The average office worker gets more than 120 emails a day. You’ll know yourself, most or ignored, many are deleted or, worse, you start to resent the brand sending you promotion after promotion. But email remains the most reliable digital channel for marketers who know how to do it right. For every £1 you spend
The average office worker gets more than 120 emails a day. You’ll know yourself, most or ignored, many are deleted or, worse, you start to resent the brand sending you promotion after promotion.
But email remains the most reliable digital channel for marketers who know how to do it right. For every £1 you spend on email, it can deliver returns of between £36 and £42, according to the Data and Marketing Association.
Not every email type needs to be used. And not every email deserves a space in your customers’ inboxes. From our experience, if you can learn to use the seven email types we talk about here, you’ll cover about 90% of what you need.
We’ve used these email types for businesses ranging from B2B tech companies to eCommerce stores, and they’ve consistently proven effective.
Welcome emails have the highest open rate of anything you’ll send (around 60%-90% open rates).
This is your one chance to set the tone for your email marketing.
The key to welcome emails is to greet the customer personally.
Use information you have about them (purchases, interests) to speak one-to-one and deliver immediate value.
It could be an introductory discount if you’re in B2C, or a free guide or educational resource if you’re B2B.
Don’t view welcome emails as “just a courtesy”. This is your chance to start a relationship with a customer that should pay off more over time.
If done properly, newsletters can build trust.
The problem is that most are just product dumps and promotional emails disguised as editorial. So your readers tune out.
Instead of using them as an excuse to sell, think like a publisher. What useful information does your audience need to know that you can give them in a newsletter?
In B2C or professional services, it could be tips for dressing for changing seasons or how to deal with upcoming changes to tax.
In B2B, it could be highlighting changes to legislation and how this will impact a company.
Our best advice for email newsletters is:
The biggest objection around newsletters tends to be “yeah, but they don’t convert”.
And they may not directly convert customers.
But they are great at building trust with your audience, which can be a big thing when it comes to converting later down the line.
Promotional emails can be great for sales. But they need to be highly targeted with the right offer to the right person.
You also need to be careful when it comes to volume. Too many promotional emails in a short space of time can erode trust and end up with your emails in the spam folder.
Think about what promotion would fit the person you’re sending to the email.
If you’re sending an email to a woman who bought a new dress for a special occasion, a promotional email for men’s casual trainers isn’t going to work.
Use your CRM and the information you have about customers to segment audiences into lists based on previous purchases, interests, gender, age, and birthdays.
Doing this means you can create specific offers for segments of your audience that have a much higher chance of converting.
Just remember, customers will wait for discounts. Use urgency sparingly and tie any offers to the context of who they’re being sent to.
Around 70% of carts are abandoned.
But abandoned cart sequences can help you get between 10% and 25% of that revenue over the line.
You might see abandoned cart emails as pushy. They’re really just reminders to customers that they were in the middle of a purchase before they got distracted by something.
If you’re going to create abandoned cart emails, these are our top tips:
Email lists decay around 22% a year.
But, reviving a decaying list is still cheaper than replacing those who drop off.
Even a simple “We haven’t heard from you in a while” or “We miss you” campaign can cut email churn by about 15%.
It can also improve deliverability (because people are more likely to engage with them), which saves your emails from being flagged as spam.
Our best advice for re-engagement emails is:
Don’t just let inactive users sit in your database. Too many of them can damage your sender reputation, which makes it harder to get email past spam bots and filters.
Customers read receipts more than they read promos. Transactional emails have open rates of over 50% on average.
But many brands ignore the potential to use them to entice future sales.
Adding product recommendations to order confirmations could help increase repeat purchases or cross sells.
If you are going to use transactional emails remember:
Relevance always beats frequency with emails.
And what’s more relevant than tying an email campaign to something your customer already cares about, like a holiday, birthday or special event.
Make your campaign specific and distinct to your customer.
Use these types of email to share celebrations and provide personal value.
Email marketing isn’t about smashing as many promotions into your customers’ inbox as you can.
It’s about creating or adding value beyond a sale, building loyalty and trust and matching messages to specific moments to boost engagement and drive more revenue at the right time.
By getting to grips with the seven types of emails we’ve mentioned you’ll be able to cover the entire customer lifecycle from greeting, nurturing and converting them, to recovering and reviving relationships in the future.
If you need help getting a better return from your email marketing, our email marketing agency can help.
We’ve got technical experts in email platforms like Klaviyo and HubSpot, and experienced email copywriters and designers who can create great looking emails that get the right message to the right person at the right time.
Get in touch for a free strategy session.
Speak to a member of our team and start your project today!
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