If you’re a marketer, you probably already know that email marketing should form part of your marketing mix. Why? Just look at these statistics. According to GetResponse’s Email Marketing Benchmarks, the average email open rate across industries is a staggering 26.8%. Even the average email clickthrough rate is high compared to those of other marketing channels. At 1.89%, it’s better than the click through rates for social media ads at 0.98% and for display ads at 0.46%.
No wonder for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you get an average return on investment of $38.
Does this mean you can just choose one type of marketing email and send variations to subscribers to reap the above email marketing benefits? Of course not! Your email content strategy should include different types of emails if you want to succeed. Only with a diverse mix of email marketing content can you hook your subscribers and get them to take your desired action.
Don’t know which marketing emails to include in your content strategy? We’ll discuss several types of email marketing campaigns that drive results.
14 Types of marketing emails for optimal results
But before we get on with the list, here’s an important tip when writing content for these different types of email marketing campaigns: Personalize. Whether you use your email recipient’s first name in your messages or send emails based on where they are in the marketing funnel or both, your goal is to make your email recipients feel that your message was written specifically for them. Personalized emails have a higher open rate–at 30.26%–than generic ones–at 26.55%, according to the same GetResponse report.
That said, here are some types of email marketing campaigns you should consider:
1. Welcome Emails
Welcome emails are emails that are sent right after someone opts into your email list or when a customer fills out a form on your site. Customers expect welcome emails. That means if you haven’t included them as part of your email content strategy, then you’re not meeting consumer expectations. Besides, welcome emails are a great opportunity to create a strong brand impression.
Now how do you create excellent welcome emails? Start off with a casual, warm greeting. Remember, your welcome email will set the tone for your future communications. To quote Michal Lezczynski, “In addition to driving engagement, welcome emails are great for setting expectations for your relationship with your new audience.”
So, you want to make your email recipient feel comfortable from the get-go. You can’t do that if your initial greeting sounds too formal or is written in technical language.
Check out this excellent email greeting by the GetResponse team to new subscribers:
Notice the inviting atmosphere the email helps create with the friendly language. The image of the content team members who are all smiles also helps make the brand seem more approachable.
Your welcome emails don’t have to just “welcome” new subscribers or users. They can also give additional value. That “additional value” will depend on the type of welcome email you send. For instance, to welcome new subscribers, the GetResponse content team also sends links to its other articles on email marketing. If you’re welcoming a new product user with your email, you could send them valuable resources for effective onboarding, for example.
2. Promotional Emails
Promotional emails are used to boost awareness of a company’s products and other offerings. In other words, a promotional campaign is one of the many types of email marketing campaigns you should run. The primary goal of promotional emails is to attract new buyers or retain existing customers.
That said, promotional emails can come in different forms. Among others, they can be:
- Emails that launch a new product – We’ll talk more about these later.
- Emails that announce a flash sale or discounts
- Customer loyalty program invitation emails
- Emails that promote a brand event – We’ll get to event invitation emails in a bit.
The key to writing good emails for such campaigns (as with other types of email marketing content) is to have a clear goal from the start. What is the exact reason for your promotion? Do you want to encourage subscribers to shop during your flash sale? Is your goal to get customers to sign up for your rewards program so they’ll be encouraged to make repeat purchases? Once you have your goal, you just need to tailor your email message accordingly.
For instance, the goal of this promotional email is clear: to drive sales. So, all the elements in the email–from the title to the call-to-action–are geared toward achieving that goal.
The email even gives the subscriber multiple options so they’ll push through with the desired purchase. If they’re not interested in any of the products they find after clicking on the Shop Now button, they can just scroll down and find these other products to choose from:
If the subscriber still isn’t interested? Well, they can click on that Find Us button to search for a Chamberlain Coffee stall to visit personally.
Another tip when writing content for your promotional email campaign is to highlight the benefits of what you’re promoting. That will help ensure your email subscriber takes your desired action. For instance, if you’re promoting your Christmas flash sale, you can highlight in your email copy how much shoppers can save.
For you to highlight these benefits effectively, you need to use simple language your target audience understands, of course.
3. Announcement Emails
Announcement emails are messages that are sent to inform subscribers of relevant business updates. With these types of email marketing content, the aim in informing subscribers isn’t primarily to generate revenues, as is the case with promotional emails. It’s mainly to strengthen customer relationships by keeping them in the loop.
So, an announcement email could notify subscribers about a company’s changes in management or newest corporate social responsibility initiative. Or, it could inform them about its rebranding plans, like this one:
When writing announcement emails, you need to make it clear to email recipients why the changes you’re announcing were made. Highlight how those changes will affect them, if any. Shift does this perfectly. Notice how the brand specifies that the user can still “continue using the features you already know and love without interruption” despite the rebranding:
As a final tip, you may give subscribers the option to reach you on their preferred platform if they have other relevant questions.
