9 Types of Email Marketing Campaigns You Should Already be Using

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:

1. The Welcome Email Series
2. The Standard Promotional Campaign
3. The Seasonal Campaign
4. The Triggered Email Series
5. The Post-Purchase Drip
6. The Connect-Via-Social Campaign
7. The Newsletter
8. The Cart Abandonment Campaign
9. 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:

1. 1. Fulfillment and Introduction
   2. Invite them to your social media
   3. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

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.