Are you staying in touch with your customers? Or are they dormant in your database?
While email marketing remains the most effective digital marketing tactic, it continues to evolve in order to meet your customers’ expectations.
Traditional email will always be an important piece in the puzzle; however, the smartest brands are now taking advantage of personalized automated email campaigns.
Not only are automated email campaigns personalized, but they’re also timely and more relevant to the customer. Automation delivers email to the right person, at the right time, and with the right message. As a result, more emails are opened and clicked, ultimately generating a higher ROI for your company. Companies that adopt automated email campaigns usually increase sales by 14.5%.
If you’re also looking to increase your customer lifetime value, then keep reading! We’re going to look at how automated email campaigns can help you achieve this.
What is an automated email campaign?
Email marketing automation is based on workflows that are set up to automatically send an email based on the action of a customer. Like subscribing to a newsletter, purchasing a product, or clicking a CTA.
Where traditional emails are sent manually and in mass quantity without personalization, automated email campaigns are triggered by the individual and include content based solely on their interactions with you online.
Why are automatic email campaigns important?
Automated emails are useful for marketers because it eliminates the time-consuming task of developing, sending, and managing email workflows. For example, let’s say you want to send an email to someone who recently subscribed to your newsletter.
The ideal next course of action will be to initiate a relationship with them. Your first email to them may include loads of information about your company, products, resources, and maybe even a discount code.
Imagine how extremely time-consuming it’d be to manually develop and send an email to every person that continued to subscribe to your newsletter. Eventually, you might get tired and stop altogether.
This is where automated email campaigns come into play. Once you set up the workflow, and customers take action on your triggers, the email automatically sends without any additional effort on your part.
Still on the fence? These automated email statistics don’t lie:
How to create an automated email campaign in Campaign Monitor
With Campaign Monitor’s journey designer, you’re able to deliver relevant emails at key moments to keep your brand top of mind with customers.
We lay everything out for you so you can skillfully design campaigns with a “set it and forget it” strategy in place, allowing you to focus on other important things, like growing your brand.
First, navigate to the Automation section in your account and select Create a new journey. Then, name your journey, select a list to be sent to, and choose a trigger. Triggers include:
- Subscriber joins a list
- Subscriber enters a segment
- Subscriber exits a segment
- A date or anniversary
Source: Campaign Monitor
Journey steps
Once these fields are established, you can begin personalizing the journey by clicking the + button and adding journey steps. There are three steps to choose from: Delay, Email, and Condition.
- Delay: put a delay between emails in minutes, hours, days, weeks, and monthly increments. This helps to space out the sequence to avoid customers becoming too overwhelmed. It’s also important for condition-based journeys.
- Email: email steps define the actual content of each message within the journey. You have the option to send the email to everyone on your list or specific segments for a more hyper-personalized approach.
- Condition: based on defined rules, you have the option to split a journey into two paths. The subscribers who follow the rule will go one on path and the others on a separate journey. Rules can be created based on subscriber detail, custom fields, membership, campaign activity, or journey activity.
You have the option to add as many steps as you like—giving you the flexibility to create a personalized and relevant automated email campaign for every subscriber.
Source: Campaign Monitor
After all steps in the journey are complete, you can click Turn on journey to begin subscriber movement and reporting. If you want to edit or develop additional steps in the journey, you’ll need to turn it off.
Now that you understand how to build an email journey in Campaign Monitor, let’s take a look at the different campaign options you can develop.
4 automated email campaigns you need to create
Email automation is based on triggers and activity, so you have countless options, depending on your own creativity and brand needs. To kick things off for you, we’ve compiled four popular automated campaigns that’ll increase your customer’s lifetime value.
Welcome emails
A great way to introduce your brand value and product benefits to your new subscribers is a welcome email series. In fact, these emails have a 91.43% open rate and can boost revenue by 30%.
These new contacts have already shown interest in your brand and, therefore, are in a perfect position to build a relationship with.
You can welcome them to your email list, include a fun video or image to show personality, and even offer a promotion that piques their interests.
Source: Really Good Emails
Product-feedback emails
How do you really know what your customers want? Are you meeting their needs? Customer feedback is a valuable method for not only understanding your customers, but also opening your business to new industries and revenue. You can send an automated feedback email to capture these insights and better cater to your customers’ needs.