4. Newsletter Emails
Email newsletters are used to disseminate company news and valuable content created by the brand. Unlike announcement emails that are sent as company updates come, newsletter emails are sent on a fixed schedule to subscribers – usually weekly or monthly.
Newsletter emails are one of the types of email marketing content you should create. Why? Well, because they’re that effective. In fact, 30% of businesses believe newsletters are the best way to nurture leads.
So, how do you create newsletter emails that drive results? Just keep them interesting. Get your subscribers’ attention with a compelling subject line that summarizes your email content. Here’s a great email newsletter subject line from Writer:
When writing your email newsletter, follow the inverted pyramid. Make sure to include the important details first and the least important ones toward the end. You’ll only stop your subscribers from reading if, from the get-go, you give them information they find irrelevant. Use subheadings and bullet points to make your content easy to read.
Pay attention to your email newsletter design as well. For this, you can choose an email marketing platform that offers newsletter templates. GetResponse, for instance, offers over 150 free ones you can easily customize with the drag-and-drop editor. Plus, each email template here is already optimized for mobile devices:
Make sure to incorporate visuals into your email newsletter as well. They won’t just enhance the visual appeal of your email content. They’ll also make your content more engaging. GetResponse also offers over two million free images you can use.
5. Transactional Emails
You can think of transactional emails as official records of subscriber interactions with the company. So, they aren’t sent en masse to a mailing list. They are sent to a specific subscriber in response to their individual actions.
For instance, when a customer buys from you, you can send a transactional email that confirms the purchase:
You can also send transactional emails after password resets and account log-ins for security purposes, among others.
Because transactional emails are reactive (as we mentioned, they’re sent in response to customer actions), these types of email content should be sent in a timely manner. Your customers are waiting for these transactional emails from you. A person who resets their password is likely waiting for that message that confirms the password reset. If that doesn’t come, they’ll likely contact customer support or redo the password reset process. Either way, they end up with a bad customer experience.
To ensure timely email sending, leverage marketing automation. Seek a reliable transactional email service. With GetResponse, you can use API or SMTP-triggered emails to notify subscribers on time.You just connect your Content Management System or eCommerce platform to the email marketing software, and you’re all set!
Finally, you should treat confirmation emails and other transactional messages as an opportunity to nurture your relationships with your subscribers, not just as an obligation. So, don’t send your automated email just because it’s expected of you. Ensure its content is truly helpful and easily understandable. It should help customers achieve what they wanted to accomplish in the first place (whether that’s a password reset, a purchase, among others).
6. Educational Emails
Educational emails are precisely those: emails that educate. But instead of educating subscribers about company updates, products or offerings as announcement and promotional emails do, they typically enlighten customers about specific niche topics. So, an educational email could give subscribers a few tips on how to perform effective email marketing. Or, as part of your lead nurturing campaigns, it could discuss trends on artificial intelligence, for example.
Don’t know how many types of email marketing content of this type to write? Well, the truth is, there’s no hard-and-fast rule to follow. What’s clear, however, is that the more emails of this type you send, the better. A Conductor study found that when asked to choose from four brands, 83.6% of respondents opted to buy from the brand that produced a piece of educational content they read. In other words, based on this study, the more educational emails you send, the more potential for sales as well. After all, the more emails you send, the more chances for a subscriber to also read your educational content.
So does this mean you can just write about anything under the sun for as long as it educates subscribers? Not really. Since your ultimate goal is still to convert subscribers, the topics you discuss should align with the products you sell. With your educational emails, you want to empower subscribers so they’ll eventually decide to use your product and buy it.
For instance, Grammarly is a writing tool. So, it makes sense for the company to send relevant resources that help subscribers navigate the writing process:
Since educational emails aim to well educate, make sure you use clear and concise language. Avoid jargon. If you have to use technical terms, define them using simple words.
7. Sponsorship Emails
This type of email marketing campaign entails promoting your brand via the marketing messages of a publisher. How does it work? Simple: you pay the publisher for access to their subscribers. The publisher then creates the content on your behalf and sends the email to their own subscriber list. You can either pay for a solo ad (one entire email) or for a small ad to be embedded in that publisher’s regular newsletter. Something like this:
You may have probably already guessed why sponsorship emails–especially solo ads—should be approached with caution. Since you’re paying to reach a subscriber base who never opted in to get your own marketing messages, the chances of conversion are likely lower than if they had voluntarily subscribed to your mailing list. In fact, the dedicated emails may even end up in their spam folder, leading to some Internet Service Providers blacklisting your chosen publisher. Subscribers who do manage to read those emails might also blacklist the publisher–and by extension, you—for sending them marketing messages they never opted to receive in the first place.
