4 Essential Email Campaigns
Many claim that email marketing is over saturated and outdated. However, these email campaigns are still successful in today's business landscape.
Key Takeaways
Lead nurturing emails are most effective when they're automated to send when a user does something on your site.
The key to newsletter emails is to make sure the content always offers something valuable for new subscribers.
Transactional emails are triggered when the user hits various parts of the purchasing process.
There are many kinds of marketing emails your company can send to boost brand awareness, nurture leads and generate sales.
Newsletter Emails
The first one is the most common of them all the newsletter. How common? Well, 81% of B2B marketers say their most used form of content marketing is email newsletters.
Newsletters or emails that are sent out at a regular frequency, usually anywhere from daily to monthly depending on your business and your audience. The key is to make sure the content always offers something valuable for new subscribers.
Retail trading giant Robinhood sends out its daily Robinhood Snacks email to keep its users up to date on the latest financial news that could affect their investments. And, Zillow hits inboxes weekly with house recommendations in your area.
However, not every business offers the quantity of content needed for a weekly newsletter. That doesn't mean a newsletter isn't valuable. Opening Act is a nonprofit committed to advancing arts equity for students of color. Its monthly newsletter showcases events, educational information, and news from the students they serve. And that newsletter drive significant donations to the nonprofit.
What if your business just doesn't generate enough public information for a regular newsletter? Like if you’re an accountant or a podiatrist—What do they even do? Wouldn’t it be great to know about that in a newsletter? A great way to get into the newsletter game is by aggregating relevant content that is interesting to your audience.
The Hustle Daily is a business and tech newsletter with over 1.5 million subscribers. They got that big by thoughtfully summarizing the day's biggest stories with tons of links to sources that let the reader learn more if they choose.
Being a good curator is one of the most valuable things you can offer your subscribers and they'll thank you with great open rates.
Lead Nurturing Emails
After newsletters, the type of marketing emails you should probably see most often are lead nurturing emails. The best lead nurturing emails are personalized messages that relate specifically to how the subscriber engaged with you in the past.
Lead nurturing emails are most effective when they're automated to send when a user does something on your site. Many email marketing tools let you set up these sorts of sequences with ease. Sometimes, with lead nurturing, you got to play the long game. Users often start researching purchases like a new car months before the ready to buy. This email from cars.com reminds users of a previous search they conducted then gently nudges them to keep looking.
Lead nurturing can also happen after a subscriber becomes a customer. This is called: Retention. And it's another place you can use the user's actual experience to keep them engaged.
Transactional Emails
The next type of email is transactional emails. Like the name suggests transactional emails are triggered when the user hits various parts of the purchasing process.
The most common are confirmation emails. Airlines do this really well. Not only do their emails confirms the ticket purchase, but also provides links to information that could be needed before your flight. Sometimes through a partnership, they’ll encourage you to sign up for Lyft Rewards or something you're likely to wish you had done before you arrive or ordered when you land.
E-commerce confirmations are also essential for letting customers know that their order did in fact go through. The first thing the customer wants after placing an order is the confirmation, delivery status, and the shipping info.
Confirmation emails have some of the highest open rates up to 60%. Despite the excellent open rate, confirmation emails also have incredibly low order rates. This can be improved by including cross-selling opportunities like the classic “you might also like section.”
Remember that the success rate of selling to customer that you already have is 60% to 70% while the success rate of selling to a new customer is only 5% to 20%.
Another easy sales conversion path is cart abandonment emails, which can recover up to 10% of otherwise lost sales. For example, a cart recovery email should turn up the urgency by telling the customer that their free shipping is about to expire.
Welcome Emails
The name is very self-explanatory, but that very first email you send to a new subscriber is a huge opportunity. That's because welcome emails have an exceptionally high open rate 50% or better. So what should you do with this one unique opportunity?
If you're in retail, how about offering a quick discount code or free shipping.
A Welcome Email is also a great time to ask users to:
set their preferences
delve into your content
download your app
start streaming something
offer a free side of chips
These are the essential email marketing campaigns every business should be doing. But no matter how good your email game is, sometimes subscribers just drift away. Sometimes there's just nothing you can do to get them back. If this is the case, then once in a while, appeal to that lost or dormant subscriber by bragging all about the improvements and changes you’ve made while they've been gone.