We recommend keeping this process simple. Develop a modest design, tell your customers why you need their input, and include a strong CTA.
Once you begin collecting responses, analyze the findings and implement the feedback to provide a better customer experience. Your customers will love your brand even more if they know you care about the information they provided.
Sources: Really Good Emails
Birthday emails
We all love it when someone remembers a special event like a birthday or anniversary. In fact, birthday emails generate 342% higher revenue and a 179% higher unique click rate than traditional messaging.
Send these emails on the customer’s birthday and include fun features like mystery savings, free gifts, coupons, or even a festive gif.
Remember, these emails are all about celebrating your customers and making them feel special, not promoting your newest product.
Source: Really Good Emails
Lead nurturing emails
Fifty percent of qualified leads aren’t ready to purchase. How can you efficiently move them along the buyer’s journey without spending too many resources on them?
If your contacts are organized within a CRM system, you have the ability to tag leads that need additional nurturing and integrate the contacts with Campaign Monitor.
From there, you can develop an automated campaign that educates these subscribers about the benefits your brand provides.
We recommend sending an email workflow that illustrates the following messaging:
- Educate readers on a current problem they’re facing
- Showcase how your product helps achieve your customer’s goals and lives
- Outline the process for transitioning from the customer’s current product to yours
- Provide an overview of the tools needed to achieve your customer’s goals—introduce your product here and explain why it’s better than the competition
- Demonstrate how other customers have used your product with a case study
- Suggest additional resources, like an eBook or blog, for the customer to learn more about your product
While you can use a variety of different emails, the goal is to provide value and a solution instead of a sales pitch. With this automated email campaign, you’re able to educate the lead into making a decision.
Source: Really Good Emails
Wrap up
Developing an automated email campaign not only helps increase the customer lifetime value, but it also takes time-consuming tasks off your plate.
With automation, you’re able to create campaigns that are highly relevant and personalized without having to manually send email after email to every new subscriber.
Depending on your brand’s offering, you’ll want to consider sending the following workflows:
- Welcome emails
- Product feedback emails
- Birthday emails
- Lead nurturing emails
However, you could also send appointment reminders, upcoming expirations, blog post promotions, event invitations, and more.
With automation, the sky is truly the limit in terms of the emails you can deliver to your subscribers.
The key is keeping their needs in mind to deliver a powerful customer experience that’ll boost your ROI.
Are you ready to start building your own automated email campaigns? Campaign Monitor has you covered. We provide what you need to develop, send, and analyze your email marketing strategy. Get started today.
This is a guest post from Roberto Garvin at Mofluid.
Did you know that emails are 40% more effective than Facebook and Twitter when it comes to acquiring customers?
This is all thanks to email marketing’s high ROI potential.
However, not all your subscribers will have the same interests or respond to the same things. That’s why it’s important to spice up your emails with a little variety—send different kinds of emails, so that you reach different subscribers.
Read on to discover 18 types of emails ecommerce customers want to see.
18 emails ecommerce customers want to read
1. The welcome email
Pinterest, Really Good Emails
Welcome emails that are sent to subscribers when they first sign up are a great way to introduce yourself and give your subscribers an idea of what kind of content they can expect from you.
This way, they won’t be surprised by how many emails they’re getting.
The welcome email can allow you to build a relationship with your readers. Here are some stats about its effectiveness:
- Its open rate is over 91%
- Marketers that send welcome emails can get up to an 86% increase in their campaign’s overall open rate
- Welcome emails have 5 times the average click-through rate
2. The double opt-in email
SendGrid, Really Good Emails
The double opt-in email actually comes before the welcome email. It’s highly recommended to send these out, as they can improve your engagement rates.
3. The newsletter email
The newsletter, or value email, is one where you focus on providing your subscribers with quality content. It’s best to send these on a regular basis.
The more value you can provide your subscribers without expecting to get anything back, the better a relationship you can build with them.
Some of your emails shouldn’t be focused on promoting anything, but rather on providing people with helpful tips and useful information.
While customers like new products, ecommerce customers want messages with tips, educational content, and relevant information.
