Marketing is changing at a rapid pace. With new tech tools and channels popping up seemingly every day, it can be challenging for marketers to know where to focus their precious time and budget. However, one channel has stood the test of time and takes pride of place for its ability to drive engagement, convert leads and secure long-lasting customers – email.
In this article, we’re going to take a look at 13 different types of commonly used email marketing campaigns, and explain how they can help boost your overall digital marketing strategy.
Introduction to email marketing campaigns
Although email may feel like an antiquated channel compared to social, SMS, or video, it’s still an excellent and highly utilized strategy — in fact, 89% of marketers still use email as their primary channel for lead generation. Email, especially when segmented and personalized to each customer, can help get eyes on your brand, improve conversion rates, and cultivate vital customer loyalty.
Key types of email campaigns
Email marketing can be used to gain brand awareness and visibility, boost engagement, acquire new customers, retain existing ones, drive loyalty, and much more. While there are endless different types of emails, campaigns can generally be organized into three overarching groups:
- Manual email campaigns: Emails that marketers craft and send at specific times to promote particular events or updates. These can include monthly newsletters, sales announcements, product releases, and brand updates.
- Automated email campaigns: These are pre-created emails that are designed to send based on certain triggers or actions taken by customers, such as adding an item to a cart, making a purchase, or viewing a specific product range on-site. Automated emails leverage data to personalize each email to each customer, driving more sales through increased relevancy.
- Transactional emails: Triggered by key interactions with a company, such as placing an order, opening an account, or requesting a password reset. Transactional emails don’t have a marketing focus, as they tend to serve a single, specific purpose.
Types of manual email campaigns
A manual email campaign is a batch campaign that is unautomated and often unsegmented, meaning that your brand will use one standard template and send it to a large group of recipients. These emails are sent at a fixed time and only get sent out once. Depending on the campaign, manual campaigns can take hours or days to build, requiring notable investment into execution.
A brand may utilize a manual email campaign as a way to send out updates like recent news or an upcoming industry event that falls outside of your typical email marketing strategy. This type of campaign could also come in handy to push out information on a new product release or a special offer.
Let’s take a look at some of the most popular types of manual campaigns:
1. Special offers and promotions
Source: Really Good Emails – AnyDay
Definition: Special offer and promotion emails are engagements sent to your marketing database with the goal of driving sales in exchange for a discount or deal. Sharing special offers or promotions like limited-time deals or discounts, sales events, or other promos can help drive business and generate FOMO among your customers.
Email content: In these emails, focus on the timeliness of the deal to encourage customers to take immediate action. You can time these around events like holidays, changing seasons, or even pop culture and news events.
2. Event invitations
Source: Really Good Emails – Google Cloud
Definition: Event invitation emails can be sent to your database to invite them to webinars, workshops, or in-person product launches that are happening in the near future.
Email content: Make sure you create a visually appealing invitation complete with event details, compelling reasons the customer should attend and a clear call-to-action.
3. Product announcements
Source: Really Good Emails – Google
Definition: You can also use manual email campaigns to introduce new products, features or announcements to your subscribers and customers. This is a great way to generate buzz and awareness about a new product you’re bringing to market, in conjunction with other efforts.
Email content: Be sure to include multimedia elements like product imagery or videos, demos, or even interactive elements to engage readers and entice action.
4. Newsletter campaigns:
Source: Really Good Emails – AutoCamp
Definition: Newsletter campaigns are a great way to communicate with customers on a consistent basis. These can be sent quarterly, monthly, or even weekly, depending on the amount of news you have to share with your audience.
Email content: Newsletters can furnish customers with relevant announcements, product updates and blog content to keep them engaged with your brand, even when they’re not ready to buy.
Important considerations for manual campaigns
Depending on the amount of emails you’re already sending, and which emails customers are opted into, you have to be careful to not overwhelm an inbox with one-off recurring emails.
When planning a campaign like this, use the customer data you have to make sure you’re sending these updates to customers who really want them. The content in these campaigns is often standard for all recipients, but depending on your goals for this campaign, you may choose to add other features including personalized product recommendations, conditional text, and even dynamic features like block targeting for better engagement.
Types of automated email campaigns
Unlike manual emails, automated emails are triggered by recipient action. These emails usually focus on continuing the customer journey, by incentivizing existing customers to keep interacting with your brand – whether that be completing a first purchase, giving your business another shot instead of churning, or signing up to a loyalty program.
Automated emails can be some of the most lucrative for marketers, as they engage customers at each stage of their journey with personalized experiences. They also only need to be built once – once they’re set up in your email marketing platform, they will trigger indefinitely, saving time.
Let’s take a look at some of the most popular types of automated email campaigns:
5. Welcome emails
Source: Really Good Emails – WellEasy
Definition: A welcome series is a sequence of emails sent to new subscribers or customers to introduce them to your brand. This series usually starts immediately after someone subscribes or makes their first purchase. The goal is to make a positive first impression, provide valuable information about your products or services, and guide them towards their first purchase or further engagement.
Email content: Typical content in a welcome series includes a thank you message, an overview of the brand’s story, key products or services, and special offers to encourage immediate action.
