5 Veterans Day email marketing strategies to show authentic appreciation

Veterans Day celebrates the contributions and sacrifices of people who served in the armed forces.

With more than 18 million veterans in the US—or 6% of the population—as of 2023, many brands take this day as an opportunity to express gratitude to US veterans, show support, and engage with their audience in a meaningful way.

It’s crucial to note that Veterans Day email marketing strategies are markedly different from those for Christmas, Valentine’s Day, or Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM). This is because Veterans Day isn’t about explicitly promoting your brand and offering steep discounts. It’s about showing appreciation and building brand trust ahead of the holiday season.

Here are 5 Veterans Day marketing ideas to help you build a meaningful connection with your audience this year, without being too pushy or sales-y.

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1. Thank veterans for their service—without a CTA

Emails without a call to action (CTA) are rare, and for good reason. Customer lifecycle marketing is about moving people through the customer journey, which means showing them a next step.

But if there were ever an occasion to forgo a CTA in exchange for some memorability, Veterans Day would be it.

If you have customer data that can help you build an audience segment of veterans to thank, your no-strings-attached message will be almost immeasurably memorable. But if it doesn’t make sense for your brand to collect that data, consider using demographic segmentation and geo-targeting to reach the right audience with your thank-you message.

Show your brand cares about veterans by thanking them for their service without a sales pitch. It’s a great way to establish some brand integrity, especially so close to BFCM.

Veterans Day marketing example: Body Restore

Here, Body Restore, a brand that sells shower products, uses email marketing to express their gratitude to veterans. A captivating banner and a heartfelt note, with no CTA buttons, are enough to show Body Restore cares.

Source: Body Restore

2. Share real veteran stories from your community

User-generated content (UGC) is particularly effective at building trust because it sets aside your brand’s point of view to center that of your customers. For holidays like Veterans Day, which are ultimately about showing appreciation, UGC is almost a must-have component of your email marketing strategy.

In the weeks leading up to Veterans Day, here are a few reliable ways to collect UGC and stories from your veteran subscribers and customers:

• Ask for responses via an email campaign.
• Create a mechanism for people to share stories directly on your website or through comments on social media.
• Use a branded hashtag to invite your audience to share their own pictures, stories, and videos on social media.

Once you’ve collected UGC from veterans (and permission to use it!), you can share it on your organic social media accounts, in your paid marketing efforts, on your website, and via email and text message marketing. Try launching a specific sign-up form for those campaigns so you know that audience came through your Veterans Day storytelling.

Veterans Day marketing example: Vital Proteins

If you can’t collect enough customer UGC for Veterans Day, try asking your employees instead. Whether or not they’re veterans (but preferably if they are!), ask them what Veterans Day means to them, then share their answers with your audience.

Here, supplement brand Vital Proteins shares a genuine and heartfelt answer from an employee in a blog post on their website.

Source: Vital Proteins blog

3. Work with an influencer or a celebrity

Teaming up with influencers and celebrities can help you raise brand awareness and increase your reach through collaboration.

For Veterans Day, working with influencers and celebrities can also add some complexity to your message and raise money to help veterans nationwide.

From a marketing efficiency perspective, creating an audience segment of fans for any specific influencer is a sound part of any CRM strategy. Segments like these—and the data that accompanies them—can tell you whether it’s a good use of budget to work with that influencer again.

Veterans Day marketing example: PERFORMIX

PERFORMIX, a brand that sells sports nutrition and wellness products, has done a lot for veterans through their foundation FitOps, which helps veterans become personal trainers. The brand teamed up with John Cena to raise donations for veterans: for every dollar people donated, John Cena matched the amount.

Source: PERFORMIX Instagram

Note, however, that you don’t necessarily have to work with world-famous celebrities. Partnering with a local influencer can help you spread the word about your brand and honor and support veterans through a thoughtful initiative.

4. Recognize that veterans are more than soldiers

Veteran soldiers who have seen active duty are deserving of gratitude, but so are the veterans who served in other ways, from physicians to administrative roles.

If your products can somehow serve this audience and you can collect UGC that highlights the importance of the role, you may have hit the jackpot on a winning Veterans Day email campaign.

Veterans Day marketing example: fatty15

Here, supplements brand fatty15 co-founder Dr. Eric Venn-Watson makes a solid connection between Veterans Day and his own life: he served as a physician for the US Navy and US Marine Corps and supports entrepreneurship programs for military veterans in San Diego.

Note, however, that the campaign isn’t all about Dr. Venn-Watson. After his feature is a thoughtful and detailed customer review from a veteran, about how fatty15 supplements have helped him cope with anxiety. The connection to the product is an obvious fit, which helps this Veterans Day campaign click into place without any shoehorning.

Source: fatty15

5. Extend Veterans Day discounts to a specific audience

Coupon and discount codes can boost sales, build brand loyalty, and produce valuable data about your customers’ buying habits—so why not extend them to certain segments of your audience on Veterans Day?

If you don’t want to share promo codes with your whole audience due to cost considerations, use a marketing automation platform to send codes to specific groups, like your most engaged subscribers or VIP customers.

If you have customer data from last year’s Veterans Day, you can narrow down eligibility even further to reward only those who bought in November before BFCM last year.

Veterans Day marketing example: Brandless

Wellness company Brandless includes a Veteran Day-themed code subscribers can either use themselves or share with a veteran they’re close with. The ability to share the code is a nice touch, as it passes on the thank-you mechanism to the recipients themselves.

Source: Brandless

Show appreciation for veterans with Klaviyo B2C CRM

Your appreciation for veterans will have the most impact when it’s expressed to the right audience. Through segmentation and targeted discount campaigns, you can make sure your Veterans Day campaign is sent to the right people at the right time.

Klaviyo B2C CRM—the only CRM built for B2C—makes it easy for brands to collect the zero- and first-party data they need to deliver personalized experiences for their customers.

As a data platform with email and texting automation, customer service, and analytics under one roof, Klaviyo B2C CRM is making it possible for brands to scale personalization for thousands or even millions of customers.