4. The promotional email
Even though it’s important to provide your customers with valuable content, it’s just as important not to forget what your email marketing goals are. That’s why you shouldn’t be afraid to send purely promotional emails now and then.
Just make sure they’re relevant to your customers’ interests.
5. The cross-promotional email
This email doesn’t promote any specific product but can help you build your overall online following.
In the cross-promotional email, you encourage your subscribers to like your Facebook page, add you on Instagram, or follow you on Twitter. If you have another email list for a separate but related topic, you can promote that as well.
Reminder emails that encourage customers to leave reviews for products they recently purchased also fit into this category.
6. The special offer email
The special offer email is just as important as the promotional email. You don’t just want to sell things to your subscribers without offering them any special offers from time to time.
Whether the special offer is a time-limited BOGO sale, a coupon code for 10% off, or a free shipping offer, surprising your subscribers can kill two birds with one stone: You can increase your sales and build a relationship with them.
7. The free offer email
Rifle Paper Co, Really Good Emails
Besides special discounts and promotions, it’s a good idea to occasionally give your subscribers something for free.
This can be a free ebook, webinar, video course, or whitepaper.
Just don’t do this too often—if you set expectations that you’re only giving away freebies, subscribers might get annoyed when you finally decide that you need to send a promotional email to boost profits.
8. The feedback email
Lyft, Really Good Emails
Asking customers for feedback is part of building a relationship with them. It shows that you value their opinions and are interested in doing what you can to satisfy them.
Asking for feedback is important because, if you don’t ask, you might never figure out if your products can be improved, if your customers are truly satisfied with your service, and whether there are additional services your customers want you to provide.
Embed short surveys in your emails, so that customers can provide feedback easily. You can also include an optional field that they can fill out themselves for custom feedback.
9. The story email
Consider sending story emails. Testimonial emails would fit into this category.
You can tell the story of how your business was created or why you decided to create your product. You can also tell stories of how previous clients were helped by your service.
Stories are engaging, touch upon emotions, and can increase conversions.
10. The curated email
Not every value or newsletter email has to be your own content. You can provide the same value with curated content.
This can be a collection of how-to guides or tips from other blogs. Another idea would be to send a list of recommended resources, such as ebook guides, video courses, apps, or software tools that your subscribers can get for free.
11. The launch or announcement email
Whenever you launch a new product or service, make sure that your subscribers know about it first. You can even offer the first people who purchase it a special discount.
Announcing your new products or services to your existing customers is a great way to leverage the email list that you worked so hard to build and can help you recoup the money you invested quickly.
12. The pre-launch email
Framer, Really Good Emails
Similar to the launch email, the pre-launch email announces an upcoming product or service that’ll be released soon. You can send several pre-launch emails leading up to your actual launch.
The goal of your pre-launch email is three-fold.
First of all, you want to build suspense. The more suspense, interest, and anticipation you can build, the higher your conversion rate will be.
Secondly, you want to presell your product. After you’ve promoted your product for weeks or even months, all you have to do is send your launch email and the sales will come in automatically.
Finally, not everyone will see or open your launch email. Sending a few emails beforehand allows you to reach more people.
13. The transactional email
The transactional or confirmation email is sent to customers after a purchase is made. Of all the emails ecommerce customers want, this is perhaps the most important.
The purpose of this email is so that they know that their purchase went through, but transaction emails can also be a great opportunity to personalize your customers’ journeys.
What’s more, you might consider using transaction emails to send reviews or advertise other services or products.
14. The shipping email
InstaCart, Really Good Emails
Send this email to customers after their product has shipped. Ideally, you should include a tracking number, so that they can keep track of when their package will arrive.
This category also includes emails with shipping updates.
15. The upsell email
Medium, Really Good Emails
The upsell email is also sent after a purchase and can be combined with the confirmation email.
Amazon, in their purchase confirmation emails, recommends related products that consumers might be interested in.
Whether you sell physical or digital products, cross-selling and upselling can lead to increased conversions.
16. The abandoned cart email
Moment, Really Good Emails
Did you know that more than three-quarters of shoppers leave items in their cart unpurchased?
