Email marketing is one of our favorite tactics for small businesses because it’s relatively low cost, relatively low effort, and relatively high-impact. Businesses like bookstores can especially benefit from email marketing because of the constant influx of new and exciting reads coming through the door, as well as events, holidays, and other promotions. Even the smallest bookstores are often vibrant, engaging businesses, so if you think email marketing doesn’t apply to your shop because you’re not some behemoth retailer, think again! Here are five examples of email templates that your bookstore can use to keep customers engaged, increase foot traffic, and boost sales year-round.

New Arrival Bookstore Template

In our last blog post about email templates, we mentioned the New Product Email Template. For bookstores, this email template would specifically be a New Releases Email Template. Each New Release Tuesday, or when you want to celebrate something special like a local author, or reads for a season or holiday, it’s the perfect occasion to send an email to drive excitement and hopefully online purchases or in-store visits.

For maximum success with these emails, we recommend a clever, attention-grabbing subject line for your email. Bonus points if it’s a fun, insider joke for the community of readers who love the book or the author. Including a photo of the book will also be more compelling than just text. Finally, it’s best practice to end with a call to action, whether that’s asking them to come to the shop to grab their copy, or a button with a link to purchase from your online store.

Event Invite Email Template (Author Signings, Book Clubs, Workshops)

We talked about all the different events you can host in our Creative Ideas To Drive Traffic To Your Bookstore, but don’t forget: putting together the event is half the puzzle. You need to promote the events too and that’s where an Event Invite Email Template comes in. We’ve seen people forget this so many times in emails and social media, so excuse us for stating the obvious: make sure to include the date, time, and location of your event in addition to a fun description that gets people excited. Your call to action for these emails should either be some way for the person to RSVP (maybe that’s Eventbrite or a Google Form), or if you don’t need RSVPs, you could include an Add to Calendar button, so they can set up a reminder on their phones.

Not only will you drive traffic into the shop with your bookstore events, but you’ll also give like-minded book lovers a chance to come together, make friends, and ultimately create a community for your business.

Seasonal or Holiday Promotions Email Template

Technically, this could be an email template for any promotion you want to run, regardless of a special holiday or season, but it is more fun when you have a theme to build around! When building a seasonal or holiday promotion template, you’ll want to think ahead and have it ready to go before the season or holiday comes around. That way you can time the sending of your email just right. Think about what times a year you naturally see revenue spikes and plan for a promotion during those times. Back-to-school, or summer “beach read” season, or the holidays, or even industry holidays like Indie Bookstore Day are perfect opportunities to have a sale that gets people excited about purchasing books.

Obviously, the point of these promotional emails is to offer some sort of sale or discount, so that’ll be the first element you figure out. But in addition to that, you can make these emails compelling with graphics and text that match the theme. Think of a clever subject line and a special header graphic that catches your customer’s eye in their inbox. The best marketing campaigns have personality, but are also cohesive, so consumers understand that all the moving pieces go together. Ensure that any website landing pages you lead them to match the theme, as well as any printed materials and possibly store displays too.

Finally, you can use these email templates to help measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Besides the click data within your email marketing software, you could track coupon downloads, or visits and purchases from a special campaign landing page to match your email to your sales.

Customer Retention Loyalty Program or “Thank You” Email Template

If your independent bookstore is using some sort of digital loyalty program, you could pair your customer data in your program to your email marketing software and reward loyal customers with special offers through email. The best times to email them would be when they join your loyalty program, and at purchase milestones. Luckily, customer retention emails can be automated through any email marketing software. The “welcome to our loyalty program” could be automated to get the customer excited and explain all the perks, then your “thank you” emails could be automated for after purchases with a nice thank you note, and any special offers they receive toward their next purchase.

Don’t have a fancy loyalty program software to keep track of all this? A much simpler process to set up is to create automated emails that celebrate customer birthdays or their first date of purchase (like an anniversary)! These are still versions of loyalty emails because if you’re offering some sort of thank you perk for these occasions, they build goodwill and encourage repeat purchases. Plus, who doesn’t love to be remembered on their birthday or anniversary?

A Monthly Newsletter Email Template With Reading Recommendations And More

As a cool, independent bookstore owner, we guarantee that your fellow book-loving customers want to hear from you and your cool staff– what’s going on behind the scenes, staff favorite picks, musings, and more. An email newsletter is the perfect vehicle to share your thoughts and interests with your growing community, and while you’re at it, you can involve those community members as well! You could highlight a frequent customer who just finished a huge series, or highlight a local author, a monthly book club, and customers showing off your merch just to name a few ideas.

Besides fun social items, your monthly newsletter should keep customers connected and informed of future events, show off your community involvement, and of course, highlight great books that you want to entice folks to buy.

Other Helpful Bookstore Email Template Ideas

These last several ideas are more examples of set-it-and-forget-it automated emails that will help keep your bookstore running smoothly. For starters, if you’ve started that monthly newsletter we mentioned above, it’s best practice to create an automated Welcome Email that sends immediately after someone joins your newsletter list. This helps them feel confident that they signed up correctly, it creates a nice touchpoint between you and your customer, and it gives you the opportunity to set expectations for the newsletter communication.

Then, if you’re making online sales, automated transaction emails like receipts, shipping (if applicable), and abandoned cart reminders are helpful to set up and are likely part of your point of sale program too. These emails will help avoid future headaches for your customers and staff.

Something important we want to stress about setting up an email marketing program is that most of the work is done up-front as you sign up for an email marketing software and build your templates initially. The beauty of templates is that once they’re completed, they save you time in your future work by making it a quick process to open a template, plug in the most recent text, proofread, and hit send. And the automation possibilities take it a step further by making it a one-time setup that you shouldn’t have to revisit again! But, we understand if there’s too much on your plate and the thought of setting up these templates seems impossible. If that’s the case, remember that we help small business owners, like yourself with your independent bookstore, get set up for success quickly or free up marketing from your plate entirely. Don’t hesitate to contact us for support!