6 Best Year in Review Email Tips, Examples & Templates
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As humans, we love to look back on our achievements, to feel part of a success story, and to learn new things about ourselves.
A year in review email lets you check all those boxes for your customers. It’s an opportunity to nurture relationships by placing your customer at the center of your story. But how can you create the most effective emails?
In this post, we provide the very best year-end summary examples along with best practice tips to help ease your customer relationship into the new year, on the strongest possible foot.
A year in review email goes directly to your customers once per year.
It’s a recap, wrap-up or summary of how each customer interacted with your brand over the past year. Usually, these emails aren’t just a report filled with data. They tell a story about the individual customer’s journey with your brand.
Almost like birthday emails, it’s a way to thank customers for their loyalty. However, while birthday emails usually include an exclusive perk or discount, year in review emails are more of a celebration of the relationship with your customer.
These emails usually focus on the customer’s milestones rather than the company’s achievements, but a balance of both works well, too.
Your customers are bombarded with hundreds of marketing emails every week. This is an opportunity for your brand to stand out from the crowd by stopping the sales and taking a moment to recognize the individual at the other end of the campaign - your customer!
Here’s why a year-end summary email is so valuable:
Customers who receive an extra-special year in review email could tell their friends about it or share it on social media, which is great word-of-mouth marketing for your business.
You can get creative with your year in review emails, and make them personal to your brand and the customer. However, to get you started, take a look at these ideas for some ways to approach the message.
Pro tip: Not sure how to get started? Use an email builder! An email builder has a drag-and-drop editor that’s so user-friendly anyone can use it to edit emails. Plus, you can access hundreds of highly engaging and fully customizable email templates, including stunning year in review templates!
People like to be a part of success stories. Use this email to share the stats around your company’s growth, from how many customers you served to how many new employees you hired.
Your recipients probably aren’t interested in vanity metrics like your social media follower count, so skip those stats.
Numbers are great, but what other milestones and achievements can you cover?
Think about successful launches or events, awards you won or new services that improved the customer experience.
Gather data to celebrate everything the customer has achieved in a year with your product or service.
Spotify does this well with its yearly “Wrapped” feature, which provides a vibrant recap of the customer’s listening trends. In this case, the email’s call-to-action takes users to the app to see their full yearly review.
Subject line: Your year in music is here.
Feel free to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. You could examine your customer data to look for interesting trends, such as top-selling products and most shared social media posts or webinars.
Stick to trends that are relevant to your customers’ lifestyles and shopping habits. This will change depending on your industry, of course.
If you’re strapped for interesting insights and trends, look to the wider industry.
You could share some top news stories and recap how the industry progressed over the year.
If your emails are taking too long or are too tricky to design, try an email builder. Get started with a library of hundreds of professionally designed templates that are customizable down to the finest detail. Browse templates for just about everything, from yearly reviews to company blog round-ups, company news and more.
Email builders have a dynamic web scraping tool. All you need to do is type a URL and the tool automatically populates all relevant information, including a title, image, description and link.
That means you don’t have to add this information manually, and there’s no need to download and re-upload images from the web! So, it’s easy to share news articles from your industry.
Combine all the usual email newsletter best practices with these year in review best practice tips for an email your subscribers are bound to enjoy reading.
A yearly summary should be a standalone email, so send it separately to your holiday emails and any promotional messages.
The year in review email is about showing appreciation while giving readers a reason to continue their relationship with your brand.
Sharing numerical data acts as proof of the year’s success. People like to see tangible growth, so they know exactly what has been achieved.
A huge wall of text can be overwhelming for readers.
Make your emails more engaging by adding visuals, GIFs or videos, and by breaking up the copy into smaller sections.
An email builder can help you source and add visual content in minutes. The platform gives you direct access to over 2 million royalty-free images, GIFs and videos.
There are also integrations with internal communications tools, such as Slack and Teams. So, if anyone on your team has shared relevant visuals such as graphs or timelines on those channels, you can easily drag those graphics into your newsletter to tell the story visually.
You can be sure the format of all pre-designed templates is highly engaging, too. The templates are broken up into digestible sections, making them easy to follow for your audience.
An estimated 41.6% of users open emails on mobile, so make sure your email is designed for mobile. If you skip this, there’s a risk that formatting that looks great on desktop, becomes skewed on mobile.
In other words, your email becomes hard to read and disengaging.
If you want to avoid this headache email builders contain beautiful templates created with email-optimized and tested code. You don’t need to do any of your own coding and you’ll know your designs will render perfectly across all device types and email clients.
It’s super easy to show gratitude to your readers, and a “thank you” is always well-received.
Something as simple as “Thank you for choosing [Brand] for all your [Service] needs!” works well.
While year in review emails aren’t primarily centered around conversions, you can make them actionable in ways that benefit your business, while giving value to the user.
Here are some ideas for an actionable email:
Boost engagement in your year summary emails by starting with the best year in review templates.
We’ve rounded up some high-impact templates ready for you to customize with your own data and information.
Share the most notable news stories from the year. This can include stories from within the business, the wider industry, or both.
It’s best to format this email with large headings to break up the stories, and images (or even videos) to add visual interest. Stick to summaries of each story, or the email will get too long, and consider linking out to blog posts or articles for readers who want to dive deeper.
We think this template would be perfect…
Subject: 2024 Year in Review: Documenting the Delightful
Wrap up all the best bits from your year into an email for your customers.
Cover the highlights, from new products to awards won, and even the countries that make up most of your customer base.
Be sure to thank customers for their support over the year, too.
We think this template would be perfect…
Subject line: 2024 Year in Review!
This email is all about numbers, but it’s best to support those figures with a little storytelling, or emails can feel dry.
Recap on your company’s journey this year. For example, a coffee company could share their best-selling blend, how many cups of coffee its customers drank, and which blog posts had the most views.
Keep the language simple, fun and lighthearted.
We think this template would be perfect…
Subject line: ☕2024 Year in Review!
As humans, we love learning about ourselves, so an email that reflects on the customer’s year is sure to be engaging.
These emails are personal to the individual, which helps them feel valued as a customer.
As an example, Spotify’s yearly recap lets listeners know about their most-played artists and genres. A SaaS product might let users know how much time they saved using that particular product. Get creative with the data you have and consider what’s relevant for your industry.
We think this template would be perfect…
Subject line: Your 2024 in Review: What Type of [Brand] Personality Are You?
Promote a sense of togetherness among your audience, by emphasizing everything you achieved as a team.
This helps to cement your relationship and helps the reader to feel part of something big. Elevate this email with plenty of high-quality photography and other graphics.
We think this template would be perfect…
Subject line: It’s that time! Look at our 2024 Year in Review
Your email’s subject line plays a huge part in whether your email is opened. From year in review to Black Friday subject lines, take some time to craft an irresistible message that boosts open rates.
Here are some great year-end summary example subject lines to get you started:
A year in review email is all about celebrating the past while thinking about the future. It’s a way to personally connect with customers by focusing on their experience with your product or service. This helps to foster loyalty and encourages customers to stick with you for another year.
You can design these emails with an email builder. Simply grab a year in review email template and drag in the graphics, headings and other elements you need. This saves time and money on the design process, so you can spend more time collecting data and crafting great stories.
To find out more about how to export those designs to your favorite ESP, read our blogs on sending HTML emails in Gmail and Outlook.
