Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach your audience. It’s affordable and quick, and it can help you reach thousands of people in a single click.
The problem is that email marketing tools are complex, expensive, and difficult to use—which is why we created fluxresource.com We wanted to create an intuitive, easy-to-use email marketing platform that could be used by anyone, no matter their technical background or level of experience.
That’s why we’ve put together this blog: to give you the details on what we do and how you can use our product. So read on, and join us as we explore the world of email marketing!
Email Marketing Tools Meaning
Definition
Email marketing tools are the software and applications used in email campaigns. Email marketing tools are used for:
- Email design
- Email building
- Sending email
- Optimizing email
- Measuring email metrics
- Generating email reports
What is the best email marketing tool?
According to G2’s 7,316 reviews, ActiveCampaign is one of the best email marketing tools. According to one reviewer, “Excellent tool, reduces the headache and simplifies the scheduling and mental cost of reaching out to your clientele. Great set of features, and has full DKIM/SPF support so no bounced messages. The flowchart-like style helps you keep things concise over time. I’ve never needed to contact support.”
What are the 4 types of marketing emails?
- Email Newsletters
- Acquisition Emails
- Retention Emails
- Promotional Emails
Is email marketing still effective?
While email marketing has been around for over two decades, it’s changed to also include more marketing automation, as well as a focus on customer relationship management software (CRM). Email marketing is, arguably, more popular than ever before and whether your business is just starting or has been around for over 25 years, email marketing can help you grow.
types of email marketing
Email marketing campaigns are not launched on a whim — they are strategic and calculated
These are the nine types of email campaigns your organization should be implementing, but don’t consider this a definitive list – every brand is different so tailor your strategy accordingly.
Learn how to optimize and send each type of email marketing series:
The Welcome Email Series
The Standard Promotional Campaign
The Seasonal Campaign
The Triggered Email Series
The Post-Purchase Drip
The Connect-Via-Social Campaign
The Newsletter
The Cart Abandonment Campaign
The Re-Engagement Campaign
1) The Welcome Email Series
Congrats, you gained a new subscriber. Imagine for a second you made a new friend or perhaps a new colleague, it’s only polite to introduce yourself. This is exactly what the welcome email series are for. It’s not the most common email campaign, but it’s one of the most effective.
By sending a series—three, four or five—you have the chance to build some familiarity with a new subscriber. You can also educate them on your brand promise when they’re most open to hearing from you.
Here are some examples of things you should have in your welcome series:
Fulfillment and Introduction
Invite them to your social media
Get to know them
– Ask them for their birthday- Ask them about their preferences for email- Ask them how they found you
Taking too long to contact a new email subscriber can lead to higher spam scores simply because your subscribers forgot they actually signed up for your list. On top of that, welcome emails receive higher than average open rates, click-throughs, and generate more revenue.
If you put no other kind of email marketing campaign into action — use this one.
4 important facts to keep in mind when crafting your welcome email
Wow your customers
Showcase your brand
Say thanks
Give them a little gift
2) The Standard Promotional Campaign
This is the most common of the email marketing campaigns and probably the one most familiar to you.
Chances are you have a promotional email from a brand in your inbox right now…or a few dozen. In my experience as a consumer, these are often less strategic or systematic than we’d like to see.
They are kind of like machine-gun fire, showing up in inboxes over and over again with a kind of rat-a-tat-tat repetition that never changes. That’s not what we encourage — think these campaigns through.
Rather than sending 10 different one-off emails promoting your products, what about putting some thought into a campaign that is progressive or unified in some way so one email builds on the previous and leads to the next?
Here are some things that can add spice to your traditional email promotion:
Provoke emotion
Add humor
Leave them curious
Give a free product
Use slogans from popular music
Use color, images and font that grabs attention
Give a free product
3) The Seasonal Campaign
Branching off the promotional email campaign is the seasonal campaign.
On any major holiday, you can most likely launch an email marketing. From Valentine’s Day to less popular campaigns, but still highly effective, on Father’s Day. These types of email marketing campaigns can have a buildup before the event and a follow-up after—meaning you have several opportunities to send an email.
This period’s especially important for retail. According to the National Retail Federation, holiday sales account for 20% of all retail sales. In the US alone, those sales were worth more than $84 billion.
Here are some things to consider when planning your season campaign:
Know the holidays in the country you are promoting. This is a great way to segment your list.
Start early. People are bombarded over the holidays so make sure you’re the first one to reach their inbox.
Make sure the colors as well as the language matches the theme of the holiday.
Give them an exclusive discount for the holiday. This is a critical reason why holiday marketing is effective.
Use urgency. One of the main reasons email marketing works well is that they are for a limited amount of time.
4) The Triggered Email Series
With automated email marketing, you can have a user’s action trigger a series of targeted and relevant emails.
