Currently, almost half of the world’s population uses emails, and this number still grows. In this way, email marketing goes far beyond just sending sales messages.
Email marketing is a powerful tool, uniting different approaches and e-letters to customers.
Being the oldest and yet most comprehensive strategy, email marketing obtains a set of undeniable perks:
• Supreme cost-effectiveness;
• Good targeting;
• Extensive customization;
• Advanced scalability;
• Exact analytics.
And you still haven’t tried it, have you?
In this article, we explore the types of emails essential for trying to engage involved subscribers, grow a loyal audience, boost sales, and build trust through brand awareness.
Why you should try email marketing
You should try email marketing simply because of its effectiveness.
Emails are way more effective than other Digital Marketing strategies. For example, when compared to social media, emails still have a wider audience, and users consider business communication via email more credible. Also, an average email reaches 3x more audience than a Facebook post.
Another point in email marketing’s favor is its solid ROI. To illustrate, email campaigns generate almost 4,000% of ROI on average, which is absolutely impressive.
These are only key highlights approving the efficiency of this strategy. Primarily, email marketing allows you to choose the right message and send it to the right customer.
Why you need different types of email
While picking up emails and encouraging people to interact with your product or website, an ultimate goal is to convert them into customers. Effectively turning all those contacts into paying users highly depends on the emails you send.
Sending one type of email may not (and even won’t) bring many results. Customers get bored and start to ignore the same old newsletter.
So, you should think of diversifying messages from your end. Try to mix things up. Your subscribers would appreciate that, resulting in the benefit of higher open rates increasing sales.
Besides, various types of emails have different purposes, which your business may require. For example, it’s cool to start with a welcome email, send an informational email about upgrades of your product, share a newsletter, and more. You may not need 4+ types, but you definitely need to send a few of them.
Let’s play with different types of emails we absolutely recommend for enriching your email campaign.
Marketing emails
Marketing emails are a must-have to build thriving relationships with customers, generate leads, and educate clients.
The design and content of such emails show clean branding, encouraging users to browse premium product features or other extras.
Welcome emails
According to Campaign Monitor research, welcome emails have the highest open rates among all emails with the average open rate being 50%.
A welcome email is the first interaction between a new user and you. Consider welcome messages as first impressions.
Remember that with a welcome email, your new customer starts a journey with your company. Greet new customers and introduce them to the crucial function of your product or website.
Crafting your welcome email, make sure to meet these requirements:
- Be straightforward in your subject line — just welcome a new customer
- Be thankful
- Don’t promote. This is not the right type for promos
- Promised something for a sign-up? Mention and deliver that in the message
- Use clear CTAs
- Provide a choice either to dive deeper into an experience with your product or just opt-out
Don’t forget about storytelling. Share a short passage about your brand and what customers can gain from becoming a part of your family.
Also, it’s ok to share your social media links, onboarding videos, links to starting guides in welcome emails.
Newsletters
A newsletter is a wonderful solution for businesses promoting through Content Marketing. Cool newsletters deliver top-quality content to subscribers regularly.
The main goal of newsletter campaigns is keeping in touch with clients and increasing website traffic. To achieve it, prepare a personalized, action-packed, and visually-appealing newsletter template.
What to include? Try one or combinations of these content types:
- Guides
- Blog posts
- News
- Product reviews
- Recommendations
- Insider tips
- Announcements
- Interactive elements
- Infographics
Avoid vague spaghetti-language and being promotional bearing in mind that this email should focus on educating your subscribers, sharing ideas, and reminding them about your brand.
Info emails
In fact, any marketing email shares some sort of information for a recipient. Let’s view a scenario. You think of new features to present, which can exponentially boost your product growth.
For loyal customers, your product’s hot feature may be well known since they might try it already. But for newly arrived users, the update doesn’t exist since they weren’t informed.
The information email solves this challenge by bringing announcements about updates and new features. Essentially, information emails are newsletters that focus on product updates.
Pack smaller upgrades into a changelog newsletter. This allows you to send every feature without being spammy. This especially works for users who are eagerly following your product’s development but don’t use it regularly.
Briefly describe new features highlights as well as encourage a reader to click the button or link, check and try the update. Also, give the opportunity to reply and ask questions.
Promo emails
Promotional emails are a straightforward but powerful way to tell the word about your service. Traditionally, such emails propose discounts, coupons, free upgrades to the Premium, or a bunch of similar goodies.
Promo emails are very effective. Almost half of an audience wants to receive promotional emails from their favorite brand. Become that brand!
Using promo emails, you’re able to:
- Improve customer retention
- Attract users
- Cultivate loyalty
- Boost awareness
When you clearly decide on your promo priorities, you may try to send a message from a personal email address, which looks more friendly.