There are many reasons people end up abandoning their carts. They include:
- A long checkout process
- Unsatisfactory shipping options
- Hidden fees
- Needing to create an account
- And more
Fortunately, there’s a way to get back these customers: by sending an abandoned cart reminder email.
This email gently reminds customers that they left items in their cart.
Sometimes, people abandon their carts for genuine reasons: Perhaps their baby started crying, they realized they were late for an appointment, or some other reason. A reminder email can help.
A whopping 48% of abandoned cart emails are opened, which is much higher than the average email open rate. (It’s worth paying attention to your subject line for an increased open rate.)
You can increase the conversion rates of your abandoned cart emails by including incentives for people to buy:
- You can offer a discount
- You can offer free shipping
- You can offer a free trial
- You can throw in a freebie, for good measure
17. The reminder email
Clear, Really Good Emails
The reminder email isn’t about abandoned carts. Rather, it’s for other reminders.
For example, if a customer has a subscription that’s expiring soon, you can send a reminder email for them to renew it.
18. The purge email
This sounds ominous, but it’s actually rather simple.
It’s important to keep your list clean. If there are people who never open your emails, it can skew your open rate data.
There are many reasons why people will subscribe but never open your emails.
Many people use a burner account to subscribe for free ebooks but never actually check it. Other email accounts may have become inactive, or the subscriber may simply have become uninterested in what you have to offer.
Before you clear these people from your list, however, send them a purge email. Tell them that you noticed that they haven’t opened any emails recently and offer them the option of staying on your list, if they choose to do so.
If you get no response, feel free to delete those subscribers.
Wrap up
Eighteen types of emails can sound like a lot, but not all of them will apply to your business. Plus, these are the emails ecommerce customers want to engage with.
Sending quality emails to your customers allows you improve their experience, further personalizing their journey and improving brand loyalty.
Choose the emails above that you think will be the most effective and start using them in your campaign. Then, watch the sales pour in.
Need help connecting email with your ecommerce business? CM Commerce can help.
Roberto Garvin is the co-founder of Mofluid. From email to browsers, search engines, mobile, AI, and now blockchain, Robert loves watching tech evolve and can’t wait to write about what’s next.
Twitter @mofluid / Facebook @mofluid
Article first published in September 2015, updated June 2019
Does your company send out emails for password resets, shipping confirmations, account renewals and the like? As a marketer, do you have control of these important messages? More likely than not, your company sends them, but you have little to no control of them. This can be a major point of frustration for digital marketers looking to build a cohesive and consistent customer experience and take advantage of all the touch-points along the way.
In this post, we’ll explain what transactional emails are and how you can get more action out of the ones you send.
What is transactional marketing?
To understand what transactional emails are, you first need to understand the marketing strategy behind it. Transactional marketing focuses on point-of-sale transactions between individual consumers. Traditionally, this strategy consists of four main elements: product, pricing, placement, and promotion.
In turn, this creates a more efficient communication system to handle a large volume of sales—rather than a focus on developing a relationship with a customer. Let’s look at a few advantages and disadvantages of transactional marketing:
- Low cost: Transactional marketing is driven by price, not brand messaging, so the costs are relatively low compared to a long-term campaign.
- Limited personalization: You don’t have to worry about building emotional relationships; you’re focused on the short-term purchase that’s run by price.
While transactional marketing does well to pinpoint a single sale, it can actually inhibit long-term sales growth due to the lack of personalization. However, when paired with the right email strategy—transactional marketing can be used as a communication port to inform your customers with product updates, subscriptions, order tracking, and more.
What are transactional emails?
Transactional emails are automated messages, triggered to send on demand by specific interactions on your website or application. Examples of transactional emails include order confirmations, shipping notifications, membership renewal notices, account status messages, and many more.
The current state of transactional emails
As marketers, we should care about transactional emails because companies send billions of transactional emails every month. Because these emails contain valuable information for customers, these messages are some of the most widely opened, read, and clicked emails around. In fact, their open rates are eight times higher than marketing emails. That’s a major opportunity for every marketer to optimize them and harness their power.