In other words, you might end up paying for, well, nothing.
So, if you decide to leverage this type of email marketing, make sure you weigh the pros and cons. Do your due diligence when choosing your publisher. They should have an email list that aligns with your target audience. GetResponse has an excellent blog post on sponsorship emails, particularly solo ads, that can help you determine whether they’re right for your business.
8. Event Invitation Emails
The primary goal of this type of promotional email is pretty straightforward: to get subscribers to attend or sign up for a brand event, whether that’s a webinar, a demo, a conference or something else.
Because this is your primary goal, your email should highlight the benefits of event attendance. See how Asana does this. By saying attendees will be able to “ship better products, faster” in the email title, Asana ensures the webinar benefit is the first thing email recipients see when they open the invitation email.
That increases the chances they’ll sign up for the event then and there. If they don’t, Asana tries to get them to take the desired action again by breaking down what specific topics webinar attendees will learn at the bottom of the email.
Create email campaigns that also specify your key event details, of course. How else will subscribers sign up for and attend your event if they don’t know where and when it takes place? See how Google makes these details stand out by placing them at the top of this event invitation email. Google even reiterates the details in the main email copy:
Finally, make it easy for your subscribers to register for your event in the first place. Include a clear call-to-action button that takes them to a targeted landing page where they can easily fill in the relevant details. Don’t ask for too many details, by the way. Just ask for basic information like their first name and last name. You can also ask for details that are critical to the upcoming event, if any, like their choice of session/s if you’re organizing a conference.
9. Re-Engagement Emails
As part of your email marketing strategy, you can also send re-engagement emails to inactive or lapsed subscribers. As their name suggests, these emails aim to renew subscriber interest in your brand enough for them to interact with you again.
There are many types of re-engagement emails. Here are some popular ones:
- We miss you emails
- Messages that share personalized recommendations
- Emails that give hard-to-resist offers like discounts
That’s not to say you should stick to these re-engagement email categories when creating your marketing email. In fact, you can combine at least two of these types to come up with just-as-effective email content. LootCrate, for instance, combines the “we miss you” and “discount” email categories for its re-engagement email campaigns:
Whatever emails you decide to come up with, make sure you use compelling email subject lines. Hint at your valuable offer or content in the subject line to get your subscriber to open your email in the first place. You can also create a sense of urgency by using phrases such as “Last Chance” or “Don’t Miss Out.”
Your job doesn’t stop after creating engaging subject lines. You also need to ensure your main email content is brief and concise. Remember, these are subscribers who haven’t engaged with your brand in a while. If they see a bulky email as part of your re-engagement campaign, they’ll likely leave again.
Make your drip campaign content engaging as well. For this, you can use storytelling techniques, including humor. Use attention-grabbing and high-quality visuals that support your overallemail message.
You can also leave an unsubscribe link to give email recipients the alternative to opt out of your mailing list if they changed their minds.
10. Survey Emails
Survey emails – or emails that ask for customer feedback – don’t just help you boost customer engagement. They also help you gather relevant data you can use to improve your email marketing strategies, products and services.
Here are a few of the different types of survey emails you can send:
- Post-purchase survey: This is where you ask a customer to give you feedback on the product received or on their customer experience.
- Net Promoter survey: In this type of survey email, you ask customers this single question: “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?”
- Lead enrichment surveys: These are used to gather more information – needs, interests, pain points – about potential customers.
However, you need to first convince your subscribers that responding to your survey is worth it. Customers prefer it if you offer them an incentive like a discount. Another option is to highlight how their survey responses can help. See how Tillamook does this. In its email copy, the brand notes that the subscriber’s survey responses will be used to “deliver the best content to your inbox”:
Like Tillamook, you can also emphasize the fact that responding to the survey won’t take up much of your subscriber’s time. In the email copy above, Tillamook notes that theirs is just a “three-question survey.”
With GetResponse, you can easily send out email surveys via Google Forms, Jotform and Survicate. Here’s a great GetResponse article on email surveys that teaches you how to easily navigate those tools.
11. Thank You Emails
Thank you emails are a great way to show your appreciation for customers who took your desired action. You can send customers these lead nurturing emails after they make a purchase, sign up for your email list (you can include your thank you in your welcome emails, like the GetResponse team did in our first email example, or send a dedicated email each that thanks subscribers and welcomes them), fill out a form on your company website, or even take part in your survey.
