Getting your Super Bowl email marketing strategy right

Why should you join Super Bowl marketing?

The Super Bowl, set for Sunday February 11, is one of those few days per year where nearly everyone’s attention will be on one event. Reaching over 100 million viewers every year, the Super Bowl brings in nearly 3x the traffic you can expect from other major events like the Oscars or the NBA Finals. The best-performing TV shows might reach 15-16 million, but nothing ever comes close to the Super Bowl on an annual basis. In 2023, the Super Bowl brought in 115.1 million viewers, an increase of approximately 3.1 million compared to 2022.

The point is, the Super Bowl presents a rare opportunity for you as a marketer, and given email marketing continues to drive the highest ROI compared to other marketing channels (yes, including social media, digital advertising, and, of course, Super Bowl commercials), it’s a rare opportunity to leverage this sporting event to drive more conversions from email.

In this post, we’ll help get you ready for this event with some tips on how to optimize the impact you can get from your email campaigns before, during, and after the Super Bowl.

We’ll also look at some tips for your Superbowl email subject lines.

Preparing your email strategy for the Super Bowl

In the lead up to the Super Bowl, there is a lot you can do to ensure that both you and your customers are ready for the big game day.

Roughly half of the Americans that watch the Super Bowl often plan to do so at a party. We're not sure how that will look this year, but regardless of where they are, viewers will no doubt spend a lot of money on food, drinks, and merch. In fact, in 2023 spending reached $16.5B, with consumers spending an average of $85.36 each.

To capture your share of this pie with your email marketing campaign, you need to anticipate your customers’ needs and wants for the day and help them spend their money the best way. This could include sending relevant and personalized sales a couple of days or weeks ahead of time, like deals on dip bowls, food, big screen TVs, or streaming packages.

West Elm Super Bowl sale

Or you could help your customers have a stress-free day by letting them pre-order certain items ahead of time, like pizza or wings.

Make pre-orders easy with email

Almost as important as getting your customers ready for the Super Bowl is getting you and your marketing team ready as well. As you’ll see in the next section, there are many marketing opportunities during the game that you’ll want to be ready for.

The key details you need to know

There are a lot of knowns and predictable moments in the lead up to the Super Bowl, and you should use this to your advantage. We’ll start off easy:

• We know the date: Sunday February 11.

• We know it’s taking place at the Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, Nevada, and will be broadcast on CBS.

• We know football games are usually three hours long, so a good guess is that the halftime will take place at around 8pm EST and will feature Usher – the first artist since The Beatles in 1964 to have two singles occupy the top two positions in the charts.

• We know that it’s likely to be watched by people off all ages, particularly those aged between 35-44.

But let’s go beyond this:

• We also know who will be advertising during the Super Bowl, as Ad Age is tracking everything they know about upcoming commercials.

• The tracker also shares what we know so far about these spots. This means that if any of them are relevant to your brand in any way, you can adjust your messaging to stay relevant.

We’ll have a few more tips for you later on, to show how you can leverage the obscene ad dollars from major brands ($7M for a 30-second ad) to help your own campaigns.

Ultimately, with all this information up front, you can begin to plan your email campaigns accordingly. If you want engagement on your site, you can schedule a campaign to go out three hours before the game to advertise last minute deals. If you want to take advantage of moment marketing, you could get your email design team ready with images related to football or the halftime show so you’re ready to quickly send a relevant email campaign at a moment’s notice.

Prepare. Prepare. Prepare.

Taking advantage of email during the Super Bowl

There is a lot happening when the game is on, and of course people are distracted. While many people check their email and social media during the game and the commercials, you are going to see a noticeable drop in engagement during the game.

Make sure your emails are mobile friendly

A few years ago, Moveable Ink put together a really interesting study to look at showing how people are engaging with email during Super Bowl Sunday. They found that email open rates on Super Bowl Sunday were on par with open rates you can expect on any other Sunday throughout the year. However, they did find that emails were opened much more frequently on smartphones and tablets than on desktop devices during this time.

This is understandable given people are away from their desks on most weekends, but it’s a good reminder that it’s important to ensure your emails are responsive on all devices, and that your campaigns, CTAs, landing pages, and promotions are also optimized for mobile conversions.

Leverage email for your retargeting campaigns

Social media platforms like Twitter have quickly become the digital channels people are engaging with during the Super Bowl to discuss the game and the commercials, but they are also often engaging with brands, websites, and search.

According to Patrick Tripp, senior product marketing manager at Adobe Campaign, people use their mobile devices to enhance their viewing experience by researching celebrities and brands, new products/services making their big debut, and more. And they're also checking their email during the game.

While you can certainly take advantage of the fact that your customers are potentially reading your emails during the game, it’s more important that you are leveraging re-marketing and contact capture opportunities that occur during the game.

For example, if someone is reading an article you wrote about the Super Bowl on your site during the game, or are researching your products, make sure you set up transactional emails or automation workflows with promotions or calls to action to keep them engaged.

Kraft’s Family Greatly Twitter campaign in 2018 directed people to a landing page where they were promoting an email newsletter with easy and delicious recipes.