Unfortunately, the key to the transactional email kingdom has traditionally been held by IT or engineering departments who’ve commonly used the built-in email functionality of their e-commerce or CRM systems which offer little or no reporting, poor HTML support, and only basic personalization. As a result, transactional emails often feel dated, off-brand, and deliver an inconsistent customer experience from other marketing efforts.
This is why we’re used to seeing transactional emails that look like this:
In addition, the elements marketers are accustomed to leveraging in our marketing email efforts—real-time reporting, cross-sell/upsell, mobile optimization, and more—have been simply unavailable with transactional emails.
Marketers get control
Luckily, a sweet new feature from Campaign Monitor finally gives the keys to the transactional kingdom to marketers. We now have complete control over the email that our customers open and engage with most. This means that even minor tweaks to an email’s branding or messaging can be done on the fly, and without the help of a developer. More substantial changes—such as adding or changing a promotional CTA—is also just as easy as creating a traditional marketing email in Campaign Monitor.
So let’s take a look at some good examples of transactional emails, which may inspire you to grab those keys and take control of transactional emails for your business.
Order confirmation emails
Generally, order confirmation emails that you receive from in-store purchases are fairly bland looking and contain your standard purchase information, such as the order number, price, date, etc.
However, this example from Nordstrom is first-rate. It’s nicely branded, and it’s been optimized for mobile using responsive design.
Shipping confirmation
Shipping confirmations might not sound like the most exciting email out there, but they’re hugely useful for your customers who are waiting for their order to arrive. This example from Fast-Growing-Trees, allows their customers to easily track their package and also includes useful instructions on what to do once their plant arrives.
Any value content you can include will go a long way in making these emails more relevant to your customers and more impactful to your bottom line.
Return emails
With 191.1 million digital shoppers in the US alone, companies like Levi’s are wise to optimize every step of the online shopping experience, including when a consumer needs to return something. They use a helpful tone and outline exactly what to expect, which is reassuring. It’s also useful to have prominent phone numbers and email addresses in these types of emails. Finally, it’s definitely worth including links back to your website to shop again. If you can make a return simple, it’ll be easier for someone to buy from you again and know that, if they aren’t satisfied, they won’t have any regrets.
Password reset
Resetting a password is a total drag, so don’t make the experience worse by sending a poor password reset email. This example from Netflix gets straight to the point, clearly states what the customer needs to do, and provides a phone number to call if something goes wrong. Password reset emails should remove every obstacle and make it lightning-fast for your user to get back into your website or app.
Account summaries
You know that data you’ve got? Here’s your chance to put it to good use. Summary emails, especially when they’re personalized and based solely on your subscriber’s data, are the perfect place to put it to good use. You’ll often see these types of emails coming from wearable tech companies like Jawbone and Fitbit or social media companies like Twitter and Linkedin.
MapMyRun is an excellent app for tracking, logging, and sharing your workouts. Their weekly summary emails are a highly engaging way for them to share this data with their subscribers. It’s an excellent idea to include social sharing buttons if you decide to send this type of email so your subscribers can share their stats with friends and social networks.
Now that you’ve had a chance to see some examples of transactional emails, we’ll quickly look at a few best practices to make sure yours deliver.
Content for transactional emails
You may have noticed that many of the examples in this post contain a mixture of transactional and promotional content. This is fine to do, but it’s important to have a good understanding of the difference between commercial and transactional content and to follow best practices to ensure that your emails are CAN-SPAM compliant.
Types of email content:
Commercial content
Promotes a commercial product or service, including content on a website operated for a commercial purpose
Transactional or relationship content
Facilitates an already-agreed-upon transaction or updates a customer about an ongoing transaction
Emails that primarily contain commercial content must be CAN-SPAM compliant, meaning that you must have opt-in from the subscriber and provide an unsubscribe link, among other rules. Transactional emails, on the other hand, don’t need to follow CAN-SPAM requirements. The FTC clearly outlines CAN-SPAM requirements here and has some helpful examples.
When an email contains both kinds of content, the primary purpose of the message is the deciding factor in determining which type of message it is. Follow these best practices to ensure that your transactional emails stay compliant.
- The subject line and headers must only reference transactional content
- Transactional content must appear at the top of the message
- Commercial content must appear in a secondary position within the email
- The transactional content must be the main reason for sending the email
Things to optimize in your transactional emails
A few things to consider when optimizing your transactional emails include:
- Think about your customer journey – A great transactional email can help you grow your list, generate additional revenue, capture customer feedback, and make your customers happier.