6. Abandoned cart emails:
Source: Really Good Emails – Days Brewing Co
Definition: Perhaps one of the most common types of on-event emails, abandoned cart emails can be triggered when a customer adds something to their cart but doesn’t complete a purchase. These can also be sent via a sequence like a recurring email discussed above.
Email content: Inside an abandoned cart email, you’ll always find a dynamic block that shows the contents of each customer’s cart. These emails might also include benefits of shopping with the brand, trust signals like money-back guarantees, reviews and free shipping information, and also other recommended products to drive customers back to the site.
7. Abandoned browse emails
Source: Really Good Emails – Something Navy
Definition: These come one step before abandoned cart emails. Abandoned browse emails are triggered when a potential customer views products or services on your website but leaves without making a purchase. These emails aim to re-engage these visitors by reminding them of the items they were looking at on your site.
Email content: Abandoned browse emails could include personalized recommendations based on a customer’s previous purchases, or items other customers have also bought. Some marketers go one step further and include special offers, or additional information about the products viewed to entice the recipient to return and complete their purchase.
8. Post-purchase nurture emails
Source: Really Good Emails – Sundays
Definition: Post-purchase nurture emails are sent after a customer completes a purchase. The purpose of these emails is to enhance the customer’s experience and build loyalty.
Email content: Post-purchase emails often include brand story information, advice on how to get the most out of the purchased products, and positive reviews to build order anticipation. Additionally, these emails can be a great place to cross-sell complimentary products and share information about loyalty programs.
9. Win-back emails
Source: Really Good Emails – Sourse
Definition: Win-back emails are targeted at customers who have become inactive or have not made a purchase in a while. The goal of these emails is to re-engage these lapsed customers and bring them back into the purchasing cycle.
Email content: These campaigns often include personalized offers, discounts, and reminders of what the customer is missing out on by not engaging with the brand. They may also ask for feedback to understand why the customer has become inactive.
10. Upsell & cross-sell emails
Source: Really Good Emails – BirchBox
Definition: Upsell and cross-sell emails aim to increase the customer’s average order value by suggesting higher-end products (upselling) or complementary products (cross-selling) based on their previous purchases or browsing behavior.
Email content: These emails are typically personalized and may include recommendations, special bundles, and exclusive offers. For example, if a customer buys a camera, an upsell email might suggest a more advanced model, while a cross-sell email could recommend lenses, tripods, or other accessories.
11. Loyalty program update emails:
Source: Really Good Emails – McDonald’s
Definition: Got a loyalty program? Automated updates are a brilliant way to keep your customers engaged with your program and drive sales. By integrating email with your loyalty program using a customer engagement platform like Emarsys, you can leverage your loyalty data to create 1:1 personalized email automations.
Email content: In these emails, you can automatically update each customer on the points in their loyalty wallet and how far they are from reaching the next tier. You can even make personalized product recommendations based on the last products they purchased.
12. Significant date automations:
Source: Really Good Emails – Ray Ban
Definition: Significant date emails trigger based on specific dates within your CRM, such as a customer’s birthday, a national holiday, or even a wedding anniversary.
Email content: The idea of these automations is to leverage memorable dates to drive sales. They typically include personalized offers and deals to help customers celebrate the occasion.
Important considerations for email automations
When using automated emails, it’s easy to “set and forget” them. However, it’s important to review performance on a regular basis. Set up A/B testing to find subject lines that drive better open rates, test new email formats, and trial fresh offers and discount amounts to find the sweet spot between conversion and ROI.
With email automations, consistency is key. By using marketing automation tools to drive your email marketing, your brand can target the right people, at the right time, with the right message and keep them engaged with your brand.
Conclusion
There are numerous ways you can leverage email marketing campaigns and the different types that we have outlined above as part of your overall digital marketing strategy. These campaign types provide your brand with the ability to elevate personalization, and improve the customer experience.
By diversifying your email marketing efforts with a blend of recurring, ad hoc, and on-event emails, you can engage your customers with relevant information that they actually want to engage with, improving brand loyalty, awareness, and ultimately revenue. But, every audience is different, and reacts differently to campaigns. Be sure to experiment with different campaign types to see what sticks.
Email marketing campaigns FAQs
Here are some common questions people have about email marketing:
1. What type of advertising is email marketing?
Email marketing is a form of direct digital marketing, in which your brand is directly interacting with customers or subscribers through email.
2. What are the different types of email marketing?
There are two main types of emails, inbound and outbound. Inbound emails are sent to your existing subscriber or customer base and are used to deepen your relationship and encourage engagement. Outbound emails are used to expand your audience and build a bigger email list.
3. What are email marketing campaigns?
Email campaigns are an email or group of emails centered on a consistent theme and measured by a specific set of KPIs. This can include a nurture campaign, with the objective to nurture cold leads who haven’t purchased recently, with success measured by the number of leads reengaged.
4. How do promotional email campaigns work?
Promotional email campaigns share a promotion, like a sale, a deal, or a one-time discount, with a group of customers. These campaigns are usually time-limited, so as to generate urgency.
5. What’s the difference between transaction and direct email marketing?
Transaction emails give customers information they requested explicitly or implicitly, and are usually automated. This can include order confirmations, account changes, or two-factor authorization. Direct emails are sent directly to an individual, and can include the content of a transaction email, but without automation.
