamline your sequences without extra effort. Find the right design, triggers, actions, and everything will be set up sooner than you expect.

Set up your workflow

9. Optimize Your Strategy With AB testing

Last but not least, optimizing your Valentine’s Day email marketing messages is one of the best email marketing tips you need to follow. Not only will you discover what your audience likes to see, but you will also target them better with content that will ultimately convert them.

Running an AB test is possible through your email marketing platform. You can create variations of your first email campaign and send it to different segments of your email list to see how they interact with it.

Here are some of the things you can test:

• Email copy (short vs. long)
• CTA buttons (copy, color, placement)
• Color schemes
• Subject lines
• Graphic elements and visuals

You can also use the data you collected from last year and compare it with your new findings to see how your engagement changed and make necessary adjustments for better results.

Becoming Your Customers’ Cupid

Valentine’s Day is among the most important sales holidays of the year, along with Christmas, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and New Year’s.

To target your audience the right way, create beautiful email marketing campaigns with a clear benefit. Don’t forget to add the right subject lines and visuals to attract your subscribers’ attention and convert them into loyal customers.

If you want a great email marketing platform to help you, you can give Moosend a try by registering for a free trial. Among others, you can create forms, landing pages, and emails, send transactional emails, and segment your email lists.

So what are you waiting for? Get your arrows ready! Valentine’s Day is around the corner!