It might be that they clicked on a link in one of the emails in your promotional email series, put items in their cart but then bounced without checking out, downloaded a piece of content, bought something, or responded to a survey. In some way, their behaviour “triggered” the drip campaign they are now entered in.
According to the DMA’s 2013 National Client Email Report, over 75% of email revenue is generated through triggered campaigns, rather than one-size-fits-all promo campaigns.
Reading MailChimp’s automation triggers, there are 4 types of triggers that you can add to your email marketing toolbox:
Campaign activity: an email is sent to someone who is part of a campaign list, opened a specific campaign, didn’t open a campaign, clicks on a specific link, didn’t click on a link.
List management: triggers an automated email when someone is manually added to a list, or if they sign up to a list on their own.
Workflow activity: triggers an email that sends after a subscriber receives, opens, doesn’t open or clicks on a link in the previous automated email in your series.
Ecommerce: triggers an email that sends after a customer purchases any product, a specific product, hasn’t purchased a second product, abandoned a product in a cart or showed interest in a product from a previous email.
5) The Post-Purchase Drip
I hardly ever see these, and I don’t know why. I think the post-purchase drip is just savvy email marketing!
This is an email series that is sent not to sell necessarily but as a simple follow-up to a purchase.
Let’s say I bought a new gadget for my kitchen. The savvy email marketer could use automated email marketing to send emails (triggered by purchase) that both reinforces my decision to make the purchase and builds brand loyalty.
For example, one email might give me tips on how to clean and care for the gadget. The next email could be a recipe using the gadget…and so on. From an emotional perspective, it builds trust and delight with customers because you’re delivering value after you’ve already made the sale. Yet each one of these emails is still a chance to up-sell and cross-sell.
6) The Connect-via-Social Campaign
The social campaign is one that crosses channels from email into social media and potentially back again to email.
It’s an email marketing campaign that seeks to engage people in their newsfeed. You have plenty of options with this one, from Facebook to Instagram.
Take the kitchen gadget for example, a social campaign might use email marketing to ask users to pin pictures of recipes made with the gadget to Pinterest, or post them on Facebook, or tweet with a hashtag. The possibilities are endless!
(For some fantastic examples of Facebook contest promotions to inspire you, check out Wishpond)
7) The Newsletter
Although not technically a “campaign,” because it can go on indefinitely, a newsletter or digest—something that’s a regular communication between you and your list—is just smart email.
When you do newsletters right, they are not sales pieces that your audience is likely to grow tired of but rather emails that can do them a real service — keeping them in the loop on product updates, educating them and even just entertaining them.
Some of the most popular emails around are newsletters sent out by brands like theSkimm. But it’s not all give on your part. You benefit too by staying top of mind, building brand loyalty, and providing share-worthy content that potentially grows your audience.
8) The Abandoned Cart Series
Abandoned cart emails can actually be a kind of email marketing campaign.
Like other automated campaigns, these are emails triggered by a user’s actions—in this case, adding an item to a virtual shopping cart but not buying. These types of emails tend to offer an incentive, like, “Hey, you didn’t finish checking out. Here’s a 10% discount to encourage you to complete your purchase.”
This type of email series—like welcome emails—tend to have markedly higher open rates and conversions. However, they are more sophisticated for the beginner to take on, but should be on everyone’s radar for implementation.
9) The Re-Engagement Campaign
The re-engagement campaign is a series of emails sent to inactive subscribers.
Email list churn rate is about 25-30% per year. This is normal, people change emails, companies change names – it’s part of the industry. A re-engagement campaign attempts to battle this very fact.
Let’s say a segment of your list hasn’t opened an email in over 6 months. Your re-engagement campaign is an effort to either to either a) bring these subscribers back into the fold or b) determine if they can even be r-engaged and if not, cleanse your email list.
Why remove them from your list? Because they are dead weight, and by not opening or engaging with your emails, they can potentially affect your reputation in the eyes of the ISPs, and therefore your deliverability rate.
Download 9 Types of email campaigns photoshop mockup templates
What to Keep in Mind…
There’s one thing we need to point out before you start implementing these campaigns: There will be those email marketing campaigns that need to be adjusted based on a recipient’s action, otherwise you risk being extremely annoying.
Here’s an example: Let’s say we are marketing a conference. We have a plan to send five emails leading up to the conference to drive registration. Once a recipient registers for the conference, we need to remove them from the list! We don’t want to keep sending them the “register today!” emails once they have registered, right? They need to go to a different list, a list of registered attendees.
This caveat doesn’t apply very often, but I’ve seen folks get riled up when the messages don’t stop coming even after they followed through on the call to action, so just be aware.
Remember, a campaign is rarely—if ever—a one-time email. It’s a way to reach out to a prospect, subscriber or customer multiple times in a strategic, systematic approach. So pick a campaign idea or brainstorm a few marketing ideas of your own and get emailing!
Maropost for Marketing allows users to create personalized email marketing campaigns to engage better with users and increase ROI.
Conclusion
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