Does this mean a mere “thank you” suffices in this type of email communication? The short answer is no. For starters, you need to make it clear to your target audience what you’re thanking them for. Besides, when you specify what desired action they completed, you basically also confirm that they did complete that action.
Check out this thank you email sent by Trustpilot:
With that one “Thanks for writing your first review!” sentence, Trustpilot is already saying several things. The brand is expressing its gratitude while confirming at the same time that the subscriber did write their first review.
You also have to specify the steps subscribers need to take to maximize the value you promised for taking the desired action. For instance, if you offered an incentive to boost email survey response rates, you can outline how they can avail of that incentive after submitting their valuable feedback. Then include a relevant and clear call-to-action.
If applicable, define expectations in your thank you email as well. If you send a thank you email as part of your post purchase drip campaign, for example, you can mention how long before your new customers have to wait before receiving the product.
12. Abandoned Cart Emails
Let’s face it. Not all those who add products to their carts will complete the purchase. They might have had the intention to buy, but when life gets in they way, they might forget what they had planned to do in the first place. Or maybe they just changed their mind about buying. Overall, a staggering 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned.
This is why abandoned cart messages are among the types of content you should send as part of your email strategy. Abandoned cart messages aim to encourage those who almost bought from you to complete the transaction.
The secret to effective abandoned cart emails lies in the content. Make sure your email has a compelling email body and a clear call to action. Peak Design, for instance, managed to recover 12% of its abandoned carts with emails such as this:
Notice that the copy addresses any buyer’s apprehensions the potential customer may have. Since it’s possible they didn’t push through with the purchase because they had unanswered questions, Peak Design emphasizes they can reach out to the support team to ask.
In the email copy, the brand also highlights the fact that the potential customer can save money since “all camera clips and bundles ship free in the US” or globally, if they add two more products. Then there’s that product guarantee “for life.”
Finally, the call-to-action–Proceed to Checkout–is clear and concise. It stands out in the email so the potential buyer won’t have to look for it once they do decide to complete the transaction.
Now how many types of email marketing content of this type should you send? Well, for the best results, send at least three as part of your cart abandonment sequence. The first could be a reminder email sent a few hours after the cart was abandoned. Then you can send a follow up email a few days later as part of your email marketing strategy. If that doesn’t work, you can offer an incentive to purchase–a discount maybe–in your third email. Send this several days after the second email.
13. Co-Marketing Emails
Co-marketing is a form of strategic partnership between brands that aim to broaden their marketing reach. For example, two companies may work together on a piece of content or an event. This way, each gains access to the other brand’s audience as well, ultimately generating more leads than if they had undertaken the initiative alone.
That said, these types of marketing emails simply specifically promote the co-marketing initiative. Check out this email example and the corresponding landing page:
Notice that the email highlights the joint marketing efforts undertaken by both brands. Both their logos are prominently displayed at the top of the email. The email copy also emphasizes the collaboration with the use of first-person plural possessive adjectives (“our”).
Co-marketing emails are written jointly to ensure that they align with each brand’s editorial guidelines. You’ll need to create a landing page you’ll share as well. To help you determine which leads come from where, you can create unique tracking URLs.
14. New Product Launch Emails
These types of promotional emails aim to introduce your newest product to subscribers. Your ultimate goal in sending them? To convince subscribers to make a purchase, of course.
If you plan to include these messages as part of your email marketing strategy, you need to highlight your new product benefits to ensure they’re effective. Don’t just enumerate new product features your subscribers won’t probably understand. Explain exactly how they’ll make your potential customers’ lives easier.
See how Casper does it:
The brand notes its newest product’s “velvety soft layer” feature in the email copy, then quickly explains what that means to users: “extra cozy” bedtime without sacrificing support and cooling.
If that doesn’t convince the target audience to click on the Shop the Nova CTA, Casper enumerates other product features to give them another nudge. This is what you’ll see if you scroll down:
Like Casper, you can also include social proof in these types of email marketing content. Just make sure they have the right placement. In the email example above, for instance, the customer testimonials are strategically positioned at the bottom of the email. Casper’s rationale is simple: If potential customers don’t take the brand’s word for it and buy after seeing the new product’s features and benefits, then maybe they’ll listen to the brand’s loyal customers.
Offer early bird discounts as well. Those might be the final nudge subscribers need to take your desired action. In these dedicated emails, you can also leave a link to your new blog post for additional product details they can check out.
In Closing
Now that you know the types of lead nurturing emails to consider and a few best practices, go ahead and apply these marketing tactics in your future campaigns.
With GetResponse’s hundreds of ready-made email templates, user-friendly email editor, and an intuitive landing pages builder, you have everything you need to create email marketing campaigns that drive results.
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