Not all marketing emails are the same, nor should they be! When building out a marketing campaign, it’s important to understand common types of emails, their respective advantages and disadvantages, and how each serves your subscribers. While there is no definitive list that is applicable to every brand, here are five types of marketing emails that you should be sending to build and nurture relationships with all your subscribers.
- Welcome Emails Every brand should have a perfectly refined welcome series that engages new subscribers and starts the new relationship out on a good foot. A strong welcome series sets the tone for the relationship, gives an overview of your brand’s mission and vision, demonstrates how your business can help new subscribers, and gives clear instructions for how a reader can do business with you. A clear advantage of welcome emails is that they often have higher open-rates and click-through rates; the downside is the stakes are high to get it right the first time.
- Dedicated Emails Stand-alone promotional or sales emails contain information about a specific offer with an accompanying call-to-action. Whether you are announcing a new product, alerting clients to a deal, or relaying a major update, dedicated emails should be concise, clear, and include a focused action. A key advantage of dedicated emails is that they drive results and are therefore easy to measure. If you have a basic customizable template, they also are fairly easy to construct. One disadvantage is that because you are reaching such a large audience, dedicated emails are rarely personalized and can increase unsubscribe rates.
- Transactional Emails Order confirmations, receipts, tickets, and thank you emails are all examples of a transactional email. These emails are triggered by a specific action and only contain information relevant to that action. Transactional emails typically have a high click-through rate because they serve a specific purpose and help fulfill an action.
- “How-To” Content and Email Newsletters Marketing emails shouldn’t just be about selling a product or service, but also about building them into your customers’ lifestyles. In between transactions, stay top-of-mind with your subscribers by sending them supplementary materials like blog posts, quizzes, instructional videos, and more. If you have a library of content, you can package it into newsletters, which can both nurture relationships with existing contacts and/or attract new people to your list. One advantage of this type of email is that it helps build brand awareness by maintaining a regular sending cadence. For newsletters especially, it’s easy to compile them effectively by repurposing existing content as well. However, newsletters do require curation and design skills, and it’s important to dedicate time and resources to build and test them to make them as effective as possible.
- Re-Engagement Emails Overtime, some of your subscribers may engage less and less, or even become inactive altogether. The purpose of a re-engagement email is to attempt to bring those readers back from dormancy. This can be done numerous ways — by sending a friendly hello, offering a deal to encourage them back, or asking for feedback that can inform why they’ve become disengaged. Similar to transactional emails, there aren’t many disadvantages in trying to woo back subscribers once or twice. One advantage of re-engagement emails is reinvigorating lapsed interest, but the greater benefit might seem counterintuitive: it helps shed dead weight. If these emails don’t reel subscribers back in, you can use those metrics to clean up and further optimize your sending list.
Each and every email you send should be valuable, so it’s important to package key information in the most appropriate format to get effective messaging with your database of customers and prospects. Take time to dig into what each type of email looks like for your brand — and how your subscribers will engage with each one. By doing so, you’ll be taking important steps to strengthen and diversify your overall marketing strategy.
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