- Customer service focus – Ensure that your transactional emails are always customer-service focused and feature phone numbers, email addresses, and help pages prominently.
- Consistent branding – Would you send out an ugly, plain-text welcome email? Probably not, but it seems to be an acceptable practice for many transactional emails. You’re going to look much more professional and engaging and provide a better experience if your transactional emails are consistent and compelling, from start to finish.
- Mobile optimization – While responsive email designs are taking over the rest of the email world, transactional emails are still in the dark ages when it comes to mobile optimization. This is seriously unfortunate when you consider how many transactional emails are read on mobile devices. Campaign Monitor’s transactional email feature ensures all your messages are mobile-friendly.
- Value-added content – Why not tell your subscribers how they can get the most out of their new purchase or recommend add-ons? Your transactional emails don’t just have to contain transactional information. Just follow the guidelines outlined above.
Exemplary examples of transactional emails
Are you still looking for inspiration for your transactional emails? When done correctly, these emails not only instill loyalty with customers, but could also boost your sales line.
Outlined are a few great examples of brands that took advantage of creating impactful transactional emails.
Uber
Take this confirmation email from Uber. The company clearly displays what the transaction was: a trip from a driver that resulted in a $65.00 charge to the customer’s email, along with the entire route and driver information. Uber also allows customers to rate the service or contact support directly from the email. By receiving this email instantly after the service is complete, the customer has a clear image of the company and costs.
Source: Really Good Emails
Takeaway: Be as detailed as possible when providing customers with their purchase information. Not only does this reduce the amount of time a customer needs to find answers, but it also means your customer service team will receive fewer support questions.
Hulu
While you never want to see a customer leave, it’s an inevitable action that can be easily addressed through a transactional email. Hulu used this email to confirm that the customer had deactivated their subscription, but also created a bold CTA to ask if they’d like to reactivate the account again. With this method, Hulu could possibly capitalize on re-engaging the customer.
Source: Really Good Emails
Takeaway: Utilize bold CTAs in order to grab customer’s information and entice them into action. Even if the customer has deactivated their account, an email will remind them of this action and re-engage them into a purchase.
Joybird
Joybird’s shipping notification really nails the head on how transactional emails can be impactful. The company clearly displays the tracking and order information, but also includes a comprehensive branding video that demonstrates what the customer can expect with the delivery. At the end, they even offer a $200 referral coupon. Joybird’s email provides every detail a customer might need to know about an order to make their customer journey easier.
Source: Really Good Emails
Takeaway: You don’t have to lose your brand identity in transactional emails, while still providing customers with valuable information. By including the product information with a branded video, customers are more likely to read through your email instead of sending it to the trash bin.
Wrap up
Hopefully, these examples have inspired you to take control of the transactional emails your company sends. Try out our transactional email feature and put more action in your transactional emails today. Now that you understand how beneficial transactional emails are, learn more about how to create a full customer journey with email.
The weekly newsletter. A welcome email. Holiday discounts. Although effective, these emails can tend to become overly routine, where pressing “send” is a bit too easy, and creating content can get lazy. If that sounds like you, it might be time to spruce up your messaging with new types of email content.
We’ve collected eight different types of email content to refresh your email strategy. While this list isn’t exhaustive, it’s chock-full of new ideas for you to begin implementing today. No matter what kind of company you are, you’re bound to find some good ideas in this list to send new types of email content.
1. Welcome email or welcome series
The welcome email has become a very common practice for most organizations—and for good reason! This type of email content boasts the highest open and engagement rate. Today’s customers and new subscribers expect to see this type of email appear in their inbox after their first purchase or subscription. Exceed their expectations by sending an outstanding welcome email or welcome email series.
Here are some questions you may not have thought of to get some juices flowing:
- Are my welcome emails sent based on how they signed up?
For example, sending different messages based on whether they signed up via your website, a social media page, or if they purchased something.
- When customers buy a specific product from me, what are they interested in seeing next? Can I send them relevant suggestions?