Seeing a boost in social mentions is great, but capturing contact information will allow you to build a more meaningful and lasting relationship with your audience. Once you have a list, you'll be able to craft relevant remarking campaigns leveraging the data you already have from your subscribers.

Moment marketing at the Super Bowl

Finally, there is of course moment marketing, making sure you are ready to jump on relevant moments from the game. Oreo won this game in 2013 with their “You Can Still Dunk in the Dark” Twitter post during 2013’s Super Bowl power outage, but many brands can take advantage of these moments on both social media and email to leverage a shared experience for brand awareness and engagement.

#BigGameDosOrDonts

To do this right, you’ll need to have your email marketing team ready, maybe launch a “war room” at the office to watch the game, have some pizza (maybe even some beer) and be ready to quickly design a new campaign and write some new copy to capitalize on the shared conversation happening online.

Maximize impact after the game is over

Once the game is done, your work is not.

One way to understand this is to look at how people interact with advertisers before and after the game. During the game, Gen Z is the most digital generation to date and are more likely to buy on their phones, although their spending power is still lower. Millennials are the most likely to visit an advertiser’s website, whereas Gen X’ers and Baby Boomers are far more likely to engage with your brand right after, or even up to one week after.

Be a part of the ongoing conversation

While we can’t all be advertisers at the Super Bowl, there are opportunities to take advantage of the discussion happening online about the game, the commercials, the players, and the brands. You can send campaigns that reference those moments from the game, that follow up on your social media posts, or maybe even email out your own (much cheaper) Super Bowl commercial with a YouTube link.

Either way, around 115+ million Americans are riding high from an event – take this opportunity to start and/or continue a conversation with them.

Piggyback off of major brand awareness

Another massive opportunity, depending on your industry, is to leverage the goodwill of the advertisers for your own products and services.

Super Bowl commercials are often more about pushing a new idea or concept, as much as they are about pushing a specific brand or product. For example, Amazon’s fantastic 2018 Super Bowl commercial for Alexa was as much about the future of the connected home and voice control, as it was about a specific Amazon product. In fact, they never actually name the product in the ad (the Amazon Echo).

“The commercial built awareness of Alexa and Echo devices, says Deb Gabor, CEO of brand strategy consultancy Sol Marketing. “While it didn’t offer much in name of showcasing the value proposition of Alexa, it seemed aimed at driving the adoption of smart speakers into mass use.”

Brands who don’t have $7M to spare on a Super Bowl ad, but with an interest in the connected home industry, can piggyback off the attention smart speakers and connected devices will now have in the zeitgeist. It often doesn’t need to be a competing company, it’s almost more impactful if you are a completely different product entirely. For example, if you sell smart thermostats, maybe send a campaign after with the subject line “Our smart thermostats never lose their voice.”

We know which brands will be advertising during the Super Bowl, and in fact, we will likely already be able to see the actual commercial since they are commonly leaked ahead of time (whether intentionally or not). Major brands will be pushing new marketing ideas and new industries. Identify where your brand can jump into this new window to capitalize on this new concept awareness.

Football email subject line tips for your Super Bowl email campaigns

Finally, one of the most frequently asked questions about email marketing is how to write the perfect subject line. On a crowded marketing day like Super Bowl Sunday, standing out with good copy is even more important.

According to AWeber, 47% of recipients open emails based on subject lines alone. So, what can you do to try to capture attention and inspire action? Here are a couple of tips that you can incorporate into your campaigns. We’ll apply each of these tips to the same Super Bowl-themed email campaign.

Our case study will be a Home & Decor shop advertising their sale on beer mugs for your Super Bowl party. Check out the ways you can use subject lines to maximize sales with the following examples.

Generate curiosity

This is obviously easier said than done, but there is always a way to generate curiosity with your subject lines, and it’s often a matter of reconceptualizing the same question in a slightly different way.

❌ Beer mugs on sale this week

✅ Here is one item you’ll need for your Super Bowl party

Create urgency & scarcity

By creating urgency or scarcity, you are creating a small window for your customers to click. Give them too much time to act, and you’ll reduce your chances of them coming back to your email. This is especially true for emails on a mobile device – act or lose them forever. In fact, subject lines with words that imply time sensitivity (e.g. “urgent”, “breaking”, “important” or “alert”) are proven to increase email open rates...but careful not to sound spammy.

❌ We have all the beer mugs you need for the big game

✅ Today Only! One item you’ll need for your Super Bowl party

Personalize

We’ve said it a thousand times by now, but you should always be personal with your customers. Personalized email messages can improve your click-through-rates by 15% and your conversion rates by 10%. Often you will only have the person’s name, so use this in the subject line. Many brands also have much more information they can use such as transaction history, and city.

❌ Beer mugs on sale for the big game!

✅ Mike – we have Boston’s best-selling mugs on sale today only

Kick off your team’s Super Bowl campaigns

Sinch Mailjet is devoted to helping teams send their emails faster, together. As you prepare for the Super Bowl, and all of 2024’s upcoming marketing moments, it will be more important than ever to have your entire email team on the same page. If you do, you’ll be sure to score that marketing touchdown.

Check out all of our email resources and ideas and start building successful email campaigns to win the battle of the inbox in 2024.