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8 Types of Email Content to Send Your Audience
The weekly newsletter. A welcome email. Holiday discounts. Although effective, these emails can tend to become overly routine, where pressing “send” is a bit too easy, and creating content can get lazy. If that sounds like you, it might be time to spruce up your messaging with new types of email content.
We’ve collected eight different types of email content to refresh your email strategy. While this list isn’t exhaustive, it’s chock-full of new ideas for you to begin implementing today. No matter what kind of company you are, you’re bound to find some good ideas in this list to send new types of email content.
1. Welcome email or welcome series
The welcome email has become a very common practice for most organizations—and for good reason! This type of email content boasts the highest open and engagement rate. Today’s customers and new subscribers expect to see this type of email appear in their inbox after their first purchase or subscription. Exceed their expectations by sending an outstanding welcome email or welcome email series.
Here are some questions you may not have thought of to get some juices flowing:
- Are my welcome emails sent based on how they signed up?
For example, sending different messages based on whether they signed up via your website, a social media page, or if they purchased something. - When customers buy a specific product from me, what are they interested in seeing next? Can I send them relevant suggestions?
- Is my welcome series a good mix of content (opportunities for subscribers to learn) and promotions (opportunities for subscribers to purchase)?
- Is my welcome series focused too much on my company? Can I shift the focus to being more on how my company can help our customers achieve something?
2. Promotional emails
The world of promotional emails is changing as consumers become more leary of this type of email content. The world continues to grow in technology and available information, and consumers are being made more aware of when messages are overly promotional. The task then is to offer a good mix of engaging emails (how-to content, informational content, etc.) and promotions.
One way to accomplish this is to actually mix in content with your promotions. Make your promotional emails focus on the sell or offer, and highlight this focus using your stand-out CTA. Then, maybe beneath the main offer, you can provide additional free content that supplements the offer, using a less eye-grabbing CTA. This gives customers an on-ramp to dip their toes in without pulling the trigger on a purchase, which may give you more opportunity to convert them later on.
3. Guides, blogs, and other content marketing
Highlight your awesome content in an email. If one of your strategies consists of inbound or content marketing, make sure your list knows about it!
At Campaign Monitor, we send what we call “blog solos” to highlight individual blog posts. We don’t expect readers to spend their entire day scrolling through our resources pages. Instead, we know a lot of people want to be given curated and relevant content in a way that’s extremely accessible. So we send emails that give a brief overview of a blog post, then a bold call to action that draws them into reading the rest.
Other companies, like Invision, send weekly content highlights, showcasing a handful of different pieces of content for their readers to interact with. No matter how you slice it, this is a huge opportunity to engage your audience with this type of email content.
4. Loyalty and rewards
Loyalty and rewards can be expressed in dozens of different ways—especially when you implement automation.
Sending rewards based on purchases is a great start. Hitting certain tiered levels of rewards (spending x amount gets you free shipping, or 10% off, etc.) is a great incentive that your subscribers look for in email.
Another idea for tech-oriented companies is to send loyalty emails based on what parts of your app or service someone used. If you have certain workflows you want your customers to complete, you can email them with a congratulatory message and reward for their good work (like a discount on an upgraded plan, for example).
5. Testimonials and reviews
Social proof is one of the best ways to close deals and drive sales. And if you can wrap it up into an actual customer story (instead of just a one-off quote), then you can both nurture and engage existing customers as well as inspire new ones to convert.
6. Surveys and net promoter feedback
Asking your customers how you’re doing as a company can be very vulnerable. But it can also give you great insights into your performance, the culture you’re creating with your customer base, and how to continue, stop, or begin processes to engage with your customers.
Surveys can also serve simply as insight into who your customers are, like market research. It’s so easy to assume certain things about who you’re actually trying to sell to. It’s another thing entirely to see what people have to say when they fill out a well-informed survey. And email is the place to send these invitations for feedback.
7. Behavioral-based emails
Triggered emails, automated emails, transactional emails, behavioral emails—these are all ways to describe an email that is sent by your marketing platform whenever a specific action is taken on your website or app. A very popular behavioral email is a shopping cart abandonment email, which is sent when someone adds an item to their cart but doesn’t finish their purchase.
You can send behavioral emails based on almost any action, so long as you have a way to track your user or customer (like asking them to log in before using your site, service, or store).
In addition to behavior on your site, you have another behavior that you’re tracking all the time: email behavior. You have a massive repository of information showing you email engagement statistics for your entire list (or at least you should, if you have the right email service provider). With all this information, you could set up a variety of emails to re-engage customers that have opened but haven’t clicked through, haven’t opened in a while, or are constantly clicking through but haven’t purchased.
8. Newsletters and product/company announcements
A standard newsletter is super important, especially if you focus on content marketing. But more than anything, these emails should be a consistent touchpoint with your audience.
If there’s one function they serve, it’s to keep your company top-of-mind for your audience, and to remind them of your brand whenever you can. Any sales and engagement on top of that is a big plus, and you should definitely optimize these campaigns to improve engagement. But make sure you’re sending something compelling to keep your readers interested.
Wrap up
Don’t let your email content get stale! As you think about how to apply some of these types of email content to your own strategy, remember to pull reports now, and then track as you experiment. See what resonates with your audience, and try to maximize your impact based on what your audience likes to see.