- Is my welcome series a good mix of content (opportunities for subscribers to learn) and promotions (opportunities for subscribers to purchase)?
- Is my welcome series focused too much on my company? Can I shift the focus to being more on how my company can help our customers achieve something?
2. Promotional emails
The world of promotional emails is changing as consumers become more leary of this type of email content. The world continues to grow in technology and available information, and consumers are being made more aware of when messages are overly promotional. The task then is to offer a good mix of engaging emails (how-to content, informational content, etc.) and promotions.
One way to accomplish this is to actually mix in content with your promotions. Make your promotional emails focus on the sell or offer, and highlight this focus using your stand-out CTA. Then, maybe beneath the main offer, you can provide additional free content that supplements the offer, using a less eye-grabbing CTA. This gives customers an on-ramp to dip their toes in without pulling the trigger on a purchase, which may give you more opportunity to convert them later on.
3. Guides, blogs, and other content marketing
Highlight your awesome content in an email. If one of your strategies consists of inbound or content marketing, make sure your list knows about it!
At Campaign Monitor, we send what we call “blog solos” to highlight individual blog posts. We don’t expect readers to spend their entire day scrolling through our resources pages. Instead, we know a lot of people want to be given curated and relevant content in a way that’s extremely accessible. So we send emails that give a brief overview of a blog post, then a bold call to action that draws them into reading the rest.
Other companies, like Invision, send weekly content highlights, showcasing a handful of different pieces of content for their readers to interact with. No matter how you slice it, this is a huge opportunity to engage your audience with this type of email content.
4. Loyalty and rewards
Loyalty and rewards can be expressed in dozens of different ways—especially when you implement automation.
Sending rewards based on purchases is a great start. Hitting certain tiered levels of rewards (spending x amount gets you free shipping, or 10% off, etc.) is a great incentive that your subscribers look for in email.
Another idea for tech-oriented companies is to send loyalty emails based on what parts of your app or service someone used. If you have certain workflows you want your customers to complete, you can email them with a congratulatory message and reward for their good work (like a discount on an upgraded plan, for example).
5. Testimonials and reviews
Social proof is one of the best ways to close deals and drive sales. And if you can wrap it up into an actual customer story (instead of just a one-off quote), then you can both nurture and engage existing customers as well as inspire new ones to convert.
6. Surveys and net promoter feedback
Asking your customers how you’re doing as a company can be very vulnerable. But it can also give you great insights into your performance, the culture you’re creating with your customer base, and how to continue, stop, or begin processes to engage with your customers.
Surveys can also serve simply as insight into who your customers are, like market research. It’s so easy to assume certain things about who you’re actually trying to sell to. It’s another thing entirely to see what people have to say when they fill out a well-informed survey. And email is the place to send these invitations for feedback.
7. Behavioral-based emails
Triggered emails, automated emails, transactional emails, behavioral emails—these are all ways to describe an email that is sent by your marketing platform whenever a specific action is taken on your website or app. A very popular behavioral email is a shopping cart abandonment email, which is sent when someone adds an item to their cart but doesn’t finish their purchase.
You can send behavioral emails based on almost any action, so long as you have a way to track your user or customer (like asking them to log in before using your site, service, or store).
In addition to behavior on your site, you have another behavior that you’re tracking all the time: email behavior. You have a massive repository of information showing you email engagement statistics for your entire list (or at least you should, if you have the right email service provider). With all this information, you could set up a variety of emails to re-engage customers that have opened but haven’t clicked through, haven’t opened in a while, or are constantly clicking through but haven’t purchased.
8. Newsletters and product/company announcements
A standard newsletter is super important, especially if you focus on content marketing. But more than anything, these emails should be a consistent touchpoint with your audience.
If there’s one function they serve, it’s to keep your company top-of-mind for your audience, and to remind them of your brand whenever you can. Any sales and engagement on top of that is a big plus, and you should definitely optimize these campaigns to improve engagement. But make sure you’re sending something compelling to keep your readers interested.
Wrap up
Don’t let your email content get stale! As you think about how to apply some of these types of email content to your own strategy, remember to pull reports now, and then track as you experiment. See what resonates with your audience, and try to maximize your impact based on what your audience likes to see.