Avoid two things in promo emails:
- Don’t boldly sell your offer
- Don’t send many promotional emails
It’s critical since promo messages can be a robust part of consumer behavior campaigns, and if you’re doing them badly, they can harm your business.
Transactional emails
The main goal of transactional emails is to keep users aware of what’s happened after their actions or to request some action from the user (reset the password, grant access, etc.). That’s why transactional emails are triggered by some events from the user’s side mostly.
In contrast with marketing emails, transitional ones do not aim to promote or deliver informational messages. Their first task is to notify users about important events on time.
Confirmation emails
Confirmation emails are used to finalize user actions. It may be a message containing order confirmation, subscription confirmation, etc.
Like many other types of transactional emails, confirmation messages should be clear and concise.
Send confirmation emails from support email or other business email addresses to add credibility since confirmation emails usually intersect with the user’s security and privacy.
It’s crucial to meet all the tech requirements, so users will receive your messages. Namely, make sure to comply with email authentication, GDPR, CAN-SPAM, CCPA, and other privacy policies.
Notification emails
Notification emails bring information about changes your service experiences or will experience soon. Also, such messages notify users about their accounts.
Wide-used subtypes of notification emails are privacy policy, terms of use change, notifications about limits, upgrades, trials, comments, and more.
Best practices that will make your notifications effective:
- Deliver one single idea at a time
- No confusion, no promotion. Just get straight to business
- Be specific. Planning maintenance? Specify the reason and the exact dates in your email. Recipients should know for how long you will be absent
- The email subject line should show the very notification: “Your plan has been upgraded”, “Ticket has been created for your account”, and the email body should contain all the details
To make it clear, notification emails differ from the info type with the sense of importance, obligatory sending, and they are sent to all the users.
In turn, info emails deliver non-critical messages, are optional, and may be targeted to audience segments.
Alerts
From one perspective, this is a version of notification emails. Alert emails have a top priority for users because they bring user’s attention to such important changes as suspicious logins, payment-related actions, etc.
They should be super concise and sent right after the event. It’s important to provide a user with an opportunity to reach you in alternative ways — live chat, phone number, etc. —offering proactive customer service to users.
Abandonment cart emails
It may happen the customers add an item to their shopping cart and leave it there (perhaps, they were distracted, forgot, or changed their mind) without completing the purchase. For these occasions, using abandoned cart emails is exactly what you need!
Abandoned cart emails should deal with reasons that made a customer leave the cart.
Therefore, use creativity in making email copy, spend time on the design for sure, set a friendly voice and tone. That would be an effective way to recover those lost sales.
The best practice for doing abandoned cart emails is to set a sending sequence. However, don’t spam customers. We recommend using two emails in the sequence:
1. Just a reminder,
2. Call to action with a sense of urgency to motivate a customer to finish the purchase.
If you feel that’s not enough, add the third most motivational step, including some extra offers, free shipping, etc. But making more than three abandoned cart messages is strongly unpreferable.
Bonus
Here are two extra types of emails that many businesses skip sending.
Birthday emails
Have you ever sent birthday emails to your customers? It’s worth trying!
Birthdays offer an astonishing opportunity for engagement. People are delighted to know you’re thinking of them. And they are endlessly looking for good deals, especially on their special day! Such emails propose discounts, gifts, or advice on preparing a birthday party.
Feel free to send these emails not only on the subscriber’s special day but also one or two days in advance or after the birthday date.
Also, marketers prefer to send anniversary cards to thank subscribers for being a part of their community, which is also a good way to improve customer retention and just make a user happy.
Re-engagement emails
Unstoppable waves of emails hit your subscribers’ inboxes every day. Actually, 40% of consumers say they have at least 50 unread emails in their inbox. This means that some subscribers stop engaging with your email campaigns.
To effectively address this common issue, create a special re-engagement email targeted directly to your “inactive” subscribers. This type of email helps to re-involve your subscribers into your brand and remove passive subscribers from your mailing list.
To do more, try to figure out the reason why subscribers didn’t read your emails. At least, provide social media buttons for the convenience of those subscribers who prefer another communication channel.
Some companies like to occupy subscriber thoughts with their disappointment from missing a user with a heartbreaking image of a sad baby animal. This move is trivial but terribly effective.
Sum up
It’s time to try email marketing! This strategy is still effective and relatively easy to implement.
The substantial point to remember is not limiting yourself to just a few types of emails. As you’ve seen from above, there are at least 10 types of email that directly impact communication with your audience and your company thrive.
We hope you find this overview helpful. And you’re already considering which email type to send next.
Author Bio
Dmytro Zaichenko is a Marketing Specialist at Mailtrap, a product helping to test emails at the developmental stages. Apart from writing and networking, he’s passionate about basketball and poetry. Connect Dmytro on LinkedIn.
