Coles Supermarket – great email communications & templates

After looking at the Tesco emails, I thought it would be a good experiment to see if any Australian retailers/supermarkets are doing emails well. Coles is probably the best place to start as they have recently revamped their emails and also repositioned Coles Online to be Coles.com.au (I think that’s a great thing – one umbrella brand without any sub-brands, so easy for the consumer to remember when they are going online).

Currently, Coles send out a weekly email and most elements of the emails are consistent. The only exclusion being for promotional emails. The Coles email structure is:

• Coles logo
• Key navigation on the right-hand side
• Anchor links to email articles/sections
• Heading including images
• Hero promotion
• Staff introduction
• Weekly offers
• Competition/promotion (if relevant)
• Recipes
• Support service (contact details and links)
• T&Cs

Below is an example of a bespoke email that was sent out during the Olympics, it follows some of the above but not all.

Coles promotional email

Below are examples of the standard Coles weekly emails:

Coles weekly email

Coles weekly email (alternate week)

Below is a section of the email showcasing the offers and recipe.

Coles email details - page 2

Below is my favourite section of the newsletter. Coles is actually showing they are there for their customers if they get stuck. The links to other Coles sites is a great way to drive traffic to their sister companies.

Coles support - contact and links

Below is an example of the T&Cs in one of the weekly emails. They are so long and could easily be a link rather than so much text/copy.

Coles T&Cs

Collection of the subject lines – there is no consistency with the subject lines. Fingers crossed Coles are testing subject lines to see which ones are getting the highest click through rates.

From email address

SUMMARY

Overall, I think Coles are doing a great job with their emails and there are only a few things that these emails can do to improve:

1. HTML link at the top of the email
2. T&Cs link rather than a few paragraphs
3. Subject line consistency